Improvements in poppy refinement by Mexican dealers have driven purity up and prices down. Heroin imported from Asia and the Middle East in the 1970s was around 5-percent pure; now federal agents report seizing drugs at purity levels of between 50 and 80 percent.

The potent heroin can kill unwary users almost instantly if they are accustomed to using weaker versions.

Independent smugglers are driving the new trade from Mexico. While the major cartels focus on marijuana and cocaine, smaller traffickers pay for access to the big cartels’ smuggling routes.

According to the DEA, heroin seizures along the border quadrupled from 2008 to 2009. According to the AP’s research, heroin deaths in the U.S. rose 20.3 percent between 2006 and 2008.

“We’re seeing [heroin] sometimes 80-percent pure,” said Oregon state medical examiner Karen Gunson. “If you’re using it every day, your chances grow and grow that it’s going to kill you.”

Heroin addicts who can’t quit using and don’t respond to methadone treatment can be helped by maintenance doses of heroin, according to a study conducted by researchers at King’s College London.

Reuters reported May 28 that heroin maintenance, while obviously not a cure for addiction, at least kept most of the hardcore addicts in the study away from street drugs, which in turn helped prevent use of dirty needles and other unhealthy behaviors. In fact, about two-thirds of the heroin-maintenance group tested clean for the presence of street drugs, a far better performance than among methadone patients, two-thirds of whom typically test positive for use of street drugs.

Some of the study participants stayed in the program for more than two years and were able to get jobs and reconnect with family members, researchers added. “People are not only physically getting better, but they’re getting back into society,” said study author John Strang.

The findings were published in the May 28, 2010 issue of The Lancet.

As a V-Man, I know that we were raised this way.  Our fathers and even our mothers passed this on to us by modeling what their parents had modeled to them. We see it in movies and on the TV and in our daily lives – everywhere.  As boys we are raised with the Four Basic Rules of Masculinity:¹

1. No Sissy Stuff!  Reject all things feminine.

2. Be a Big Wheel!  A bumper sticker put it this way: ‘He who has the most toys when he dies – wins.’

3. Be as sturdy as an oak tree!  What makes a man a man is that he is reliable in a crisis. And what makes him reliable in a crisis is that he resembles an inanimate object – a rock, a pillar, a tree.

4. Give ‘em Hell!  Give off the aura of daring and aggression. Take risks; live life on the edge.

The single greatest obstacle to women’s equality [and safety] is our behavior resulting from our sense of privilege.

You are a V-Man if you are a man who believes that women and men are created equal, that your role in a relationship is to help each other grow mentally and spiritually and to protect the women in your life from harm, that you understand your own gender and recognize and honor the feminine within you, that you recognize that power and status is not everything, and that being a man does not mean we have to resemble an inanimate object such as a rock, a pillar, or a tree.

We recognize that the differences between men and women are fewer than the differences within each of our respective genders.

A V-Man recognizes that most domestic violence involves male anger directed against their women partners.  Boys are not born to be violent, or to be superior to girls. These attitudes and behaviors are learned through stereotypes of what our society thinks it means to act and behave like a man.  V-Men know this and want to break that cycle.  Thank you!

¹Michael Kimmel

Want to know more about gender issues? Interested in V-Man workshops?  Contact Peace and Justice of La Luz at pajoll@zianet.com — Visit our website at http://pajoll.org

by Tina Godby-Ware, RN Otero/Lincoln Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner Program

The goal of sexual health promotion is to foster healthy relationships and comfort with sexuality. It is based on the premise that adults who are comfortable with their sexuality and at ease with open discussion of sexual issues will create a family environment that supports healthy sexual behavior and responsible sexual choices. Healthy sexuality is based on respect, value, honesty, and joy.

But first, we must work diligently to challenge the institutions and practices that uphold male domination, the powerlessness of children, the turning of sexuality into a commodity, and the glorification of violence and exploration of fellow human beings. Every two minutes, somewhere in America, someone is sexually assaulted. Only 83 percent of victims ever report this crime, with a large majority never telling anyone, allowing this silent epidemic to multiply and explode. The literature states that sexual violence is perhaps the most insidious manifestation of patriarchy, because it involves the corruption and distortion of that which is fundamental to our existence; our sexuality.

We are taught every other part of the amazing human body except in the unmentionable area—“down there.” This leaves us unprotected and vulnerable. Women developed a deep anger as the truth of violence against the female body was revealed—in the form of rape, childhood sexual abuse, anti-lesbian violence, physical abuse, sexual harassment, terrorism against reproductive freedom, or the international crime of female genital mutilation.

The pervasive belief that sexuality is derived from a weakness in humanity promotes the detachment of sexuality from self. This pervasive cultural norm shames us out of accepting and/or embracing our sexuality as a positive part of our own humanity. Thus sexuality exists on a foundation of relatively rigid and well-enforced ideas about gender. Males learn that their sexuality is characterized by action, control, and achievement, making it a game that man’s worth is to be judged according to the ability to play this game.  Females are taught that their sexuality involves learning how to balance being a “good girl” with pleasing men.

The Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) Program along with NMSU-Alamogordo, Peace and Justice of La Luz, COPE, and other community citizens have joined forces to locally direct, produce, and act in Eve Ensler’s award winning masterpiece The Vagina Monologues. The Vagina Monologues give voice to women’s deepest fantasies and fears bringing the hidden experiences into the open, naming them, and turning rage into positive action. It is witty and irreverent, compassionate and wise. The Vagina Monologues has been performed in cities all across America and at hundreds of college campuses. It has been translated into over 24 different languages, and has inspired a dynamic grassroots movement—V-Day—to stop violence against women. The V-Day movement is growing at a rapid pace throughout the world, in 130 countries from Europe to Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, and all of North America.

The Vagina Monologues is the truth-telling that our bodies are sacred.  With the help of outrageous voices and honest words, the grandmothers, mothers, and daughters of the future will heal their selves—and mend the world. Eve Ensler believes that nothing is more important than stopping violence toward women. The desecration of women indicates the failure of human beings to honor and protect all life and if we do not correct it, it will be the end of us all.

It will be difficult to encourage people to overhaul their experience of sexuality through a lens of well-being, rather than a lens of shame, fear, and power. Doing so directly confronts our culture’s unhealthy sexual status quo, and therefore threatens to upset the numerous interests that benefit from it. Those of us that want to positively redefine this status quo will need to forge alliances in order to surmount these formidable barriers to change. Join us in the global movement to change the story of women and end the violence.

The Vagina Monologues

Rohovec Performing Arts Center NMSU-Alamogordo campus

February 6 at 7:30 pm

February 7 at 2:00 pm

Tickets $5 at the door or at the COPE office 909 South Florida in Alamogordo

Our traditional justice system has been inadequate to the task of breaking the cycle of substance abuse and crime. Four out of every five offenses are committed by someone with a drug or alcohol problem; and we just keep locking them up!

In just the past 20 years alone, state prison systems have added 1 million new cells to incarcerate the 2.3 million adults now behind bars in the U.S. That’s far more than any other country on the globe with 1 out of every 100 adult Americans currently serving time. Approximately one-half of these individuals are addicted to drugs or alcohol and most do not pose a serious threat to public safety.

Prison for these individuals has accomplished little to stem the tide of crime or substance abuse. Upon their release from prison, two thirds of drug abusers commit a new crime and virtually all relapse quickly to drug abuse. And yet, despite these disappointing figures national expenditures on corrections well exceed $60 billion annually. On average, states spend $65,000 per bed, per year to build new prisons and $23,876 per bed, per year to operate them. Despite the staggering cost to incarcerate these individuals, most return to their communities without treatment, without jobs and without hope.

Given the abysmal outcomes of incarceration on addictive behavior, there’s absolutely no justification for state governments to continue to waste tax dollars feeding a situation where generational recidivism is becoming the norm and parents, children and grandparents may find themselves locked up together.

The addicted in prison truth is:
We want them to have self-worth
So we destroy their self-worth
We want them to be responsible
So we take away all responsibility
We want them to be positive and constructive
So we degrade them and make them useless
We want them to be trustworthy
So we put them where there is no trust
We want them to be non-violent
So we put them where violence is all around them
We want them to be kind and loving people
So we subject them to hatred and cruelty
We want them to quit being the tough guy
So we put them where the tough guy is respected
We want them quit hanging around losers
So we put all the losers in the state under one roof
We want them to quit exploiting us
So we put them where they exploit each other
We want them to take control of their lives, own problems and quit being a parasite on society
So we make them totally dependent on us

I am speaking up about this matter because I have personally been addicted to Meth for 17 years (other drugs and alcohol 30 years total). I am clean and sober for many years, but unfortunately I had to go to another state (other than my home state of New Mexico) to go to Rehab. A recovery friendly community made all the difference in my miracle

Please help stop the war on drugs. Prohibition has never worked and never will.
Thanks, Ken Larson

The coordinated sexual assault response team  is designed to ensure that victims are provided with a broad range of necessary care and services (legal, medical, social services) and to increase the likelihood that an assault can be successfully prosecuted. The SART team includes a nurse examiner, a sexual assault advocate, a prosecutor, and a law enforcement officer. All responding actors follow specific protocols that set out their responsibilities in treating and providing services sensitive to the needs of victims of sexual assault.

You can contact members of the response team at the following numbers:

Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner,  Tina Godby-Ware:  575 430-9485
Otero County Sexual Assault Coordinator, Sandra Wilder:  575 437-7404
Response Team Coordinator,  Detective Lt. Lee Wilder:  575 439-4300

. . . . .

The SART presentation was  followed by a showing of  “V-Day, Until the Violence Stops”. “V-Day” is an international movement to stop violence against women (and men).  An Alamogordo stage presentation of “The Vagina Monologues” is slated for February of 2010.  Men are encouraged to attend.

August 21, 2009

MEXICO CITY (AP) – Mexico enacted a controversial law on Thursday decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other drugs while encouraging government-financed treatment for drug dependency free of charge.

The law sets out maximum “personal use” amounts for drugs, also including LSD and methamphetamine. People detained with those quantities will no longer face criminal prosecution; the law goes into effect on Friday.

Anyone caught with drug amounts under the personal-use limit will be encouraged to seek treatment, and for those caught a third time treatment is mandatory – although no penalties for noncompliance are specified.

The maximum amount of marijuana considered to be for “personal use” under the new law is 5 grams – the equivalent of about four marijuana cigarettes. Other limits are half a gram of cocaine, 50 milligrams of heroin, 40 milligrams for methamphetamine and 0.015 milligrams of LSD.