David Lewis, 54, Dies

The Washington Post

Ex-convict pioneered Drug Rehab programs known nationwide

David Lewis, 54, an ex-convict turned social activist who co-founded a substance abuse treatment and prisoner rehabilitation program that gained national recognition, died June 9 of a bullet wound to the abdomen, said his mother, Cora. Mr. Lewis was shot outside a mall in San Mateo, Calif., in what police are calling a targeted attack.

Mr. Lewis started Free at Last in East Palo Alto, Calif., with a Stanford University student in 1992. The organization helps more than 4,200 people annually and has become a model of community-based treatment, said Lara Galinksy of Echoing Green, a nonprofit group that provided seed money to Free at Last.

Born Nov. 23, 1955, in San Francisco, Mr. Lewis was a high school dropout in East Palo Alto who became involved in gangs and drugs. A victim of heroin addiction at 15, he was in prison at 19 and spent most of the next 17 years behind bars.

He was serving time in San Quentin State Prison when the Loma Prieta earthquake hit in 1989. He felt powerless and "vowed to never feel powerless again," Mr. Lewis told the Sacramento Observer in 2003.

Released from prison shortly after the quake, he eventually entered a California drug and alcohol rehabilitation center and joined a black men's support group, Circle of Recovery, that was featured in the 1991 Bill Moyers documentary of the same name.

Mr. Lewis co-founded Free at Last the same year that East Palo Alto recorded the highest murder rate in the nation. The program has been credited with greatly reducing area crime.

He also pioneered a program aimed at East Palo Alto residents who are returning to the community from prison. Run by the local police department, it provides life-skills training and temporary jobs with the California Department of Transportation.

More recently, Mr. Lewis had been working with Pasadena police officials to set up a similar program and had completed projects with New York correctional systems and Michigan drug rehab programs.

In 1994, he received the California Wellness Foundation's Peace Prize for his efforts to treat violence as a preventable health issue.

In addition to his mother, Mr. Lewis is survived by three children and three grandchildren.

Volunteers Canvass East Boston to Fight Drug Abuse

The Boston Globe

Information packets hung from doorknobs of three-deckers up and down Saratoga Street in East Boston as volunteers canvassed the neighborhood yesterday, knocking on some 8,000 doors to distribute substance abuse information and ask residents about the health of their community.

Dr. Barbara Ferrer, director of the Boston Public Health Commission, said the undertaking was the largest single-day campaign to get public health information from any neighborhood in Boston. Mayor Thomas M.

Menino’s office teamed with the public health department to launch the effort after the arrest last month of John M. Forbes, Menino’s East Boston liaison, on charges of dealing prescription painkillers.

“The mayor’s committed to making sure out of this comes real problem-solving and real solutions,’’ Ferrer said.

The information on the hundreds of completed surveys will be compiled and presented at a city-organized community summit in two weeks. The quick turnaround will provide residents with up-to-date information for dealing with substance-abuse issues - the most recent data the BPHC has is from 2007, Ferrer said.

“This is not a one-time thing,’’ she said. “We’re here today to start learning.’’

Bundled up against temperatures in the teens, volunteers Rita Nieves and Haidy Pena worked their way up Faywood Avenue in Orient Heights. They stopped at each house and apartment, taking notes on residents’ concerns. Though the survey was initially designed to cover drug abuse, the volunteers noted everything from trash pickup to flu vaccinations to potholes.

Pena, who lives in Mattapan, said she came out because she wanted to help people struggling with drug problems, no matter where they live.

“If we can do anything to help, give information, save one life, it makes me feel better,’’ Pena said.

East Boston resident Abdel El-Andelesy talked with volunteers outside a coffee shop on Bennington Street. He said he knows the city has resources to help addicts, but the people he sees doing drugs don’t care.

“If we leave these kids taking drugs, it will not go away,’’ he said.

Andelesy, who has two young children, said surveys like this one open up a conversation so the whole community can deal with the issues it faces. “With this, you get my opinion and you get everyone’s opinion so we can talk about it,’’ he said.

Ferrer said face-to-face interaction builds trust and strengthens the community, helping aid the effort to curb drug use through substance abuse treatment.

“It tells people how much we care,’’ she said. “That’s a powerful message, not only for people with substance abuse problems but for people who want to know that we’re here to help.’’

China's Drug Rehab Program: A Punishing Ordeal

NY Times

BEIJING — Fu Lixin, emotionally exhausted from caring for her sick mother, needed a little pick-me-up. A friend offered her a “special cigarette” — one laced with methamphetamine — and Ms. Fu happily inhaled.

The next day, three policemen showed up at her door.

“They asked me to urinate in a cup,” she said. “My friend had been arrested and turned me in. It was a drug test. I failed on the spot.”

Although she said it was her first time smoking meth, Ms. Fu, 41, was promptly sent to one of China’s compulsory drug rehabilitation centers. The minimum stay is two years, and life is an unremitting gantlet of physical abuse and forced labor without any drug treatment, according to former inmates and substance abuse professionals.

“It was a hell I’m still trying to recover from,” she said.

According to the United Nations, as many as a half million Chinese citizens are held at these centers at any given time. Detentions are meted out by the police without trials, judges or appeals. Created in 2008 as part of a reform effort to grapple with the country’s growing narcotics problem, the centers, lawyers and drug experts say, have become de facto penal colonies where inmates are sent to factories and farms, fed substandard food and denied basic medical care.

“They call them detoxification centers, but everyone knows that detox takes a few days, not two years,” said Joseph Amon, an epidemiologist with Human Rights Watch in New York. “The basic concept is inhumane and flawed.”

On Thursday, Human Rights Watch issued a report on the drug rehabilitation system that replaced the Communist Party’s previous approach of sending addicts to labor camps, where they would toil alongside thieves, prostitutes and political dissidents.

The report, titled “Where Darkness Knows No Limits,” calls on the government to immediately shut down the detention centers.

Under the Anti-Drug Law of 2008, drug offenders were to be sent to professionally staffed detox facilities and then released to community-based rehabilitation centers for up to four years of therapeutic follow-up.

But addiction treatment experts say the legislation, part of a stated “people centered” approach to dealing with addiction, has simply given the old system a new name. What is worse, they say, is that it expands the six-month compulsory detentions of old into two-year periods that the authorities can extend by five years.

The “community-based rehabilitation” centers, treatment experts add, have yet to be established.

Wang Xiaoguang, the vice director of Daytop, an American-affiliated drug-treatment residence in Yunnan Province, said the government detox centers were little more than business ventures run by the police. Detainees, he said, spend their days working at chicken farms or shoe factories that have contracts with the local police; drug treatment, counseling and vocational training are almost nonexistent.

“I don’t think this is the ideal situation for people trying to recover from addiction,” Mr. Wang said in a phone interview.

In its report, Human Rights Watch, which largely focused on Yunnan, says the abuses at some of the province’s 114 detention centers are even more troubling. Those with serious illnesses, including tuberculosis and AIDS, are often denied medical treatment. Many inmates reported beatings, some of them fatal.

The Office of National Narcotics Control Commission, which administers China’s drug rehab policy, did not respond to requests for comment on Thursday.

Han Wei, 38, a recovering heroin addict who was released from a Beijing detention center in October, said the guards would use electric prods on the recalcitrant. “At least they’d give us helmets so we wouldn’t injure our heads during convulsions,” he said.

Meals consisted of steamed buns and, occasionally, cabbage-based swill. Showers were allowed once a month. And the remedy for heroin withdrawal symptoms was a pail of cold water in the face. “They didn’t give me a single pill or a bit of counseling,” Mr. Han said.

Despite the deprivations, Mr. Han, a former nightclub owner, said his two-year sentence achieved the desired goal: it persuaded him to kick a habit he began in 1998. “I’m never going back,” he said.

Zhang Wenjun, who runs Guiding Star, an organization that helps recovering addicts, said such determination was most often fleeting. At least 98 percent of those who leave the drug detention system relapse within a few years, he said.

Mr. Zhang knows something about falling off the wagon. His own heroin addiction has landed him in detox centers and labor camps six times since the mid-1990s.

“What the government doesn’t realize is that this is a disease that needs to be treated, not punished,” said Mr. Zhang, 42, a tattooed man who speaks in a growl.

In some ways, he said, the stigma of addiction is as crippling as the lure of the next fix. Those arrested for drug offenses are branded addicts on their national identification cards, which makes applying for jobs and welfare benefits acts of futility. And because the local police are automatically notified when former offenders check into hotels, traveling often involves impromptu urine tests and the possibility of humiliation in front of colleagues.

“In China, to be a drug addict is to be an enemy of the government,” Mr. Zhang said.

Still, he and other substance abuse treatment workers are quick to acknowledge the progress that China has made in recent years. There are now eight methadone clinics in Beijing, serving 2,000 people, and more than 1,000 needle-exchange programs have opened across the country since 2004.

Yu Jingtao, whose organization, Beijing Harm Reduction Group, distributes 30,000 clean needles a month, said the government was slowly moving toward the drug treatment model common in much of the developed world. “We’re just caught in a transition period,” said Mr. Yu, himself a recovering addict. “Transition periods are never very pretty.”

Eminem Turns To Elton John For Substance Abuse Help

Detroit Examiner

Legendary singer/pianist Elton John is an unlikely confidant for oft troubled Detroit rapper Eminem, but Elton John says he's been helping Eminem kick drugs.

"I've been helping Eminem over the last 18 months and he's doing brilliantly," John told BBC Radio, without divulging details. The interview was taped over the holidays and broadcast today.

While John didn't discuss details, and host Danny Baker, did not pry, Eminem's drug problems are common knowledge.

"It's no secret I had a drug problem," Eminem told Vibe magazine, after he entered rehab in 2005 for addiction to sleeping pills before taking a three-year sabbatical.

    If I was to give you a number of Vicodin I would actually take in a day? Anywhere between 10 to 20. Valium, Ambien ... the numbers got so high I don't even know what I was taking.

When the rapper decided it was time to get help, he called Elton for support.

    He had a substance-abuse problem in the past. So when I first wanted to get sober, I called him, because he's somebody in the business who can relate to the lifestyle and how hectic things can be. He understands, like, the pressure and any other reasons that you wanna come up with for doing drugs.

Sir Elton John is no stranger to drug and alcohol abuse after his own battle with drugs and booze earlier in his legendary career. "To be honest with you, I don't know how I survived," John confessed. He acknowledges the problem is as rampant as it ever was.

    When you give it up, you tend to think everybody else has given it up, but of course it is just as prevalent as it ever was. And nowadays pills, such as downers, are even more damaging.

John has counseled other celebrity friends concerning substance abuse treatment over the years, including the late Michael Jackson, but says he doesn't force his advice on anyone. "I'm there if people want my help,"

"If people ask for help, you tell them where to go, but there's no point advising people if they don't want to do it."

Not everybody is interested in help or counsel. John has tried to help singer George Michael in the past only to be rebuffed. Elton holds no ill will though saying, "People used to tell me 'Oh, for Godsake, clean your act up." And I didn't want to know. I didn't want anyone's help. I used to get annoyed."

You can watch the entire interview here. (The Eminem conversation is at approximately 18-19 minutes in).

At the 2001 Grammy Awards, John and Eminem performed a memorable duet of the hip-hop star's hit song, "Stan." At the time, Eminem was under fire from gay rights groups because of his lyrics, but he later said he didn't know John was gay when he asked him to sing with him.

L.A. Gangs Seek Profit In Peace

The Wall Street Journal

LOS ANGELES -- After nearly two decades fighting gangs, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Detective Robert Lyons thought he had seen it all. Until he saw members of the Bloods and the Crips -- rival gangs that spent years in brutal conflict -- meeting amiably in a restaurant.

"They were talking. There was hugging and high-fiving. It was unbelievable," Mr. Lyons said. He has heard a refrain from gang members: Red (the Bloods) and blue (the Crips) make green (money).

Gangs that were once bloody rivals now are cooperating to wring profits from the sale of illegal drugs and weapons, law-enforcement officials and gang experts say. In some cases, gangs that investigators believed to be sworn enemies share neighborhoods and strike business deals. The collaboration even crosses racial lines, remarkable in a gang world where racial divisions are sharp and clashes are often racially motivated.

"You see African-Americans dealing with Hispanics on obtaining narcotics and weapons. We're seeing Hispanic gang members involved with the Eastern European criminal figures," said Robert W. Clark, acting special agent in charge of the criminal division of the Los Angeles field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. "Where they see opportunities to collaborate, they do."

Gang activity has been one of the most intractable crime problems facing Southern California for decades, terrorizing communities, claiming hundreds of lives a year in some periods and also breeding a nexus of criminal activity that has been exported to other communities. Los Angeles, along with Chicago, has long been considered one of the centers of gang activity in the U.S.

But gang-related violence is at a 30-year low in Los Angeles, according to experts. Gang-related homicides in Los Angeles totaled 128 in through October of this year, compared with 312 in all of 2002. All reported gang-related crimes, including rape, assault and robberies, totaled 4,899 through October, compared with 7,432 in 2002.

The sharp drop is undoubtedly a landmark success for law-enforcement officials and policy makers, who have used aggressive policing and rehabilitation programs to tackle the problem. But the reports of alliances between formerly warring gangs potentially offers a different explanation: Gangs are committing less violence because they are partnering on criminal activity, creating new challenges for law enforcement.

"Now, instead of having 200 guys that are arch-enemies with 200 other guys, you have 400 guys working together against law enforcement," said the sheriff's detective, Mr. Lyons.

There are still plenty of rivalries and violence. One Los Angeles-area Latino gang, Barrio Hawaiian Gardens, was charged this spring with hate crimes against African-Americans -- including targeted shootings.

Tracking the number of gang members is notoriously tricky, and membership is fluid. But a November report from the California Gang Node Advisory Committee, which attempts to track gang membership, put the number of gang members at 85,832 in Los Angeles County, up slightly from recent years.

And the number of gang members has been on the upswing nationally. There were about one million gang members in the U.S. in 2008, up from 800,000 in 2005, according to the National Gang Threat Assessment, compiled by the National Gang Intelligence Center and the National Drug Intelligence Center.

Some regions of the country -- like New England, with 640 gangs -- are seeing an increase in violence and substance abuse as gangs grow and fight for control of neighborhoods and the drug trade, the report said. But there is cohesion in other regions, like Washington and Oregon, where "alliances between gangs may result in the expansion of criminal networks and increased criminal activity in the Northwest Region," the report says.

In Los Angeles, federal and local law-enforcement agencies have launched massive investigations and raids against gangs. In 2009, law-enforcement officials arrested more than 650 gang members in Southern California, according to the FBI.

City officials also credit gang-prevention and rehabilitation programs for the drop in crime. Gang intervention workers -- often former gang members -- work alongside police to prevent retaliatory shootings. Homeboy Industries, a privately funded gang-rehabilitation program in Los Angeles, serves around 12,000 people a year who have left gangs, providing job training, counseling and laser tattoo removal. And the mayor's office has sponsored activities like basketball games and picnics among neighborhoods that are home to feuding gangs.

But intensifying pressure from police has also prompted gangs to work together, said Jorja Leap, a University of California, Los Angeles professor and gang expert. "They really are united against what they perceive to be a common enemy -- law enforcement," said Ms. Leap, who now advises Los Angeles County Sheriff Leroy Baca on gangs.

Ms. Leap said gangs form links to survive -- and to maximize profits. "The market is tougher and they're consolidating," she said.

Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck said gangs are "treating their activities more like businesses than before. In business, you work with whoever you have to."

This collaboration can make tracking gang crime and dismantling gangs more complicated. Members of street gangs are showing up unexpectedly in health-care and credit-card fraud investigations, which have traditionally been run by Eastern European crime rings.

During a two-year investigation of the Athens Park Bloods, an African-American gang entrenched in south Los Angeles, investigators learned the members had formed a pact with a Hispanic gang called Barrio 13. Eventually, 22 people were charged -- 20 African-Americans and two Hispanics.

"They shared the same guns, the same narcotics, the same neighborhood," said Mr. Lyons, the sheriff's detective.

Adolescents More Prone To Substance Abuse

Hindustan Times

A study into why teens become addicted to smoking more easily than adults and why adolescents are more prone to substance abuse has been carried out.

In an evaluation for Faculty of 1000 Biology, Neil Grunberg described the study, as “fascinating” and suggested it “may have implications to help understand why adolescents are particularly prone to drug abuse”.

The study looked at dopamine levels in adolescent and adult rats after nicotine withdrawal. Nicotine increases the level of dopamine in the brain, a neurotransmitter that is responsible for feelings of pleasure and well being.

The authors found that the withdrawal signs (physical and neurochemical) seen in adolescent rats were fewer than those observed in adults.

The study provided previously unknown mechanisms as to why there are differences in nicotine withdrawal between adolescent and adult rats.

The key here, Grunberg stated, is “age alters [neurological] systems and interactions relevant to nicotine”.

The reason that adolescents are prone to drug abuse (in this case, nicotine) is that they have increased sensitivity to its rewarding effects and do not display the same negative withdrawal effects as adults do, due to an underdeveloped dopamine-producing system.

Grunberg said since rats are not subject to cultural influences, “rat studies of nicotine ... have provided valuable insights that have led to practical behavioural and pharmacological interventions”.

“These findings might also be relevant to other addictive drugs and possible substance abuse treatment programs,” he added.

The study has been published by Natividad et al. in Synapse journal.