More details. Her mother's theory as of yesterday: it was not the boyfriend whom the victim met "four years ago" (she was 11?), but rather local junkies who were demanding to do drugs in the house.
(What the Sun story above hints at but doesn't say: Richardson was multiracial with a white mom and a "#1" dad... wonder how the city will classify her?)
A 16-year-old was shot on Dulaney Street last night.
The first-degree murder trial of Patrick Byers was postponed yesterday as police investigate a possible link between that city case and the shooting death of its main witness, Carl Stanley Lackl.
Blotterata: A woman was stabbed in the neck on the 6100 block of Eastern Avenue; a 14-year-old-boy selling water on the side of the road was robbed by an older man with a knife.
A 24-year-old woman is wanted for stabbing a 20-year-old in the stomach; murder and rape arrests; Shantel, Sharon and Tnesha were arrested on Lexington and Greene for illegal gun possession.
Yesterday the Baltimore Grand Jury indicted Charles Brockington for second-degree murder. Brockington shot a man who he believed had stolen rims from his Mercedes.
Dixon: we need a weekend court session.
Jessamy's office: don't hold your breath.
Thieves: Harford County pawn shops are your best bet!
Camp counselor Dion Harvey Montgomery, 18, was arrested over the weekend in Gaithersburg in a string of robberies and sex assaults that targeted Latino women.
Rodricks = being his usual fucking annoying self.
God Smites Baptist Church
33 comments:
Continuing a thought from the previous thread:
I don't think that "de facto" legalization of heroin would be a very good idea. What we ought to do is set up a system so that addicts who hold down a job & obey the law can legally buy their narcotics. If it remains technically illegal then it will always be a huge source of income for criminals to fight about. People love to talk about treatment, but the success rates for it are pretty lousy. We need to admit that a lot of people aren't going to kick their heroin habit, and try to make it possible for them to remain productive members of society.
addicts hold down a job? Come on now. What do you hire them to do?
And when they don't show up what do you do with them?
Maybe the city should run sweatshops that pay in gelcaps!
Sweep floors, stock shelves at WalMart, mow lawns. We keep on hearing about how we need immigrants because there are all these jobs that "Americans won't do." If they don't show up to work then you stop selling them their narcotics. I'm not pretending it's an optimal solution, but if they're really hooked on heroin and they have to show up to work in order to get their fix then that should provide some pretty good motivation.
"addicts hold down a job? Come on now. What do you hire them to do?"
Bubbles Depot! How could I forget...
so who would be in the business of handing out said fix in your plan?
The government. We could have Baltimore City brand heroin. Like I said, I'm not pretending that this idea doesn't suck, I just think it's the least bad way to deal with the problem. I don't have any references on hand right now, but several countries in Europe have tried something similar and it seems to work reasonably well. Simply being hooked on narcotics doesn't prevent people from being sort-of productive (or at least non-parasitic) members of society.
Maybe you're on to something, that would make a great movie! A local government plan to have a underground junkie work force that works for drugs like Oompa Loompas, but it's a secret from the Feds, but this hot U.S. Attorney suspects something, and then he falls in love with a waifish junkie slave girl who tries to get clean (which makes the guards suspicious) and she starts to sneak him secret documents about the operation... but the Evil mayor finds out and spikes junkie girl's heroin with Comet, just as Edward Norton as Rod Rosenstein busts in, and she dies in his arms...
And on the persistent subject of needing to hire many, many more cops, one reason is because so many need to be let go....
I too have had this experience with the Northern.
Makes you just want to lock your door and pull the blinds. To everyone.
Hamm has no business asking for anyone's cooperation until he earns it.
cy, why did you give away the ending? I was looking forward to seeing it.
"addicts hold down a job? Come on now. What do you hire them to do?"
Actually, it's rather eye-opening to sit outside a methadone clinic and see who stops by to get a fix. Of course, if you do this too much, it completely destroys your perceptions of who is and isn't an upstanding member of society.
From what I understand narcotics can be a lot less debilitating than crack, meth or even alcohol. Part of the reason that heroin has such a horrible reputation is the crap that it's cut with on the street. Not that I'm advocating using the stuff, but if you can people who hold down jobs then come home and have eight beers every night then it certainly seems possible for someone to get up, go to work & then shoot up in the evening.
Please, let's not confuse keeping a job for a while with being a productive member of society.
Most of the employed heroin addicts I know remain employed, but by a different firm all the time. They get fired, commonly for theft. This mostly excludes the executive addict, whose income pretty fully supports his expensive habit.
People without that luxury are going to be a problem if they're using. They just are.
It's just not a good idea.
Now, these people know how to handle offenders.
For those of you who say 'but we could never get the 50,000+ addicts in Baltimore off their habits - cannot be done...', just put them onto a bunch of Air China 787's bound for Beijing. It can be done. Just not by soft Americans.
"Crime and violence are at crisis levels in Kenya", as Kenya Human Rights Network says 300 people killed in the last six months.
Now, if that's a nation of about 32,000,000, then lil' ol' Baltimore City is in biiiggg trouble.
What about my human rights ?
You really think that Red China is a country we should be emulating? Don't get me wrong, I'm all for brutal punishments for criminals, but there are only so many things we can effectively criminalize. While I sometimes make comments about how I admire Singapore's justice system, I wouldn't really want to live in a semi-dictatorship like they have.
Also, the only reason a heroin addiction is expensive is because it's illegal. Narcotics are not that expensive to produce.
No one told you? You already live in a semi-dictatorship.
Our police summarily arrest law-abiding folks and their fellows cover it up.
That being the case, you might as well not have the massive crime. 'Course, candidate Bundley has a solution he'd like to propose: at least 55 more planning meetings.
The wholesale price of landed heroin is about $70,000 a kilo and the retail price in New York about 20 cents per pure milligram, a factor-of-three markup after processing and distribution.
A half-trillion dollar global business, narcotics is the third-largest commodity trade on the planet, behind oil and arms. About half the American wholesale price goes to traffickers, but very little comes here from Afghanistan, which produces over 70% of global supply. American wholesale prices are sharply higher than in Europe, which has more lax enforcement.
Drugs regulated by the FDA routinely entail a retail markup over the cost of active ingredients of around 10,000%, which funds the R&D and the myriad of purity- and quality-control requirements imposed on the drug industry here.
Sooo, licensing the distribution of narcotics in a quality-controlled setting will not really cut into the retail price much, unless you intend to authorize product cut on the street with Comet cleanser.
Further, if you were to succeed in lowering the wholesale price to the European level, European excess demand would divert Latin American production, decreasing supply to America and reinflating prices, probably from impure sources. The illicit trafficking trade remains profitable, so the killing continues.
Unless you have in mind for the U.S. to become the world's major producer, in which case it would sell into the world market at trafficking prices while subsidizing domestic consumption so that domestic trafficking flows out-of-country.
But just dissolving the DEA and Baltimore's OCD won't fix it.
Finding an adequate supply of heroin would be the least of our problems. Hell, we could just pay Afghan poppy farmers to grow the stuff. They're going it anways, except that now the Taliban and their allies are profiting from it. If we bought the poppies from the farmers then we'd deprive our enemies of a lot of income.
Also, not all prescription drugs are expensive. Most of the costs associated with them come from R&D and clinical trials, neither of which are an issue for an old drug like heroin.
Why aren't the suspects in Christine Richardson's killing also being charged with rape? Last time I checked doinking 15 year-olds was illegal in Maryland.
Actually, opium cultivation has surged since unseating the Taliban, with fresh opium priced around $350 per kilogram in the field.
The purpose of growing and exporting would be to fund the massive subsidy of domestic retail price needed to keep traffickers out of the market. Believe me, once you provide that product must meet quality-controls, it's not nearly so cheap to deliver at retail.
The gap between the total unit cost and the sustainable traffick-deterring ( domestic excess demand, Q(p*)<0 at price p*)retail price would have to be provided out of government funds.
It's just not that easy to make the business unprofitable. Breaking the law entails profits. You just find another law to break, in this case the distribution of unauthorized commodity. To make that price-infeasible, you have to subsidize the drug very heavily. Unless you're OK with tainted product.
doinking?
Let me guess, you don't have a girlfriend and you can't figure out why!
You're correct, I should've said Afghan warlords. The Taliban themselves were rather anti-drugs, but a lot of the local thugs who support them are not.
As for the price of heroin, I know that prescription narcotic painkillers are not very expensive. I'll try to find out later how much hospitals pay for morphine, but I would be very surprised if it's more expensive than street-grade heroin. I'm not pretending that my government heroin plan doesn't have lots of potential problems, but I would be very surprised if the cost of the drugs was one of them.
"doinking?
Let me guess, you don't have a girlfriend and you can't figure out why!"
But my mom says I'm cool!
For pharmaceutical-grade morphine liquid (10 mg/5ml), the daily cost is over $1.50, while the street price of heroin in NY is about $2.00. Baltimore price is a bit less deep in the 'Hood, a bit more in Baltimore A.
A heroin habit only costs $2 per day? Whoa, in that case I retract my previous comments. I'd always assumed it cost more.
Here is an interesting article about the criminalization of narcotics. While I think that they're a a little too positive about heroin it's an interesting read.
Think pharmacokinetics. Heroin acts as an agonist to opioids and endogenous neurotransmitters. Its use diminishes the body's own production, so that tolerance and addiction develop.
It is, in fact, a stronger agonist than morphine, which is a Schedule substance.
So, a 'new', nontolerant user of pharmaceutical morphine will be more than loopy after exposure to a smallish dose, such as half the 10 mg quoted above.
A very occasaional user of heroin will get something less of a kick from the equivalent dosage.
A frequent user may not even notice the effect of a 6 mg-equivalent of heroin.
That's why they need a great deal of money. By the time they are as strung out as the Commissioner's step-daughter, they're looking to dose up on a whole bunch of dime-bags a day. They may need up to 65 mg of heroin per dose up to six times daily (if they stay awake that long) to get the desired effect. That's 390 mg.
They also experience locational tolerance: habitual fixing in the same location requires progressively higher doses. You could cut their consumption simply by marching them a few blocks away.
If you cared to.
This town had a very high heroin mortality rate before Narcan because abusers are known to push the limits of the 80 mg lethal dose, which should indicate just how voracious these folks are.
A small bag can cost $20 if bought in pitch blackness at 3:00 a.m. in some abandominium in Upton, but will carry a much higher retail pricetag out of an apartment over a nice Donna's cafe in some trendy part of town.
It costs a lotta frickin' money any way you look at it. These people are going to be a problem; you cannot maintain a functional society on so fragile a foundation as the 50,000 addicts of Baltimore City.
Correction: that cost figure for morphine (which included a 25% allowance for pharmacy costs) was outdated. In 2007 dollars, it would be about 35% more.
Now, if you wanted to dose them up daily equivalent to their heroin fix, it would cost maybe $75 on morphine as a Schedule II drug. That would be $1.4 billion a year for Baltimore's addict population, or about $27,000 a year per head.
If they pay it, they're gonna steal. If we pay it, we're broke.
Oh, and if I have to pay $27,000 per addict, I'd rather have them in jail.
Now, if you were thinking, "but the farm price in Myanmar is just $190 a kilo, let's just help them consume that...", you could be an aspiring drug-trafficker !
On that score, I'd be delighted to send our addicts to Rangoon on a one-way ticket.
wow, thanks for the insight, galt!
It sounds like one thing te drug-education-lady said was true: people who get in on it become incapable of ever feeling happy again without it.
Now, someone mentioned that there are a lot of seemingly normal people who maintain a habit over the course of years, like that William Burroughs guy. How does that work?
And thanks for that stat, I was looking for that number. $1.4 billion sounds about right. Somebody said $6b spent by addicts a year but that seems extreme even for Baltimore. Maybe that figure counts opportunity cost or lost wages or something.
...and don't forget, if people want the govt to sell heroin, the govt has to set up an entire bureau to do it. what would be the cost of drugs if we had to pay 500 certified govt workers to administer something they could sell on the street for hefty amounts?
50k ea per year? what does that add onto the price and to our taxes to boot their govt catered habits?
I heard a brief comment you made about someone considering moving to Waverly area of Baltimore and you saying (I paraphrase) that they were "crazy" for even thinking of doing so.
I just wanted to thank-you for working on torpedoing any progress we've been making in changing this neighborhood with new blood. I don't know where the hell you get off bad-mouthing other neighborhoods instead of saying - "that would be difficult, they could use some help". And your criticisms are uninformed if based on your previous issues/perceptions of the BWCO I might add... the El Presidente-s have been removed, budgets are in place, and hell, we even have "program plans". No matter how bad our neighborhood is or is perceived to be you have NO right pissing on it on a public radio show. Pissing on the efforts of those that pick up the trash that the city doesn't, that paint the play grounds, that call 911 as often as they must, that come from MICA to teach the kids art, that have community picnics to enhance neighborhood-ness...etc. etc. NO RIGHT whatsoever.
So leave your shit in your own back yard - quit ghettoizing the ghetto even more. We're working for change in Waverly and you just set us back. Thanks a lot for making sure our neighborhood stays bad.
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