Oleg glances furtively around him and, confident that nobody is watching, slips inside the entrance to a decaying Soviet-era block of flats, where Sasha is waiting for him. Ensconced in the dingy kitchen of one of the apartments, they empty the contents of a blue carrier bag that Oleg has brought with him – painkillers, iodine, lighter fluid, industrial cleaning oil, and an array of vials, syringes, and cooking implements.

Half an hour later, after much boiling, distilling, mixing and shaking, what remains is a caramel-coloured gunge held in the end of a syringe, and the acrid smell of burnt iodine in the air. Sasha fixes a dirty needle to the syringe and looks for a vein in his bruised forearm. After some time, he finds a suitable place, and hands the syringe to Oleg, telling him to inject the fluid. He closes his eyes, and takes the hit.

Russia has more heroin users than any other country in the world – up to two million, according to unofficial estimates. For most, their lot is a life of crime, stints in prison, probable contraction of HIV and hepatitis C, and an early death. As efforts to stem the flow of Afghan heroin into Russia bring some limited success, and the street price of the drug goes up, for those addicts who can't afford their next hit, an even more terrifying spectre has raised its head.


The home-made drug that Oleg and Sasha inject is known as krokodil, or "crocodile". It is desomorphine, a synthetic opiate many times more powerful than heroin that is created from a complex chain of mixing and chemical reactions, which the addicts perform from memory several times a day. While heroin costs from £20 to £60 per dose, desomorphine can be "cooked" from codeine-based headache pills that cost £2 per pack, and other household ingredients available cheaply from the markets.

It is a drug for the poor, and its effects are horrific. It was given its reptilian name because its poisonous ingredients quickly turn the skin scaly. Worse follows. Oleg and Sasha have not been using for long, but Oleg has rotting sores on the back of his neck.

"If you miss the vein, that's an abscess straight away," says Sasha. Essentially, they are injecting poison directly into their flesh. One of their friends, in a neighbouring apartment block, is further down the line.

"She won't go to hospital, she just keeps injecting. Her flesh is falling off and she can hardly move anymore," says Sasha. Photographs of late-stage krokodil addicts are disturbing in the extreme. Flesh goes grey and peels away to leave bones exposed. People literally rot to death.

Russian heroin addicts first discovered how to make krokodil around four years ago, and there has been a steady rise in consumption, with a sudden peak in recent months. "Over the past five years, sales of codeine-based tablets have grown by dozens of times," says Viktor Ivanov, the head of Russia's Drug Control Agency. "It's pretty obvious that it's not because everyone has suddenly developed headaches."

Heroin addiction kills 30,000 people per year in Russia – a third of global deaths from the drug – but now there is the added problem of krokodil. Mr Ivanov recalled a recent visit to a drug-treatment centre in Western Siberia. "They told me that two years ago almost all their drug users used heroin," said the drugs tsar. "Now, more than half of them are on desomorphine."

He estimates that overall, around 5 per cent of Russian drug users are on krokodil and other home-made drugs, which works out at about 100,000 people. It's a huge, hidden epidemic – worse in the really isolated parts of Russia where supplies of heroin are patchy – but palpable even in cities such as Tver.

It has a population of half a million, and is a couple of hours by train from Moscow, en route to St Petersburg. Its city centre, sat on the River Volga, is lined with pretty, Tsarist-era buildings, but the suburbs are miserable. People sit on cracked wooden benches in a weed-infested "park", gulping cans of Jaguar, an alcoholic energy drink. In the background, there are rows of crumbling apartment blocks. The shops and restaurants of Moscow are a world away; for a treat, people take the bus to the McDonald's by the train station.

In the city's main drug treatment centre, Artyom Yegorov talks of the devastation that krokodil is causing. "Desomorphine causes the strongest levels of addiction, and is the hardest to cure," says the young doctor, sitting in a treatment room in the scruffy clinic, below a picture of Hugh Laurie as Dr House.

"With heroin withdrawal, the main symptoms last for five to 10 days. After that there is still a big danger of relapse but the physical pain will be gone. With krokodil, the pain can last up to a month, and it's unbearable. They have to be injected with extremely strong tranquilisers just to keep them from passing out from the pain."

Dr Yegorov says krokodil users are instantly identifiable because of their smell. "It's that smell of iodine that infuses all their clothes," he says. "There's no way to wash it out, all you can do is burn the clothes. Any flat that has been used as a krokodil cooking house is best forgotten about as a place to live. You'll never get that smell out of the flat."

Addicts in Tver say they never have any problems buying the key ingredient for krokodil – codeine pills, which are sold without prescription. "Once I was trying to buy four packs, and the woman told me they could only sell two to any one person," recalls one, with a laugh. "So I bought two packs, then came back five minutes later and bought another two. Other than that, they never refuse to sell it to us, even though they know what we're going to do with it." The solution, to many, is obvious: ban the sale of codeine tablets, or at least make them prescription-only. But despite the authorities being aware of the problem for well over a year, nothing has been done.

President Dmitry Medvedev has called for websites which explain how to make krokodil to be closed down, but he has not ordered the banning of the pills. Last month, a spokesman for the ministry of health said that there were plans to make codeine-based tablets available only on prescription, but that it was impossible to introduce the measure quickly. Opponents claim lobbying by pharmaceutical companies has caused the inaction.

"A year ago we said that we need to introduce prescriptions," says Mr Ivanov. "These tablets don't cost much but the profit margins are high. Some pharmacies make up to 25 per cent of their profits from the sale of these tablets. It's not in the interests of pharmaceutical companies or pharmacies themselves to stop this, so the government needs to use its power to regulate their sale."

In addition to krokodil, there are reports of drug users injecting other artificial mixes, and the latest street drug is tropicamide. Used as eye drops by ophthalmologists to dilate the pupils during eye examinations, Dr Yegorov says patients have no trouble getting hold of capsules of it for about £2 per vial. Injected, the drug has severe psychiatric effects and brings on suicidal feelings.

"Addicts are being sold drugs by normal Russian women working in pharmacies, who know exactly what they'll be used for," said Yevgeny Roizman, an anti-drugs activist who was one of the first to talk publicly about the krokodil issue earlier this year. "Selling them to boys the same age as their own sons. Russians are killing Russians."

Zhenya, quietly spoken and wearing dark glasses, agrees to tell his story while I sit in the back of his car in a lay-by on the outskirts of Tver. He managed to kick the habit, after spending weeks at a detox clinic ,experiencing horrendous withdrawal symptoms that included seizures, a 40-degree temperature and vomiting. He lost 14 teeth after his gums rotted away, and contracted hepatitis C.

But his fate is essentially a miraculous escape – after all, he's still alive. Zhenya is from a small town outside Tver, and was a heroin addict for a decade before he moved onto krokodil a year ago. Of the ten friends he started injecting heroin with a decade ago, seven are dead.

Unlike heroin, where the hit can last for several hours, a krokodil high only lasts between 90 minutes and two hours, says Zhenya. Given that the "cooking" process takes at least half an hour, being a krokodil addict is basically a full-time job.

"I remember one day, we cooked for three days straight," says one of Zhenya's friends. "You don't sleep much when you're on krokodil, as you need to wake up every couple of hours for another hit. At the time we were cooking it at our place, and loads of people came round and pitched in. For three days we just kept on making it. By the end, we all staggered out yellow, exhausted and stinking of iodine."

In Tver, most krokodil users inject the drug only when they run out of money for heroin. As soon as they earn or steal enough, they go back to heroin. In other more isolated regions of Russia, where heroin is more expensive and people are poorer, the problem is worse. People become full-time krokodil addicts, giving them a life expectancy of less than a year.

Zhenya says every single addict he knows in his town has moved from heroin to krokodil, because it's cheaper and easier to get hold of. "You can feel how disgusting it is when you're doing it," he recalls. "You're dreaming of heroin, of something that feels clean and not like poison. But you can't afford it, so you keep doing the krokodil. Until you die."

Some of the names in this story have been changed

Boozy pensioners are Britain's "invisible addicts", according to a new study, which urges the slashing of drinking limits for over-65s to take into account the effects of ageing.
Separate guidance on safe drinking levels for the elderly should be issued by the government as current recommended limits are based on younger adults and are too high for more mature people, the Royal College of Psychiatrists says in a report.
Recent evidence has shown that the upper safe limit for older men is 1.5 units of alcohol a day, the college said, compared to a current recommendation for men of not regularly drinking more than three to four units daily.
For women over 65, the limits should be lowered from not regularly drinking more than two to three units a day to possibly to just one unit a day, according to Dr Tony Rao, a consultant in old age psychiatry and a member of the Older People?s Substance Misuse Working Group that drew up the report.
"As we age, there are other accompanying factors such as increasing memory problems and physical health problems and less of an ability to get rid of alcohol from the blood stream," he said.
"This means that the effects of what we would currently call the safe limits is actually more damaging for older people."
The call for new drink limits for the over-65s comes as part of a series of recommendations from the college on drug and alcohol misuse among older people.
The UK is witnessing a "burgeoning" public health problem in the form of a growing alcohol and drug misuse problem among the "baby boomer" generation, according to the college.
"Not enough is being done to tackle substance misuse in our aging population ? making them society?s invisible addicts,? the study found.
It said problems included misuse of prescribed and over-the-counter medicines as well as alcohol abuse. Illegal drug use was currently uncommon among over-65s but there has been a "significant" increase in the over-40s in recent years, the report said.
A third of older people with alcohol problems develop them in later life, often as a result of changes such as retirement or bereavement, or feelings of boredom, loneliness and depression, according to the report.
Recommendations include screening by GPs for substance misuse amongst the over-65s, as part of a routine health check and a public health campaign on alcohol and drug misuse targeted at older people.
Professor Ilana Crome, professor of addiction psychiatry and chairman of the working group, said: "The traditional view is that alcohol misuse is uncommon in older people, and that the misuse of drugs is very rare.
"However, this is simply not true. A lack of awareness means that GPs and other healthcare professionals often overlook or discount the signs when someone has a problem.
"We hope this report highlights the scale of the problem, and that the multiple medical and social needs of this group of people are not ignored any longer."
Don Shenker, chief executive of Alcohol Concern, said: "While younger excessive drinkers often make the headlines, we should remember that older people often turn to alcohol in later life as a coping mechanism and this can remain stubbornly hidden from view.
"This report calls for much greater recognition that excessive drinking in older age is both widespread and preventable, particularly if public health professionals are supported and trained to spot the signs and take appropriate action."

Nobody knows for sure just how many drug and alcohol recovery houses are operating in Surrey. Some estimates run as high as 200, but Surrey's mayor thinks the actual number is smaller. "From what I understand, there are about 130 here in our city," Mayor Dianne Watts told the Now. However many there are, the vast majority of the recovery houses in Surrey - about 90 per cent of them - are not subject to provincial regulation and inspection and that's a problem. It's a problem for the city, for police, but most of all, it's a problem for their residents, addicts trying to get clean and sober.

The situation dates from December 2001 when the government of former premier Gordon Campbell changed the rules governing recovery houses. The Liberals amended the Community Care Facility Act to create a new class of facility called supportive recovery residences that are not required to have a provincial licence to operate.

In order to qualify as a supportive recovery residence, operators are required to provide "a safe and drug-free environment" for recovering addicts, but cannot "provide most or all of the services" required of licenced houses. The changes essentially created a class of boarding house for those addicted to alcohol and drugs.

In many cases, what it created was a network of flophouses where people trying to overcome addiction are exploited by unscrupulous operators who take clients' welfare cheques, but deliver little in the way of support or supervision.

There's good money in recovery houses; 10 clients will gross the operator nearly $6,000 a month and those who exploit their clients by providing substandard accommodation and meals can realize a tidy profit.

Gary Robinson is a former Surrey city councillor, a recovery house operator and a recovering cocaine addict. He is the executive director of Realistic Success Recovery Society, which has three recovery houses in Surrey.

Robinson does it right. His houses provide clean, well-maintained residences where clients receive nutritious meals, counselling and caring support from staff and fellow residents.

Robinson has nothing but contempt and anger for operators who exploit people trying to regain control of their lives.

"I call them predators. They're preying on people at their lowest, at the lowest point in their lives."

'NO POINT' IN BEING THERE

Corey is a 22-year-old recovering crack addict who lives in one of Robinson's recovery houses. He's been wrestling with substance abuse of one kind or another since he was seven. He spent four weeks in a recovery house run by an organization that has at least five houses in Surrey.

"They got $560 a month from me and it was pretty much just a meal a day and a bed to sleep in. I wasn't put on any restrictions and I was allowed to keep my phone," Corey said.

He said within the first week of his residence there, he and the house monitor - the person in charge of the place - were on their way to a recovery meeting.

"While we were out, the monitor bought some crack. Both of us were using crack. After a while, I figured there wasn't much point being there."

Corey eventually found a place in one of Robinson's houses and 46 days in, he said the difference was like night and day.

"Here, they treat you with respect. All the guys and all the managers here show you respect, they don't look down on you."

PROVINCE BLAMED FOR PROFITEERING

Rogue recovery houses are bad news for neighbourhoods, too.

Steve Burke and Charlie Morton both live in Whalley and both have bad recovery houses in their area. They want the rules changed to outlaw the kind of exploitation they see every day. Both blame the provincial government for allowing unlicenced - and virtually uncontrolled - recovery houses to exist.

They say the province is responsible for the situation and they want Victoria to step up and put it right.

Burke and Morton said the majority of recovery houses have more residents than the rules allow, are poorly managed, and are nothing more than money-making enterprises that take advantage of people who have fallen on bad times.

The anger is evident in Morton's voice as he talks.

"We have more compassion for a dying seal on a beach than we have for human beings in our city. It's not right. I think the province is misappropriating our tax money, supposedly to help these people, and they're not doing anything."

Burke agreed. He said profit is the prime motive for most recovery house operators.

"You can't make a profit with just six people in that house. You've got to have more people there - a lot more."

CITY'S HANDS TIED: WATTS

Watts said city hall is working on a plan of action, but said the city's options are limited. City hall can only regulate zoning and land use; it has no direct control over the recovery process itself.

"This has been a problem ever since I've been on council. The province won't regulate them," the mayor said.

Watts said she's not eager to shut down recovery houses that violate city bylaws.

"But we've got to move in that direction. We're going to start shutting some of them down, but we have to have a plan to house these people. Otherwise we'll just have a lot more addicts on the street."

Calls to minister Rich Coleman were not returned.

The Hebrew University researchers, led by Dr. Rami Yaka of the university's Institute of Drug Research, were seemingly able to erase the drug-linked memories of rats that had been deliberately administered cocaine over two weeks' time.




The researchers injected a small protein - a peptide called ZIP - directly into an area of the addicted rats' basal forebrain called the nucleus accumbens, which controls pleasure and reward and which has been demonstrated to be connected to drug addiction.

Afterward, the rats were returned to their pens to check their reactions. Rather than seeking out the place where they had been getting their "fixes" of cocaine, the rats ignored it, indicating that memories linked to their addiction had been erased.

"One of the biggest problems with drug addicts is the high rate of those who return to drug use after being rehabilitated," explained Yaka. "Memories can trigger a desire for the drug, including memories of the drug itself, the needle or the environment in which the drug was consumed.

"This research indicates the possibility of erasing these memories, in a way that will allow addicts to cancel the associations they have in their minds regarding the drug."

The research is to be included in Hebrew University's presentation at next week's Facing Tomorrow 2011 conference in Jerusalem.

The protein used has been found by other researchers over the past five years to inhibit learning processes by affecting memory. To date, however, all the memories erased have been short-term ones. This research provides evidence that the peptide can also erase memories acquired through a long-term learning process.

Based on this research, Yaka said, it may be possible to erase memories in the course of treating other problems, such as post-traumatic stress disorder.

While the current research dealt only with memories linked to cocaine, "All drugs follow the same addictive path, just at different intensities," Yaka said. "Cocaine, heroin and even cannabis stimulate the secretion in the brain of the hormone dopamine, which is associated with pleasure, at least in the first stages of addiction. Therefore, the substance that affected the memories of addiction to cocaine should have a similar influence on addictions to other substances."

The research could provide a new treatment model for weaning people off drugs. Currently, the treatment of addicts relies primarily on administering alternative drugs, such as methadone, and psychological counseling.

Medical research has previously demonstrated the counterintuitive fact that the longer an addict remains "clean" of drugs, the more likely he is to resume taking them, because of certain chemical changes that take place in the brain.

"The treatment being examined in the current research tries to prevent the increased risk of returning to drugs by preventing some of these brain changes," Yaka said.

The scientists are still unsure if the memory erasure process is selective, affecting only memories associated with drugs, or if other memories are erased as well.

"Tests we've done show that the place [in the brain] where the substance was injected is connected solely to memories of pleasure and reward, and not to other memories," Yaka said. "We also found that after the injection of the substance, the rats' ability to accumulate new memories was not affected."

Shawn Clusky has seen every side of Kentucky's battle with pain-pill addiction over the past 10 years.

Clusky first tried OxyContin at age 17 with his school buddies, shortly after the high-powered narcotic painkiller went on the market. He was an occasional user and seller until about age 21, when he became fully addicted.

When he was 25, he got arrested at a Lexington gas station for selling $15,000 worth of pills. Clusky received probation, but was still using until he was sent to the WestCare rehabilitation center in eastern Kentucky.

He now works there as a counselor.

"A lot of times people believe a drug addict comes from poverty," he said.

Not true.

"Nine out of 10 of the guys I partied with came from millionaire families. Their parents didn't use; they had good families."

Ten years ago, Kentucky learned it had a major drug problem.

OxyContin, a powerful prescription painkiller, was being abused at alarming rates in the Appalachian areas of eastern and southern Kentucky. A decade later, the level of pain-pill abuse throughout the state and across the country is at epic levels, officials say.

Despite some successes — including high-profile drug arrests across the country, increased treatment programs and the adoption of prescription-drug monitoring programs in 43 states — the problem is now so entrenched that the cheap flights and van rentals drug traffickers use to travel from Florida to Kentucky and other states to peddle "hillbilly heroin" are nicknamed the "OxyContin Express."

The sheer scope of the problem is a key reason.

Kentucky often ranks at or near the top in U.S. measures of the level of prescription pain-pill abuse.



According to a study by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), there was a fourfold increase nationally in treatment admissions for prescription pain-pill abuse during the past decade. The increase spans every age, gender, race, ethnicity, education, employment level and region.

The study also shows a tripling of pain-pill abuse among patients who needed treatment for dependence on opioids — prescription narcotics.

The rate of overdose-related deaths among men in Kentucky more than doubled from 2000 to 2009, and it tripled among women, according to the state Cabinet for Health and Family Services.

Nearly every family in eastern Kentucky has been touched by prescription-drug addiction and death.

In the late 1990s, it was easier to find OxyContin — pure oxycodone with a time release — in Kentucky. The manufacturer, Purdue Pharma, was selling it "hand over fist" to doctors in eastern Kentucky, rich with coal-mine injuries and folks with government health-care cards, Clusky said.

Clusky said a high-school friend who worked at a pharmacy would steal the pills for his friends, so "it didn't cost any of us anything."

When many of the eastern Kentucky pill sources dried up after law-enforcement raids in 2001, Clusky said, the trade moved to Mexico, where oxycodone could be bought for pennies over the counter and sold for as much as $100 a pill in the rural U.S.

Clusky began making trips to Nuevo Laredo, driving back home with thousands of pills. By this time, heroin was his drug of choice. He often traveled to larger cities, where heroin could be found more cheaply.

"Five hundred dollars worth of heroin would last me a week. Five hundred dollars worth of oxy would last me one day," Clusky said.

Clusky lived part time in Ohio, sometimes making three doctor-shopping trips a day from Lexington to Dayton. He did a few stints in rehab, at one point trying methadone and Suboxone to treat his opiate addiction. It didn't work.

"I was as useless to society on methadone as I was on heroin," he said.

By 2002, a quarter of the overdose deaths in the nation linked to OxyContin were in eastern Kentucky, authorities said.

Police, regulators and elected officials charged that Purdue Pharma, the Connecticut-based maker of OxyContin, marketed the drug too aggressively, feeding an oversupply and diversion onto the illicit market.

Purdue Pharma denied that, but the company and three top officials ultimately pleaded guilty in 2007 to misleading the public about the risk of addiction and paid $634.5 million in fines.

Authorities had begun pushing back long before that against growing abuse of OxyContin and other prescription drugs, but addicts and traffickers kept finding ways to get pills.

"Law enforcement adjusts, and the criminals adjust," said Frank Rapier, the head of the Appalachia High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, which includes 68 counties in Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia.

Hal Rogers' voice grows tight with frustration whenever the U.S. House member from Kentucky talks about the prescription-drug epidemic that's gripped Appalachia for more than a decade.

"Crook doctors operating these pill mills" in Florida are running rampant and are fueling the flow of illegally obtained prescription drugs to states such as Kentucky, Rogers, a Republican and the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, told Attorney General Eric Holder during a recent hearing. "My people are dying."

The heroin-addict bank robber who became one of the most-wanted men in New York for a spree that began around Christmas had grenades inside his Queens home, sources revealed yesterday.

Marat Mikhaylich, 35 - dubbed the "Holiday Bandit" - was captured Tuesday after the NYPD's high-tech license-plate readers, along with some old-fashioned detective work by the FBI, led cops to his stolen getaway car, the sources said.

After his arrest, police and FBI agents conducted a search of Mikhaylich's Queens apartment and found several grenades, sources told The Post.

Mikhaylich is suspected in seven heists in Brooklyn and Staten Island, as well as two in New Jersey.

Talking to Young, the host of BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, Sheen admitted that his family finds dealing with his 45-year-old son's problem "a rollercoaster", but said that the troubled star required help and sympathy: "Charlie is dealing with the most profound problems and addiction, it is no secret," said Sheen, 70. "His behaviour has been an example of that."

After discussing his own battle with alcohol as a young man, Sheen, best known for his long stint in the Oval Office on the television series The West Wing, compared his son's addiction with other potentially terminal illnesses. "So, if he had cancer, how would we deal with him? Well, he has another disease and it is equally as dangerous as cancer. And so we lift him up and we pray for him and be present to him. And we try to meet with him as much as we can. But he is an adult and he needs a lot of help on a lot of different levels."

Although his son's problems have made recent headlines following outlandish statements about his home life with two lovers and his sacking from the sitcom Two and a Half Men, Sheen said:"He has been out there on his own for a very long time and as a family you never get used to it. It is a rollercoaster ride and it's been going on for some time. So we deal with it every day."

The star also told Young about the impact of the heart attack that struck him in March 1977 "out of the blue" while filming Apocalypse Now, and prompted a big change in his own habits and attitudes.

Sheen stopped drinking and became a pacifist, he says, as a result of the experience and after reading Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, selected as his desert island book. His subsequent journey back to the Catholic faith, he said, was guided by the memory of his mother who had died suddenly when he was 11. "I have always felt her presence. Sometimes I even see her in other people. It is fleeting, mind you."

The actor's political activism, which has seen him arrested 67 times, has caused him problems in Hollywood, he admits, but he has no regrets. "I cannot not do it and be myself," he said.

Sheen also pays warm tributes to his wife of nearly 50 years, Janet, and his other famous son, Emilio Estevez, who directs him in a new film, The Way. "When he was born I thought, 'Here is the guy I have been waiting for all my life.' He is a companion, a big brother almost. And that is the way it has always been."

With his 50th wedding anniversary due to be marked in December this year, the actor declines to explain the secret of a good marriage, but tells Young that his wife is "the most remarkable human being I have ever known", adding that "honestly, I still don't have a clue who she is".

Sheen chooses two songs by his friend and neighbour Bob Dylan: Knocking on Heaven's Door and Subterranean Homesick Blues.

76,000,000 people in the United States are afflicted with alcoholism. While a lot of people go through the twelve steps of AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) successfully (and the successes vary) many people never find a program that works for them and eventually drink themselves into a bottomless abyss.

Alcoholism can affect anyone. There is no age, income, race, religion or educational background that depicts alcoholism.


Alcoholism is a disease. While there are no visible sores on the body or medicine that can cure alcoholism, there is the program of AA. When the program of AA is done effectively, magical doors open and life becomes manageable for the first time.


What is alcohol abuse? Find out if you're drinking above the recommended amount today drinkaware.co.uk
Job Search? Study To Become A Plumber. Request Free Info Online Now! www.Train4TradeSkills.com
In the book of Alcoholics Anonymous, known as The Big Book, Bill Wilson wrote "How It Works" found on page 63. He writes, "half measures availed us nothing, we stood at the turning point." This means, alcoholics stood at a fork in the road. Life or death. When alcoholics drink, they drink with all they have. Nothing and no one matters. That is one side of the road.

The other side of the road is practicing the Twelve Steps of AA thoroughly. In order to be successful at sobriety, there can be no "half measures". No one is "kind of an alcoholic" and certainly everyone who drinks alcohol is not an alcoholic. If you drink and your life is unmanageable, perhaps you should find an AA meeting and stay to find out if you are indeed an alcoholic.

Family and Friends Stepping In
On the show "Intervention", there are profiled cases of alcoholics and drug addicts. The addict/alcoholic is intervened upon and is talked into going to a beautiful rehab in a beautiful setting begrudgingly. I've yet to read one footnote at the end of the show that said the profiled person continued a life of sobriety.

It is painful to watch our loved ones fall into the darkness of alcoholism and addiction. Many of us feel guilt and we help the alcoholic/addict out. We may give them rides or cash. This is called 'enabling' and it does more harm than good. Enablers are often co-dependent and have weak boundaries. The enabler "helps" the alcoholic/addict by giving money or calling them out of work. This leaves no culpability for the alcoholic/addict. Without responsibility for one's actions, there is no room for growth.

To learn how help an alcoholic/addict go to www.aa.org and click on "for the family." There is also Al-Anon for families and loved ones of alcoholics and addicts. Al-Anon provides support for family members dealing with a loved one's addiction.

CANNABIS-GROWING facility found by gardaí in Co Meath was being readied to produce a crop valued at €1.4 million every eight weeks and is both the largest and most sophisticated operation of its kind ever found in the State.

Senior Garda sources said the premises were in the process of being doubled in size and when fully constructed would have been capable of producing a cannabis crop every eight weeks with a street value of €1.4 million.

“This was an industrial-sized operation in the true sense,” said one Garda source.

The discovery was made at Bective near Trim in Co Meath on Wednesday afternoon.

Some 1,720 plants valued at €680,000 were found growing on the premises.

A timber-framed extension was being added to the warehouse that would have doubled the floor size and enabled the simultaneous cultivation of just under 3,500 cannabis plants.

An examination of the warehouse and farm has revealed the Irish gang behind the operation was using techniques never seen in the Republic before.

Rows of high-wattage lights needed to generate sufficient light and heat to grow the cannabis crop had been attached to generators designed to kick in and ensure the crop continued to grow in the event of a power cut.

The warehouse walls and doors had been covered in a specialist spray-on insulation to maintain high levels of heat in the warehouse.

Filipino relatives of drug smugglers to China are implored by China's ambassador to Manila to understand why these so-called "scourge of society" must be executed by lethal injection and that while he commiserates with the families the verdicts will push through "sooner or later" in consonance with Chinese laws.

That they are a scourge of society was the phrase used by the Chinese embassy in Manila to announce the finality of the verdict.

Ambassador Liu Jintao also said that other than the deferment of the original dates of February 21 and 22 to still-unscheduled times, Sally Ordinario-Villanueva, 32, Ramon Credo, 42, and Elizabeth Batain, 38, can no longer opt for reprieve, clemency or commutation.

”I would like to confirm that the three criminals who have been sentenced to death are at the moment still alive. But the verdict is the final verdict. So the penalty will be carried out sooner or later and everything will be done in accordance with the law in China,” Liu told the press.

"The verdict of the Supreme People's Court (SPC) is final and executory," he told a press briefing on Thursday.

He posed a plea to Filipino families whose relatives engage in drug trafficking in China to understand that drug traffickers destroy Filipinos as well as the Chinese people. He asked for respect of Chinese laws against heroin smuggling, wherein at least 50 grams could lead to 15 years to life in prison or death.

”These drug traffickers are not only victimizing the Chinese people, they are also victimizing the Filipino people," he stressed.

The SPC of China had upheld lower courts' sentence for the three, who separately smuggled a total 15,323 grams or more than four kilograms each of heroin into Xiamen and Shenzhen in southern China in 2008.

In the case of the three, the amount they carried was "way beyond, way beyond," thus the severity of the verdict, said Liu.

Pointing out that the situation in Filipino drug-smuggling on the China route is "really, really bad," Liu emphasized on Thursday:"I don’t want to link this (execution) case with the general relations between China and the Philippines because I don’t want to see our wonderful relationship being kidnapped by these drug criminals."

He emphasized that trade and investment relations between the two countries have surged ahead, and any differences are outweighed by cooperation and dialogues.

Liu also said that “sooner or later” the executions would push through and nothing more would prevent them -- "the issue is not on China's agenda on the visit," Liu added.

He believes the highest officials of “the Philippine Government already "have a very, very good and clear understanding of Chinese laws,” as a February 18 Joint Statement between Vice President Jejomar C. Binay and top Chinese officials show.

Binay had gone off to China on a last-ditch appeal for clemency and was informed of the postponement "that considered the sentiments of the Philippine side yet within the purview of Chinese laws."

He did not elaborate, but noted that Manila is now “waiting for what Beijing will do next (the undated execution). I’m sure they (officials) understand this.” When the time comes, the Philippine embassy in Beijing will be informed, he said.

This would be the first execution of Filipinos in China. Nationals of the United Kingdom, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Pakistan, Mongolia and Afghanistan have been executed under China’s stiff anti-drugs-smuggling laws.

The British Medical Association, Alcohol Concern and other medical groups have announced that they will not sign up to the Public Health Responsibility Deal.

This is a partnership between the Department of Health, UK industry and the health community covering food, alcohol, physical activity and health at work.

The six organisations give a series of reasons why – as a group – they are unable to sign up to the deal's alcohol policy.

They believe the Responsibility Deal policy objective to foster a culture of responsible drinking does not adequately address the problems of morbidity and mortality caused by alcohol.

They also say drinks industry pledges are not reliable, and the Responsibility Deal process has not taken the health lobby’s alternative pledges into account.

These pledges include not to advertise in cinemas during under-18 films, and to put health warnings on all bottles.

While the organisations stress they ‘remain completely open to dialogue with the government’, they also say they ‘have not yet seen evidence that Government is working towards a comprehensive, cross-departmental strategy to reduce alcohol harm, based on evidence of what works, with rigorous evaluation metrics.’

The Wine and Spirit Trade Association says it will not comment before the publication of the government’s Public Health Responsibility Deal tomorrow.

The six organisations involved in today’s announcement are: Alcohol Concern, British Association for the Study of the Liver, British Liver Trust, British Medical Association, Institute of Alcohol Studies, and the Royal College of Physicians.

BMA spokeswoman Dr Vivienne Nathanson said, “The BMA has thought long and hard about walking away from the table but ultimately we do not feel we have any option. The government has talked the talk in respect of wanting to tackle alcohol misuse but when it comes to taking tough action that will achieve results it falls short. Instead it has chosen to rely on the alcohol industry to develop policies - given the inherent conflict of interest these will do nothing to reduce the harm caused by alcohol misuse.'

A three-year-old child who was treated in hospital for addiction to alcohol is thought to be Britain's youngest ever alcoholic, health officials said Monday.
The youngster was one of 13 people under the age of 12 who were diagnosed as alcoholics by the state-run National Health Service (NHS) in central England between 2008 and 2010.
Health officials declined to give details of the three-year-old's condition or disclose the toddler's identity due to patient confidentiality rules.
An NHS spokeswoman said: "We treat alcohol abuse very seriously, and have specialist teams and experts on hand who are there to treat young patients with alcohol-related problems."
The news, revealed by the NHS after a request under Freedom of Information laws, highlights Britain's uphill struggle to curb its heavy-drinking culture.
It came on the same day that leading health groups blasted a government initiative on alcohol which involves asking drinks firms to sign up to pledges to cut binge and underage drinking.
The groups, including the British Medical Association and the charity Alcohol Concern, accused the health ministry of letting the drinks industry dictate policy and condemned the pledges as neither specific nor measurable.