I can't find any link in the usual places.

Just fixed it, my bad!

I agree with Kate's headline. I live in southern Alberta and when these headlines started to appear, I thought that social Darwinism was occurring. If you are willfully ignorant about drugs, then maybe you deserve to die. As my Scottish grandmother would have said, your death prevents the passing on of the "stupid" gene.

Another case of evolution in action.

Blame the glow ball warming thieves like Gore and Suzuki These pierced and tattooed little dweebs used to be able to afford simple neighbour grown dope, but since the cost of power and gas has gotten so high, they turn to cheaper crap, some little pierced and tattooed creep is cooking up in mommas furnace room with all mommas drain cleaner and bleach, after a hard day at the occupy protests. Like Kate's headline says, I recall, years ago, when some visionary dealer in Vancouver realized he might just have a family someday and feared for their safety so he poisoned the heroin supply, killed I think 34, which was a good start. Sorry msm, no sympathy for this stuff.

"Too stupid to breathe." Unfortunately, this seems literally true.

Oh yay. Another story advocating state issuance of 'street drugs'.

On one hand, survival of the fittest (smartest). On the other hand Redfords police have 10 times as many officers catching people talking on their cell phone or having one beer after work, than they have catching drug dealers. Survival of the fittest doesn't seem to apply to politicians. With the Alberta's CINO PC's it seems to be survival of the most incompetent.

It does seem to be a self-correcting problem, but kids aren't known for accurate risk assessment.

I feel a bit dirty for saying this, but for recreational drugs, which we can't seem to fight, legalisation and regulation seems to be the way to go. Anything else seems like a waste of time and resources.

The tricky bit is defining "recreational".

Hopefully they can find the people selling/making this deadly crap and charge them with murder. I take no joy in seeing any young person die this way.

Kate: Love your comment at the NP

Possibly warnings, education and test kits won't prevent these deaths, but I don't think laissez faire is the way to go either. We don't give up telling people to stop smoking, that exercise is good for you, or to keep your weight down even though the message doesn't always get through. The fact that these drugs are illegal doesn't entirely remove the responsibility society has to do what it can to mitigate the damage. Actually, I think we need more recreational drugs. Cannabis should be legalized.

@ et tu? - You missed one key ingredient... Hockey is not an "ILLEGAL MIND-ALTERING DRUG".

Yes, why doesn't MADD = Mothers Against Deadly Drugs, and why aren't they campaigning for road-side checks by the cops and zero-tolerance?

eh tu? @ 9:50;

That's a bit of a stretch. What's next, claiming right wingers having brunch in the Muskokas are a bigger threat than the Toronto 18?

The NP article is pretty clear with examples and numbers for the drug damage. Eh tu somehow missed that subtlety re "kids that get their heads cracked open on the hockey rink". Who? When and how many?

I tried hash and marijuana when I was just out of school and I probably would have tried other drugs if it was presented to me by people I trusted. I wasn't a bad kid at all. I worked, went to university and played junior football.

I'm glad the drugs never stuck in my case and to assume that these people were on the path to destruction is unsubstantiated.

The users do have to take responsibility for their actions, but the dealers and manufacturers are ultimately the source of the problem in this situation.

No one deserves that, but you ARE playing Russian roulette with your life.

"... legalisation and regulation seems to be the way to go. Anything else seems like a waste of time and resources."

Because the brand new Federal Bureau for the Issuance and Regulation of Recreational Toxic Substances So Idiots Won't End Up Offing Themselves will totally not be a waste of time and taxpayer money, either. Get real.

As a parent of 4 I know that 'don't do it' didn't stop them most of the time.
'Learning the consequences of their choice' was a better teacher.
Sad that the consequences for these kids was so severe, but it was their choice. Hopefully their peers will make better choices.
Rules don't change the heart or make us smarter.

Well look on the bright side . . if they were drinking and driving they might be killing innocent people.

Theses fools fall into the "self Inflicted Wound" category.

The IOC will e coming after them for using their logo!

Make Canadian homes and families safe with Castle Laws and concealed carry permits, and I will be the first to vote for legalizing any drug the left wants to snort up their nose or stick in their veins. Hell I’d even consider being a vendor.

It’s one of the surest ways to thin out liberal herd, but we need the rights to protect ourselves in the meantime. Give us our guns; we’ll give you your drugs!

ES,
If this was the US, they would be on them so fast for stealing the logo they wouldn't know what hit them.

Reading about the deaths of young kids doesn't thrill me one bit.It can happen to anyone as few at that age,like the pretty little girl in Abbotsford,17,have much judgement,especially after they've had a few drinks.

The solution might be,education, test kits,and,brace yourself, SEVERE punishment for the purveyors of these drugs,and yes, charges of manslaughter with the maximum time in jail.

We could,as some advocates want, legalize every drug known, but we'd suffer the consequences of having stoned people performing their daily routines at work under the influence.

I've seen way too many mechanics and construction workers who "toke up" at coffee break to have any illusions about restraint,and I don't want to be driving the car that just had the brake job done by a guy on ecstasy or cocaine.

I just had a tragic event in my neighborhood,when the local drug dealer moved to better digs.The guy was "known to police",but I never saw any action taken against him. I'll miss the parade of drug buyers at his door this Summer.

One of the biggest problems with drug dealers is the cops aren't interested in the small-timers,so there's not much you can do that doesn't put you in jeopardy. And, of course,with our anti-incarceration Justice System, not much happens if they do get arrested.

The drug problem is worse than the Indian problem,with even less chance of it ever being solved. Maybe we should form Drug Reservations,and let all who wish to really get involved live there at taxpayer's expense.

DIAND might as well run them, they do such good work on the Indian question. Just send my Order of Canada by mail,I'm not into attending ceremonies.

Well publicized deaths are a better teacher than all the "harm reduction" bs ever created. Tell the little morons a couple more times about the kid with his brains dribbling out his nose. There is no such thing as a safe way to take TOXIC substances. Take the illegal mystery pill and die.

Actions have consequences.

Here in BC it is sometimes hard to distinguish the drug dealers from the lawyers that defend them. Indeed it is a well known fact that some lawyers get paid with drugs that they then re-sell and/or use themselves. What a fine upright justice system we have. Also, many of the lawyers that defend the drug criminal classes have some of the biggest homes...funny that.

All of these problems can be traced to liberal ideas. Keep your kids close, and hopefully all the liberals in the world will eventually extinguish themselves. Note that the war on drugs is not really a "war". If it were we'd be able to shoot drug dealers dead. Instead it is just a prolonged battle because the cops have their hands tied by the Charter of Rights. So you end up with absolutely absurd situations where the cops know for a fact that a particular individual is producing or selling drugs, but they cannot arrest them.

Our kids are so cotton-battened these days, they haven’t learned what the boundaries are. First of all, the “adults” have tried to remove everything that might harm our kids, and then those same “adults” have decreed that serious consequences for kids’ unacceptable/dangerous behaviour is “cruel and unusual punishment”, so meaningful consequences have been virtually abolished. The wonder is that MORE kids haven’t fallen victim to their own immature and ill-judged behaviour.

The idiot, liberal (always) adults—kids, themselves—who think they’re respecting and protecting our kids are doing exactly the opposite: these cretins—in charge of most of our institutions these days—horribly patronize our kids with their disgustingly low expectations, while also leaving them vulnerable to all kinds of dangers which they’re unable to both assess and cope with: lambs to the slaughter. Ironic, isn’t it? (Like the non grown-ups they are, lefties, of course, have no sense of irony—ever.)

There's something smug, cold and dismissive about the "solution" to young people who make a poor decision being death. Those are someones children (doing no harm to others). The loss of human life like this is tragic not some form of justice.

Legalization might help but won't prevent young people from continuing to make poor decisions and who among us has not made poor decisions in their youth? I suspect most here, like me, are lucky to be alive.

"There's something smug, cold and dismissive about the "solution" to young people who make a poor decision being death"

Or one may put it another way, there is something cruel and dismissive about the destruction of cultural values that seem to lead inevitably to this kind of tragedy.

But to understand the subtext of this post would require a kind of empathy for alternative points of view of which I doubt you are capable.

What a grammar fail that last post of mine.. :P

Lookout says it well!

If the government really cared they would put up Rave venues (or diet clinics) next to the safe injection sites and only give out "safe" drugs to the youth. Compulsory helmets required of course.

/sarc

Look at the logo's on the pills in the captioned pictures.

The only thing missing to entice the little dears are words like "Cultural enrichment", "sustainable energy" or "Multiculturalism".

How come they’re not labelled with an AR-15, glock, or words like “Liberty” or "The Tea Party"?

It’s because there liberal drugs and the entrepreneurial manufactures go after the target market through selective advertisement.

The thing about illegal drugs? You never quite know what's in them. If you put them into your body anyway, you're an idiot.

I am not responsible for your idiocy.

Q.E.D.

E
snow
horse
meth
crack
rope
alky
big C
age
not always choice

It's just Darwin cleaning the shallow end of the gene pool.

Lots of tragedies there, but there always are. Everybody dies of something or other, eventually. I feel sympathy for people who lost their loved ones, but it doesn't change the fact that the dead in these stories all did something stupid to get that way, and it will also be stupid to pour public resources down the drain to protect people from the consequences of their own folly.

Texas Canuck: Helmets and glowsticks bouncing around in a rhythm. That would be a sight to see.

TheTooner >

‘...it will also be stupid to pour public resources down the drain to protect people from the consequences of their own folly.”

There it is in a nutshell.

The biggest problem is that these very same people then start deciding what else they need to protect us from, as they are attempting to do in every aspect of our lives today.

Which of course ultimately comes down to force, namely by forcing us to live in the way they feel we should live. Their lunatic hypocrisy lays in not allowing us to defend ourselves from the very societal unsafe conditions that they have created – i.e. welfare ghetto cultures and drug crime coupled with the early release of felons from prison.

Legalize it.
Regulate it.
Safe ingestion sites.
Problem solved.

Red Necky >

"Legalize it.....problem solved"

You bet, right after they intitute castle laws with the right to use deadly force, and concealed carry permits for law abiding gun owners.

It's called a trade off.

Give us our guns; we’ll give you your drugs!

When I was young it was a drug called Speed the drug Reptiles used to poison people.
It seems every generation has its poisoners.

Do you want to solve the drug problem? Shoot anyone with any more than 1 days supply. That will end the drug problem very fast.

I thought they were "Romney-vites"

Hmmm eeeesh.

Is that a can of mountain dew in the photo?
Why was she taking the pills?

Doh!

P.S.

I forgot to mention that she was obviously a racist.

"It's just Darwin cleaning the shallow end of the gene pool."

Sorry,but many of the kids who are doing drugs are very intelligent young people. Some very bright people have weaknesses,booze,women, small boys,and some can't resist drugs.

You can't rate a person's IQ by what he ingests with a group of his peers.

I don't know what the answer is,but it's a goddamned shame to see kids dead so young,like that 17 year-old girl in Abbotsford,so much like the friends of my daughter when we lived there.

revnant dream:

"speed" was methamphetamine.

"crystal meth" is methamphetamine.

It went away for a while; now back with a vengeance. It's just being used a little differently in this generation.

Some things just don't change.

It's just Darwin cleaning the shallow end of the gene pool.
North of 60

If Darwin were cleaning the shallow end of the gene pool, SDA would have almost no traffic at all. It's a toss up whether knight 99, phantom or kate would be the first to go.

Hey phil
Go flip a coin... in traffic.

just reduce the cost of their graves, that should help!!!

phil >

Witty, it's a good thing North of 60 can come up with material for you to use. Otherwise you’d be where?

Kids are kids. There will always be ones that make a dumb, impulsive mistakes. I heart sick for the ones that we lose, or have their lives destroyed, and sympathy for their families. I do not have a solution. I do not believe that there is one, really. All I know is that I want to hunt down the manufacturers and pushers of these poisons and crush their windpipes. With my bare hands.

"If Darwin were cleaning the shallow end of the gene pool, SDA would have almost no traffic at all. It's a toss up whether knight 99, phantom or kate would be the first to go."

Posted by: phil at February 6, 2012 7:27 PM

Dammit, Phil, what am I, chopped liver? I have feelings, you know. Who raised you?

phil is a good example of what happens when someone has had too many drugs or too many kicks in the head. Witch is it phil?

Black Mamba >

I know, it’s getting rewarding comments like “phil’s” that make posting at SDA the warmest and fuzziest feeling you could possibly get outside of punching Pierre Trudeau in the head, or watching Iggy’s failure to launch and shameful banishment from our lands.

It’s moments like these that you know you’ve made a painful and gut wrenching impact.

:)

I pine for the days....what was it? 4 or 5 months ago when North of 60 had yet to stumble on this blog, when phil was an irrelevant puke..oh wait!
Take me back...

"You can't rate a person's IQ by what he ingests with a group of his peers." Not sure about that, but all the same I think *maturity* is really what it is all about.

Kids today are just plain immature for their age. Gone are the days when 21 years old meant you were a grownup. Indeed some kids never grow up from what I see.

So with my kids one of the things I teach them constantly is how to be mature and behave like a grown up, and I teach them that its something to be proud of. There are lots of effective ways to go about this, one of the best being to teach kids to enjoy the company of (mature) adults, and to teach them how to communicate with adults.

Yeah for death! Go death!

Could drug warriors end their BS about wanting to protect drug users from drug damage? They clearly hate drug users and cheer for their deaths. They just see the drug war as an expensive way for the government to indulge their sentiments.

The last people in the world who should be talking to kids about drugs are cops. Cops know next to nothing about pharmacology aside from their use of alcohol. Some of the hardest patients I've had to deal with are cops who refuse to take any drugs for pain because they "don't want to become junkies". As if the 26'er of rye they are consuming nightly to treat their pain is somehow morally better.

The NP article was sensationalist and what I'd expect of a newspaper decrying children dying from guns. Yes, some tough action is needed and that's to shoot anyone who misrepresents the contents of a drug they're selling. I believe Hunter S. Thompson ran on this platform when he was running for sheriff of Aspen.

Paramethoxyamphetamine (PMA) has a very narrow therapeutic index and it should clearly be labeled as such. MDMA has a higher therapeutic index although MDA is even safer but for some obscure reason not widely available any more. Given the inter-individual variability in drug metabolism only an idiot would take an unknown dose of PMA.

Methamphetamine is not "highly addictive" and is just another member of the amphetamine family still available on prescription in the US for treatment of narcolepsy and ADHD. It made its debut in the 1930's and was a favorite of the Wehrmacht and Japanese factories during WWII. After the war was over, the Japanese methamphetamine stockpiles were sold to the population and that was probably the first recorded wave of methamphetamine abuse. Every 10 years or so methamphetamine makes a comeback somewhere and the pharmacologically ignorant label it as something else. I've heard doctors rant about the deleterious effects of "crystal meth" not having a clue that "crystal meth" is almost identical to what they're prescribing to hyperactive kids. Dose/day is the critical factor here and demonizing methamphetamine is equivalent to comparing the guy who has a couple of beer during a hockey game with a skid road drunk who has seizures whenever his blood alcohol level drops below a value that would be fatal to the majority of the population.

After seeing the totalitarian mindset of the Canadian Gestapo when it comes to individual ownership of firearms and self defense, what makes people think that these individuals are any more truthful when it comes to psychedelic drugs? As far as tracking down and prosecuting criminals who sell mislabelled, impure or garbage drugs, this is what the police should be doing. Drug users should be able to get what they expect they're paying for. Keeping the results of drug analysis of seized drugs from the public is idiotic. There should be anonymous centers where people can send drug samples and, for a fee, have the composition of the drug determined. That would probably turn a lot of people off E if they found out they were getting a cheap knockoff instead of MDMA.

It's time to push back against the statists who want to control every aspect of our lives. That means we need to go for concealed carry and enactment of the castle doctrine in Canada as well as decriminalizing most drugs but increasing penalties for misrepresenting what one is selling. For example, passing off PCP as E should be a hanging offense. PCP has it's uses as an animal anesthetic but I consider it a garbage drug although have known people that find its use enjoyable - another example of human pharmacologic variability.

To put things in perspective, I'm curious how many deaths from AIDS have been caused by the totally legal Vancouver "bathhouses" where HIV+ homosexual men have unprotected sex with other men? I'm willing to bet that the health department doesn't keep records on this sort of thing. Any society that is persecuting recreational drug users "to prevent deaths" should also be shutting down hotspots of HIV infection, but the homosexual lobby is just too strong and likely well represented among lawyers and the judiciary.

Yeah, that'll teach those immature kids! No growing old for you!

You seem to love statism if it has a uniform on and a gun its hand.

The state overstepped its bounds when it criminalized these drugs. Like anywhere the state steps in, it infantilizes the population. The parents who can feel they're safer, the kid who thinks its dangerous and thus cool, the gangsta boyz, the idiotic blog posts, etc. As always, state action introduces other unintended consequences -- a massive underground economy with industry players of incredible power that they would never have without these gov't-created monopolies, no controls or regulations on quality such as we have around food, etc, etc.

It's not the NDP/Liberals who should be advocates of decriminalization. It's Conservatives who want to reduce government bureaucracies of all kinds, even the cops.

All kinds of excuses for those darn consequences...

we need to go for concealed carry and enactment of the castle doctrine in Canada as well as decriminalizing most drugs but increasing penalties for misrepresenting what one is selling

Excellent summary of the situation. The only people profiting from illegal drugs are crime lords and politicians, and far too often the difference is indistinguishable. Many politicians find it quite easy to take the 'moral high road' to maintain the status quo on drugs while turning a blind eye to the source of their campaign funds.

many of the kids who are doing drugs are very intelligent young people. Some very bright people have weaknesses,booze,women, small boys,and some can't resist drugs. You can't rate a person's IQ by what he ingests with a group of his peers.

Intelligence is a lot more than "IQ". People who use street drugs of questionable quality are not 'intelligent' by definition. A lot of smart recreational/occasional drug users only smoke pot or hash because they can tell from looks and taste if it's clean. They don't o.d., they don't engage in hazardous behavior, and they have no interest in using anything else. They'll be alive and healthy long after the pill-poppers and meth-heads are dead.

Dealing with temptation and peer pressure is all part of becoming a mature responsible adult. Some people never make that transition. That's why the Darwin Awards exist.

...smart recreational/occasional drug users...

There's an oxymoron...

IQ is not the only quality that promotes selection into the next generation. It helps, it is a positive, for sure, but other factors apply, and if you can reason yourself into a steel trap conclusion that taking drugs of unknown provenance for an unproven benefit is the right thing to do, well, maybe you are too smart to live.

It's not the NDP/Liberals who should be advocates of decriminalization. Conservatives who want to reduce government bureaucracies of all kinds, even the cops.

One would think that, but the "conservatives" around here love, as you said, nanny statism with a gun and a uniform. They love big gov't high taxes if it benefits themselves or their friends. They only hate big government if they perceive it to benefit groups and programs they don't like. It's not like the small dead mind has a consistent, principled philosophy. Hypocrisy is it's lifeblood. Twisted, shallow bitterness it's stock in trade, even if it cuts off it's nose to spite it's face. It can only be mocked.

phil >

"They only hate big government if they perceive it to benefit groups and programs they don't like."

Gawd, do you really manage to get up in the mornings?

Gawd, do you really manage to get up in the mornings?

Wow, ain't that brilliant. The small dead mind appeals to neither reason nor logic. It is only to be mocked.

phil >

"The small dead mind appeals to neither reason nor logic."

Indeed it does, you need to show some to get some.

Your bitter little projections do not convince anyone. You have self described the left perfectly and attempted to sell it off by spinning the outrageous hypocrisies of the left as a conservative vice. in typical ‘lefty” fashion.

You people are loony mentally ill persons forcing your lunacy on the rest of society. One day it will come to an end, for better or worse.

"Hypocrisy is it's lifeblood. Twisted, shallow bitterness it's stock in trade, even if it cuts off it's nose to spite it's face. It can only be mocked." - phil

Brilliant indeed, now go look in a mirror and repeat over and over to yourself.

C'mon, you yahoos are always prattling on about freedom yet your mistress gets her panties wet over drug war collateral damage from bathtub gin. If that isn't bitter, twisted hypocrisy I don't know what is.

(phil writes, “Hypocrisy is it's [the small dead mind's] lifeblood. Twisted, shallow bitterness it's stock in trade, even if it cuts off it's nose to spite it's face. It can only be mocked.”

Actually, phil, “it's” is the contraction for “it is”. The possessive is “its”: no apostrophe. Strange, but true.

I'd have thought that someone as smart as you, someone with such a large, engaged brain, would know that.)

I'd have thought that someone as smart as you, someone with such a large, engaged brain, would know that.)

Will wonders never cease... One can actually learn something here if one waits long enough.