Yesternow: Editor’s Note Volume Seven
3 hours ago
Friday, 14 October 2011
How to use a pill wheel filter
Solid material and impurities can cause vein damage. This risk can be reduced by using a wheel filter after dissolving the drug. Using the right wheel filter can also filter out bacteria and lessen the chances of infection.
Via
When these pill filters first hit the scene down in Frankston when I was living there a number of years ago, there was anecdotal evidence that they were making people sick. It turned out that people were re-using them allowing bacteria to grow between hits. They are of course a single use device and are of the utmost importance if people are going to shoot up pills such as Bupe.
They are available at a small cost at your local needle exchange here in Australia.
Via
When these pill filters first hit the scene down in Frankston when I was living there a number of years ago, there was anecdotal evidence that they were making people sick. It turned out that people were re-using them allowing bacteria to grow between hits. They are of course a single use device and are of the utmost importance if people are going to shoot up pills such as Bupe.
They are available at a small cost at your local needle exchange here in Australia.
Running the Risk: Syringe Exchange in the South
Sara (alias) is a 35-year-old woman attending school for a Master’s in Public Health, but she has an unusual side job: running an underground syringe exchange program (SEP) in North Carolina. SEPs provide sterile syringes to drug users, diabetics, transgender people and any individual who uses syringes for medical issues, in exchange for used syringes which may potentially be contaminated with HIV or hepatitis. Sara was recently jailed for possession of a syringe inside a biohazard container, which she'd collected from a drug user in order to dispose of it safely. North Carolina laws against syringe possession make even a good act such as cleaning dirty needles out of our communities illegal. But Sara continues to put herself at risk to protect others from diseases that can be transferred from used syringes, such as HIV and hepatitis C.
“When I was 28 I got an MRSA staph infection from re-using my own syringes,” says Sara. “I was a heroin addict at the time, so I was afraid to see a doctor. By the time I checked into the hospital the infection was pretty bad. The doctors told me I had hepatitis C and a staph infection, but they didn’t explain what that meant. I was terrified and confused.”
As Sara later learned, hepatitis C is an inflammation of the liver transmitted through blood contact, such as shared syringes, crack/meth pipes, cookers, drug filters, sex, tattoos, piercings or shared toiletries. Sara was lucky; she was treated with interferon drugs and the virus went into remission after a year of treatment. Many people however, cannot get treated for hepatitis C due to the cost of treatment, not being able to deal with the treatment’s side effects, or not responding to the treatment, which may lead to liver cancer, liver failure and death. This is a serious problem, since according to the world hepatitis alliance, 1 in 12 people has hepatitis B or C.
In 2008 Sara connected with the North Carolina Harm Reduction Coalition (www.nchrc.net) and learned to help protect herself and others from hepatitis C by using sterile drug equipment and condoms. Within NCHRC, Sara found people who cared about her as a person rather than a criminal, and didn’t force her to quit her addiction before she was ready. Sara decided to operate an underground SEP to help protect others against blood borne diseases.
“There’s also a lot of misinformation about hepatitis C,” says Sara. “People think that if they sleep with someone, they might as well shoot with that person too. They don’t realize that hepatitis C is spread through more easily through shared syringes and injection supplies than through sex.”
Through the SEP, Sara provides sterile syringes, cookers, cottons, tourniquets, sterile water and bleach kits to injection users, as well as spark plugs to crack smokers to put on top of their pipes to prevent blood exposures. As HIV and hepatitis can be spread through re-using any drug equipment, she teaches drug users use new equipment for each drug-using even or to sterilize the equipment they use, not just syringes. This is because hepatitis and HIV can live in drug cookers, drug filters (such as cotton), shared sterile water and tourniquets. Sara connects with new clients through word of mouth and a network of drug dealers and she gives sterile equipment and information to current drug users. She even saves lives by providing drug users with naloxone, a drug that blocks opiates to the brain and stops drug overdose. This is important in North Carolina since drug overdose is the number four killer of people aged 18-49.
It’s dangerous to run a syringe exchange program in North Carolina,” says Sara, “but I do it because I want to help others avoid the fear and confusion I experienced in the hospital and prevent them from getting exposed to life threatening diseases.”
Until North Carolina decriminalizes syringes, Sara and others will continue to put themselves at risk to help others. If you’d like to help, please contact your legislators and let them know you support syringe decriminalization legislation.
NC Harm Reduction Coalition @'Daily Kos'
“When I was 28 I got an MRSA staph infection from re-using my own syringes,” says Sara. “I was a heroin addict at the time, so I was afraid to see a doctor. By the time I checked into the hospital the infection was pretty bad. The doctors told me I had hepatitis C and a staph infection, but they didn’t explain what that meant. I was terrified and confused.”
As Sara later learned, hepatitis C is an inflammation of the liver transmitted through blood contact, such as shared syringes, crack/meth pipes, cookers, drug filters, sex, tattoos, piercings or shared toiletries. Sara was lucky; she was treated with interferon drugs and the virus went into remission after a year of treatment. Many people however, cannot get treated for hepatitis C due to the cost of treatment, not being able to deal with the treatment’s side effects, or not responding to the treatment, which may lead to liver cancer, liver failure and death. This is a serious problem, since according to the world hepatitis alliance, 1 in 12 people has hepatitis B or C.
In 2008 Sara connected with the North Carolina Harm Reduction Coalition (www.nchrc.net) and learned to help protect herself and others from hepatitis C by using sterile drug equipment and condoms. Within NCHRC, Sara found people who cared about her as a person rather than a criminal, and didn’t force her to quit her addiction before she was ready. Sara decided to operate an underground SEP to help protect others against blood borne diseases.
“There’s also a lot of misinformation about hepatitis C,” says Sara. “People think that if they sleep with someone, they might as well shoot with that person too. They don’t realize that hepatitis C is spread through more easily through shared syringes and injection supplies than through sex.”
Through the SEP, Sara provides sterile syringes, cookers, cottons, tourniquets, sterile water and bleach kits to injection users, as well as spark plugs to crack smokers to put on top of their pipes to prevent blood exposures. As HIV and hepatitis can be spread through re-using any drug equipment, she teaches drug users use new equipment for each drug-using even or to sterilize the equipment they use, not just syringes. This is because hepatitis and HIV can live in drug cookers, drug filters (such as cotton), shared sterile water and tourniquets. Sara connects with new clients through word of mouth and a network of drug dealers and she gives sterile equipment and information to current drug users. She even saves lives by providing drug users with naloxone, a drug that blocks opiates to the brain and stops drug overdose. This is important in North Carolina since drug overdose is the number four killer of people aged 18-49.
It’s dangerous to run a syringe exchange program in North Carolina,” says Sara, “but I do it because I want to help others avoid the fear and confusion I experienced in the hospital and prevent them from getting exposed to life threatening diseases.”
Until North Carolina decriminalizes syringes, Sara and others will continue to put themselves at risk to help others. If you’d like to help, please contact your legislators and let them know you support syringe decriminalization legislation.
NC Harm Reduction Coalition @'Daily Kos'
The Banks Are Made of Marble
Over the weekend, a CBS News blogger covering the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations happened on someone singing “The Banks are Made of Marble,” a tune Pete Seeger and The Weavers covered.
This simple little song — which so nicely captures the spirit of the music the Weavers, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie made — is everywhere in this movement. Maybe Occupy Wall Street will bring about a resurgence of simple little songs like this — songs that tell the truth about people’s lives, songs that everybody can sing.
And maybe that’s why the story of the 1913 Massacre resonates more powerfully now than ever before. For Woody, what happened at Italian Hall in 1913 was a story about what was happening in America in the 1930s and 1940s, a story about “greed for money” and the destruction it leaves in its wake.
And greed is what the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations are all about: it’s almost as if these protests are the long-awaited answer to Gordon Gekko’s infamous “Greed is good.”
The connections are there, waiting to be made; it’s 1913 or 1937 or 1941 all over again. That’s why for Arlo Guthrie, the Italian Hall disaster as captured in Woody’s song is almost an archetypal event, or at least an event that helps us (still) understand “who we are and where we came from”; it gains and gathers meaning, tying past to present. As he says at one point in the film:
@'1913 Massacre'
The banks are made of marbleThis was an encore performance, of sorts: Peter Yarrow (of Peter Paul and Mary fame) sang the tune for the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators last weekend. People have been tweeting links to the song on YouTube; they were singing the song at Occupy Cincinnati.
With a guard at every door
And the vaults are stuffed with silver
That the miner sweated for…
This simple little song — which so nicely captures the spirit of the music the Weavers, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie made — is everywhere in this movement. Maybe Occupy Wall Street will bring about a resurgence of simple little songs like this — songs that tell the truth about people’s lives, songs that everybody can sing.
And maybe that’s why the story of the 1913 Massacre resonates more powerfully now than ever before. For Woody, what happened at Italian Hall in 1913 was a story about what was happening in America in the 1930s and 1940s, a story about “greed for money” and the destruction it leaves in its wake.
And greed is what the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations are all about: it’s almost as if these protests are the long-awaited answer to Gordon Gekko’s infamous “Greed is good.”
The connections are there, waiting to be made; it’s 1913 or 1937 or 1941 all over again. That’s why for Arlo Guthrie, the Italian Hall disaster as captured in Woody’s song is almost an archetypal event, or at least an event that helps us (still) understand “who we are and where we came from”; it gains and gathers meaning, tying past to present. As he says at one point in the film:
These events are like stones in a pond that have waves that go way into the future. This is where I think my dad was at his best: thinking about these things, wondering about them.The story of what happened in Calumet is not just a story about what happened in 1913. That’s a very important story, because it left an indelible mark on many people’s lives, on a whole town, on the country. But as many people have said to us after watching the film, the real “massacre” in the town and in people’s lives seems to have taken place — or continued — long after the 1913 event. And now, it appears, the event is still unfolding, 100 years after the fact.
@'1913 Massacre'
Inside Obama's War Room
President Barack Obama and Vice President JoeBiden attend a meeting on Libya in the Situation Room of the White House. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
On the afternoon of monday, March 14th, the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy stood nervously in the lounge of Le Bourget Airport on the outskirts of Paris, waiting for a private jet carrying a lone Libyan rebel to land. At 62, Lévy is one of France's most famous writers and provocateurs, a regular fixture in the tabloids, where he's known simply as BHL. He rarely goes a month without controversy – whether defending the reputations of accused sex offenders like Roman Polanski and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, or waging one-man foreign-policy campaigns that usually end in failure. In 1993, he tried unsuccessfully to persuade President François Mitterrand to intervene in the Balkans. In 2001, he personally arranged for Afghan leader Ahmed Shah Massoud to meet with President Jacques Chirac, only to have the French Foreign Ministry scuttle the trip for fear of angering the Taliban. Now, as he anxiously paced the airport lounge, he was embarking on what would turn out to be one of the most audacious and improbable feats of amateur diplomacy in modern history.Wearing his trademark outfit – designer suit, no tie, white shirt unbuttoned to reveal a deeply tanned chest – Lévy was waiting for the arrival of Mahmoud Jibril, the leader of the Libyan rebels who had been fighting for three weeks to overthrow Muammar Qaddafi. Lévy had secretly helped arrange for a meeting in Paris later that day between Jibril and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Prodded by Lévy, France had granted formal recognition to the Libyan opposition, known as the National Transitional Council. But no other European country had followed France's lead, and the uprising now appeared in danger of being crushed by Qaddafi, who had just launched an all-out military counteroffensive. Both Lévy and Jibril believed that getting the support of the Americans was the rebels' last hope. "If he doesn't succeed with Clinton," Lévy thought, "all we achieved in France this past week will have been for nothing."
But the meeting with Clinton had already run into a serious snag. Jibril, a 58-year-old political scientist who once taught at the University of Pittsburgh, had been detained at customs. Though he had been received in the Élysée Palace only days before for a meeting Lévy had arranged with President Nicolas Sarkozy, Jibril did not have official clearance to re-enter France. As the hours ticked away, the 5 p.m. time slot for the meeting with Clinton came and went. Lévy scrambled to reschedule. "At six she had a meeting with Sarkozy, at eight was a dinner or something with the G8," he told me recently in St. Paul de Vence, his home in the south of France. "It was very complicated." The consequences of the delay, he feared, could be catastrophic.
After Jibril finally cleared customs, Lévy succeeded in getting Clinton's last free moment of the night before she flew on to Cairo – 10 p.m. in her hotel suite. Lévy and Jibril took a black Mercedes sedan from the Raphael, the luxury hotel in Paris where Lévy lives when in the city, to the Westin, where Clinton was staying.
Forty-five minutes later, Jibril emerged from the meeting. "He goes out furious, he goes out fuming," Lévy recalls. "He was convinced he had failed." Coached by Lévy, Jibril had urged Clinton to support a no-fly zone, arm the rebels and launch attacks on Qaddafi's army. If the U.S. failed to intervene, he warned, there would be mass killings, just as there had been after Bill Clinton failed to take action in Rwanda and the Balkans in the 1990s. But Hillary appeared unmoved by the plea, and Jibril was distraught. To avoid reporters who were traveling with Clinton, Jibril left the hotel through a back entrance.
Lévy and Jibril returned to the Raphael. At 1 a.m., they sat down to write a press release – a desperate call for support that was, Lévy says, "implicitly addressed to the Americans." "Friends around the world!" it implored, "Libya's freedom is in danger of death – come to our rescue... Don't let the Arab Spring die in Benghazi." They finished an hour later, but decided to hold off until morning before hitting SEND. Jibril was scheduled to fly back to Qatar, where the National Transitional Council had set up a base of operations. "Then we waited," Lévy told me. What, he wondered before going to sleep that night, would President Obama do...?
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Michael Hastings @'Rolling Stone'
EdwynCollins Edwyn Collins
Here's @vic_godard 's bio : Vic Godard is a vocalist, Subway Sect front man, songwriter & postman. Add: genius.
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