What can you do to push and motivate yourself?

[burningpeach]

It also is nearly indistinguishable from the other exam week amphetamine of choice for law students:  Adderall.

By Andrew Conte
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Monday, October 25, 2004

Jamie Cafeo could not understand at first why other students wanted the prescription drugs she needed to focus in classes at Community College of Allegheny County. Classmates offered her $50 for her bottle of Adderall, a stimulant prescribed to people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. "There are a lot of friends questioning me if I'll sell it to them," said Cafeo, 20, of Bloomfield.

hehe, I am sure she is "surprised". LOL

20 years and so out of touch. I don't think so. Adderall surely helps with studying, but I prefer loads of coffee to taking it. For once, it is cheaper and you never know what situation you might end up in that might warrant drug test. Only good thing with Adderall is that it doesn't stay in system long compared to Marijuana for example (not that THAT is a great study-aid).

I prefer my Colombian coffee.

I don't think the Colombian thing is a good idea. I mean, emotional liberation, breakdown of communication barriers, increased feelings of self worth, elimination of the need for sleep and lack of appetite granted, what about the heightened risk of cerebral hemorrhages (stokes), heart and circulatory failure and paranoid psychoses?

[slacker]

I don't think the Colombian thing is a good idea. I mean, emotional liberation, breakdown of communication barriers, increased feelings of self worth, elimination of the need for sleep and lack of appetite granted, what about the heightened risk of cerebral hemorrhages (stokes), heart and circulatory failure and paranoid psychoses?

I believe it depends on which major Columbian export you stick with. Like Suen2b, coffee is my drug of choice. Not all Columbian, though....some blends include beans from Africa/Asia, also.

[IQT]

Not all Columbian, though....some blends include beans from Africa/Asia, also.

Those blends aren't that useful for the exam day, thou. I mean, once the initial fun has passed there can be a feeling of heaviness, as though your bones have melted down into your feet. You don't want to feel as if nothing matters when taking your exam, do you?!

[bjrobinson]

Blatant coke use happens at law schools school and for the most part it is difficult to catch students on cocaine because it is not an outwardly noticeable thing.

How about wide-eyed, anxious appearance, abnormal dilation of your pupils, nystagmus (involuntary jerking of eyeballs), rapid speech?

[nomine365]

Blatant coke use happens at law schools school and for the most part it is difficult to catch students on cocaine because it is not an outwardly noticeable thing.

How about wide-eyed, anxious appearance, abnormal dilation of your pupils, nystagmus (involuntary jerking of eyeballs), rapid speech?

[babybear]

Ha! You guys are so funny!

[erstes]

Indeed, I mean, this ad, this cocaine ad is really funny! LOL

[Bravo]

The chances are that most of us will live to see drugs prohibition replaced with a system of regulation and control. By 2020 the criminal market will have been forced to relinquish its control of the drug trade and government regulation will be the norm.

Users will no longer "score" from unregulated dealers.

Instead, they will buy their drugs from specialist pharmacists or licensed retailers. At its simplest, this is all legalisation, control and regulation will mean - shopping and visiting the doctor. It is simply a question of transferring the policy paradigm of management to currently illegal drugs.

One of the problems for those wanting to dramatise a world where currently illegal drugs are legal is the distinct lack of drama involved. Drug prohibition, in collision with vast numbers of users, creates a situation where drama underlies the entire business. By abrogating responsibility for the trade through the failure to prohibit it, the market is gifted to organised criminals and unregulated dealers. The consequent deregulation of the market at the international level spawns violence, corruption and political and economic destabilisation - witness Afghanistan, Latin America, the Caribbean and south east Asia. At a national level, our prisons are twice as full as they would be without prohibition, property crime is doubled. Your taxes - that the government spends on prohibition - actively make your environment a worse place in which to live. And you are being duped into supporting a policy that makes drugs more dangerous and more chaotic.

At a community level prohibition-related street prostitution is endemic, street dealing and turf wars are the norm in larger cities, and prohibition is responsible for more than half of all burglaries, shoplifting, thefts from vehicles and robberies. Drugs and their misuse are not responsible for this mayhem and misery. Prohibition is. (Note that there is no property crime related to fundraising to support a tobacco habit, even though users require up to 60 hits a day and tobacco withdrawal and abstinence are difficult to deal with). With regard to tobacco, gambling and drinking, prohibition doesn't work. A useful question to ask is: what are the successful commodity prohibitions of the last hundred years? If you are struggling to remember any successful prohibitions, it may be because there are none.

Politics, not evidence, drives the war on drugs.

You may well ask why we persist with prohibition if there is no evidence that it is effective. In short, the answer is politics - with a very big "p". The war is not fought because it is effective; it is fought because it suits politicians to fight it. US's domestic and foreign policy are now intimately intertwined with prohibition. With regard to domestic policy, prohibition identifies convenient scapegoats and drug-war enemies to rally the electorate around. Many law enforcement agencies have an investment in prohibition. Prison builders, police, customs, CIA, and the FBI are funded to a great extent to fight the war on drugs.

Breaking point?

The drug war is also enormously useful to the US in continuing its adventures in foreign countries in which it has an interest - see Latin America, Afghanistan, the Middle East, south east Asia and the Caribbean. Global prohibition is enforced through the UN (for which read US). It is supported by more than 150 UN member states, many of whom do not wish to fall foul of the US. Prohibition will end when the enormously destructive consequences of its continued enforcement become too much for the system to bear, despite its attractive political benefits. And all the evidence points to the fact that we are approaching that point.

Transform estimates that 15 years maximum is as much more prohibition as we can all stand. When it goes we will wonder why we did not end it earlier, and our trust in our politicians will take yet another dive. We can only hope that it happens sooner rather than later and that we can pass on a less melodramatic drug policy to our children.

[gettinwarmer]

Really, drugs ARE suicide . . . in a way

Not that I'm an addict or anything but jesus, are most people in LS this square? Really though, not that I would suggest using drugs to "cope" with things, but "drugs" (whatever that even means-caffeine, beer, prozac, crank, smack ... they certainly aren't the same things) are no more suicide than eating poorly, not exercising, or a host of other "unhealthy" things most people do all the time.

As you, I am sick of seeing, e.g., heroin and heroin users presented incorrectly in movies and books. The rotting corpse hidden in a motel mattress is a good analogy of society's attempt to hide heroin addicts from public view. The DEA and other agencies exist to spread propaganda meant to keep them hid; they have no interest in stopping drug use because they know as well as everyone else that this is impossible. 

[hp12c]

Discussing your penis in court doesn’t stay funny for long



On the morning of his 42nd birthday, Stephen Harrell was arrested outside a liquor store on Century Boulevard in Inglewood, handcuffed, and hauled off to face the screwiest charge ever leveled at him in his admittedly checkered career with the criminal justice system. He was accused of concealing four rocks of cocaine in his foreskin. To be more precise, he was accused of wrapping the rocks in individual clear plastic bags, placing them all in another black bag, shoving them halfway up his penis and then keeping them snugly in place for at least an hour between the time of his arrest and the time that three Inglewood cops strip-searched him. The whole package was variously described by the arresting officer as being "bigger than a marble" and having roughly the same diameter as a dime.

Let me point out to those of you unendowed with male genitalia that we are talking about an almost unfathomable world of pain here, not to mention physical elasticity of a truly extraordinary kind. (Those of you with male genitalia have probably crossed your legs already.) Nothing in Harrell's long resume as a petty criminal and drug user suggests he was ever in serious contention for the cast of Puppetry of the Penis. Or, as Harrell himself put it in one of his first interviews with his defense attorney: "I may be big, but I ain't no horse." So far, just a funny story. But it only gets more bizarre on closer examination. The arresting officer, Patrick Manning, claims he saw Harrell drop a crack pipe from his waistband as soon as he became aware of his patrol car. That, at least, was the pretext for the arrest. But Harrell didn't apparently think of dumping the cocaine – assuming he ever had it in the first place. Officer Manning noticed nothing unusual about the way Harrell was walking, and once he had cuffed him and put him in the patrol car he didn't report any wriggling or gasps of pain.

The public defender eventually assigned to Harrell, Eleanor Schneir, had the bright idea of downloading some penis diagrams off the Internet and asked Officer Manning and the two colleagues he took with him into the strip-search room to show the trial jury where exactly the bulge had been. Curiously, each policeman put it in a different place. One said it was at the top, beneath the foreskin proper, while the other two put it further down and to the side. In one diagram the package was almost all the way to the base of the penis – which makes one wonder just how endowed with male genitalia the police officers themselves can have been. Schneir had great fun buying up gourmet gumballs from her local grocery store and waving them at the jury, with a dime taped to the side for size-comparison purposes, just to emphasize the preposterousness of the allegation. She cited no less an authority than Seinfeld to question whether any penis could withstand the cold of the strip-search room without succumbing to the dreaded male problem of shrinkage, which would surely have shaken the incriminating package loose all by itself.

At a certain point, it seemed Harrell was home free, and Schneir was confident enough to berate the prosecution for subjecting him to an embarrassing public spectacle. As she told the jury: "He has to sit here and hear me, his lawyer, his advocate, a woman, argue to a jury of 12 strangers that his penis is too small for this to be possible – what could possibly be more humiliating than that?" Things took an unexpected turn, however, as a batch of photographs of Harrell's genitalia was released to the court and appeared to show that he was circumcised. From Harrell's point of view, this might have looked like a pretty good defense – how, after all, can anyone conceal drugs in their foreskin if they don't have one? In reality, though, the photographs unleashed a furor in the courtroom and changed the terms of the debate entirely. Suddenly, it was not the Inglewood PD whose honesty was under scrutiny but rather Harrell's, as the defendant was accused of yanking his foreskin back for the camera in an attempt to conceal it.

In the single most surreal sequence of the trial, Officer Manning bragged that he knew all about the flexibility of uncircumcised penises because he used to play baseball for the Atlanta Braves (he was a 1999 draft pick later sidelined by a knee injury) and frequently showered with players from Colombia and Central America who not only had foreskins but were frequently "silly" with them. Manning told the prosecutor he saw players pull down their foreskins and dance around for as long as 20 minutes. Schneir wasn't going to let this one go. "I'm a little confused," she said disingenuously. "I was always led to believe that men in showers go to great lengths not to look at each other's penises, and you're telling me you looked for 20 minutes?"

Members of the jury started guffawing. Manning said sheepishly that he hadn't exactly looked for 20 minutes. So Schneir asked him how long he had looked for – 15 minutes, 10 minutes, 5 minutes? Eventually, Manning said he’d looked at one penis for one minute. Schneir deadpanned: "Okay, we're all dying to know: whose penis was it?" For all the courtroom humor, from here on out the trial started slipping out of the grasp of the defense. The deputy district attorney suggested the only way to resolve the circumcision question was to have Harrell re-examined by a medical professional. Harrell told the court he'd had quite enough people looking at his penis and refused. The judge, Deirdre Hill, then instructed the jury that they were free to interpret this refusal as a form of self-incrimination. Schneir tried valiantly to argue that the circumcision question made no difference to the plausibility of the police's story. But the damage was done, and the jury came back with a guilty verdict.

That, of course, is the way so many petty crime cases go. Given the choice between a defendant of dubious character and the testimony of uniformed police officers, juries will almost always side with the police. The Harrell case reflects many of the uglier aspects of law enforcement in Los Angeles: a poor, black, relatively harmless delinquent picked up, handcuffed and stripped by white officers, and lumbered with a serious felony charge for which he has just been sentenced to six years and six months behind bars. Without the allegation of cocaine in his penis, he would have been looking at a misdemeanor and a $100 fine. There is some evidence to suggest that Officer Manning, for one, finds escapades like the apprehension of Stephen Harrell to be a bit of a hoot. Interviewed by a Myrtle Beach, South Carolina newspaper when he first made the leap from baseball to policing, he said patrolling the streets of Inglewood was not entirely unlike competitive sports. "To me, it's almost like a game," he said. "I’ve had a great time so far."

Judge Hill also appears to have taken Harrell less than seriously. At one point during the sentencing phase, when one of the fingerprints from his conviction record failed to match, she ruled that his priors should be disregarded and that he was therefore eligible for drug treatment under the terms of Proposition 36. When the court next convened, however, she simply reversed herself – for reasons possibly connected to the fact that the district attorney's office was in a separate dispute with her and threatening to have her removed from felony cases — and she ended up imposing the maximum sentence. "She’d already told my client she would release him," a frustrated Schneir said. "That seems to me cruel and unusual punishment on some level." Stephen Harrell is now stuck behind bars until 2010 at the earliest – and it's far from clear who is better off for it.