Oregon voters approved a ballot measure in 2020 to decriminalize hard drugs after being told it was a way to establish and fund addiction recovery centers that would offer people aid instead of incarceration.
Yet in the first year after the new approach took effect in February 2021, only 1% of people who received citations for possessing controlled substances asked for help via a new hotline.
With Oregon being the first state in America to decriminalize possession of personal-use amounts of heroin, methamphetamine, LSD, oxycodone and other drugs, its program is being watched as a potential model for other states.
Some are questioning whether the approach is proving too lenient, but others say the new system has already had a positive impact by redirecting millions of dollars into facilities to help those with drug dependency issues. The funds come from taxes generated by Oregon’s legal marijuana industry and savings from reductions in arrests, jail time and probation supervision.
Under Ballot Measure 110, possession of controlled substances is now a newly created Class E “violation,” instead of a felony or misdemeanor. It carries a maximum $100 fine, which can be waived if the person calls a hotline for a health assessment. The call can lead to addiction counseling and other services.
But out of roughly 2,000 citations issued by police in the year after decriminalization took effect, only 92 of the people who received them called the hotline by mid-February. And only 19 requested resources for services, said William Nunemann of Lines for Life, which runs the hotline.
Almost half of those who got citations failed to show up in court.
State health officials have reported 473 unintentional opioid overdose deaths from January to August 2021, the most recent month for which statistics are available, with the vast majority of those occurring after decriminalization took effect. That narrowly surpasses the total for all of 2020, and is nearly 200 deaths more than the state saw in all of 2019. The state reports that opioid overdose visits to emergency rooms and urgent care centers have also been on the rise.
The Oregon Health Authority cites as possible reasons the greater presence of fentanyl, which has increased overdose deaths across the country, as well as a downturn in reporting during the pandemic in 2020.
Sen. Floyd Prozanski, chair of the Oregon Senate’s Judiciary and Ballot Measure 110 Implementation Committee, said he’s surprised more of those ticketed weren’t taking advantage of the recovery options. Still, he believes it’s too early to judge how the new approach is going.
“It’s a different model, at least for the U.S.,” Prozanski said, adding he’d want to wait at least another half-year before considering whether steps should be introduced to compel people to seek treatment.
Decriminalization advocates argued putting drug users in jail and giving them criminal records, which harms job and housing prospects, was not working.
“Punishing people and these punitive actions, all it does is saddle them with barriers and more stigma and more shame,” said Tera Hurst, executive director of Oregon Health Justice Recovery Alliance, which represents more than 75 community-based organizations and is focused on implementing Measure 110.
The Drug Policy Alliance spearheaded Oregon’s ballot measure. With no U.S. states to serve as examples, the New York-based group, which calls itself the leading organization in the U.S. promoting alternatives to the war on drugs, studied Portugal, which decriminalized drug possession in 2000.
Portugal’s approach is more vigorous than Oregon’s in getting people to treatment.
There, “dissuasion commissions” pressure anyone caught using drugs — even marijuana — to seek treatment. Those pressure points include fines, prohibiting drug users from visiting certain venues or from traveling abroad, seizure of personal property, community work and having to periodically report to health services or other places.
Drug Policy Alliance intentionally sought an approach that did not compel people to seek treatment, said spokesperson Matt Sutton.
“We have seen that when people voluntarily access services when they are ready, they have much more successful outcomes,” Sutton said.
Some 16,000 people accessed services through the ballot measure’s “Access to Care” grants in the first year of decriminalization, according to the Oregon Health Authority.
Most — 60% — accessed “harm reduction services,” like syringe exchanges and overdose medications, the health authority said. Another 15% were assisted with housing needs and 12% obtained peer support. Only 0.85% entered treatment.
Critics say that’s simply not enough.
“The Oregon ballot initiative was presented to the public as pro-treatment but it has been a complete failure in that regard,” said Keith Humphreys, an addiction researcher and professor of psychiatry at Stanford University and former senior adviser in the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Brian Pacheco of the Drug Policy Alliance, though, said people with drug problems need a range of options, including harm reduction services, housing assistance, peer support and, for those who can’t get insurance or Medicaid, access to treatment centers.
“Measure 110 funding has strengthened organizations in myriad ways, including getting mobile vehicles to provide services in communities, helped programs keep their doors open, and aided other organizations to purchase and distribute Naloxone (which reverses opioid overdose),” Pacheco said in an email.
The $31 million in grants distributed so far paid for thousands of doses of naloxone, thousands of syringe exchanges, recovery housing, vehicles and the hiring of dozens of staffers for care centers, including recovery mentors, according to the health authority.
An example of where some of the money is going is Great Circle, a nonresidential treatment center in Salem owned by the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, which was awarded a $590,055 grant.
On a recent day, two Salem police officers checked on a homeless woman who had been assaulted days earlier. Still bearing a black eye, she confided she had a drug problem and needed help. Police Lt. Treven Upkes called Great Circle to see if they could help. Bring her right over, he was told.
“Just the fact that they had an open door for us at the moment that someone was saying they were ready for help, that’s such an incredible step for us,” Upkes said. “That’s the kind of thing that we would hope comes out of Measure 110.”
If the response had been to schedule an appointment two weeks down the road, Upkes noted he might have been unable to reconnect with the woman.
At Great Circle, a staff doctor and nurses check a person’s vital signs and do a urinalysis with an in-house lab. A nurse dispenses doses of methadone, which can relieve terrible “dope sick” symptoms a person in opioid withdrawal experiences.
Peer specialists like Nick Mull describe their own life experiences to those with substance abuse disorders, and inspire them. Mull’s parents were addicts and he fell into drug use himself at a young age.
“About six years ago, I got in some trouble and ... I started to want to change my life,” said Mull, wearing a black hoodie and jeans. “So I just started doing treatment, more treatment and more treatment. I learned a lot.”
Jennifer Worth, Great Circle’s operations director, said Mull plays an important role.
“What Nick brings to the work is a sense of hope,” Worth said. “And the patients who are struggling with where he was can see that hope is possible.”
But with so few people seeking help after receiving citations, the Legislature might need to consider requiring they do more than call a hotline or pay a small fine, Prozanski said.
Humphreys believes people should be pressured to seek treatment if they’re committing crimes like shoplifting and burglary, but not if they’re simply using drugs.
“It’s about the threats to public safety that some people pose because of their problematic drug use,” Humphreys said. “And in those cases, pressuring people to seek treatment is absolutely legitimate.”
Oregon Secretary of State Shemia Fagan’s office will be auditing Oregon’s program. Fagan said she has a personal interest: Her own mother had a lifelong battle with addiction and homelessness.
https://apnews.com/article/health-business-europe-oregon-salem-158728e57e1d48bc957c5b907bcda5f5
by Mark Tapscott via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
A National Institutes for Health (NIH) spokesperson is disputing a non-profit watchdog group’s claim that the agency “deleted” genetic sequencing data on Covid-19 from a Chinese lab, but the same official acknowledged the data was “suppressed.”
“The headline says the sequences were deleted which is inaccurate. They were not deleted. This is a really important point, and I’ve highlighted what did happen from what we provided to you earlier this week,” NIH Media Branch Chief Amanda Fine told The Epoch Times in a March 31 email.
Fine was referring to a March 29 Epoch Times story headlined “NIH Deleted Info Received From Wuhan Lab on Covid-19 Genetic Sequencing, Watchdog’s FOIA Finds.” The information Fine referenced as having been provided to The Epoch Times by NIH earlier in the week was included in the published story:
“’In June 2020, in response to a request by the same [Wuhan] researcher, National Center for Biotechnology [NCBI] gave the sequence data the status of ‘withdrawn,’ which removes sequencing data from all public means of access but does not delete them.
“NCBI subsequently reassigned the status of the sequence data to ‘suppressed,’ which means that sequence data are removed from the search process but can be directly found by accession number. This action to reassign the data was identified as part of NLM’s ongoing review into the matter. We are working to make more information available,” the spokesperson said.
The biotechnology center, which is part of the institute’s National Library of Medicine (NLM), is the U.S. component of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration.
The Epoch Times story was prompted by a report published on March 29 by Empower Oversight Whistleblowers and Research (EO) that was based on Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) responses the group received from the institute.
The non-profit reported that “on June 5, 2020, a Wuhan University researcher requested that NIH retract the researcher’s submission of BioProject ID PRJNA637497 because of error. The Wuhan researcher explained ‘I’m sorry for my wrong submitting,'” Empower Oversight said in a statement (pdf) on March 29.
“BioProject ID PRJNA637497 is also referred to as Submission-ID SUB7554642. Three days later, on June 8th, the NIH declined the researcher’s request, advising that it prefers to edit or replace, as opposed to delete, sequences submitted to the SRA,” EO reported. SRA refers to the Sequence Read Archive (SRA) data resource made available by NCBI, and it “stores raw sequencing data.”
“But then, on June 16, 2020, NIH officials reversed themselves and deleted the genetic sequencing data, as requested by the Wuhan researcher. That researcher was quoted by EO as explaining to NIH: ‘Recently, I found that it’s hard to visit my submitted SRA data, and it would also be very difficult for me to update the data. I have submitted an updated version of this SRA data to another website, so I want to withdraw the old one at NCBI in order to avoid the data version issue.’
“After some discussion about what would be deleted, the NIH concluded the discussion by reassuring the Wuhan researcher that it ‘had withdrawn everything.’”
Asked for a response to Fine’s claim the information was not deleted, EO Founder and President Jason Foster told The Epoch Times that NIH’s actions ensure the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus genetic sequencing info is only available to the few individuals possessing its “accession number,” which effectively deletes the data from open access and research.
“NIH documents released with Empower Oversight’s report demonstrate that the sequencing data was deleted from public view by the NIH at the request of the Wuhan researcher,” Foster said.
“Our report also details emails between Professor Jesse Bloom and the NIH’s Steve Sherry from October 2021 that clearly indicate NIH retained copies ‘for archival purposes.’ Yet, the emails demonstrate that NIH refused to share that data in an open, transparent scientific process sought by Professor Bloom,” Foster continued.
“The NIH should make more information available about each and every time it reassigned the status of sequence data and any information potentially relevant to the origins of COVID-19 should be made available for scientific inquiry,” he said.
Fine did not respond when The Epoch Times asked who “has access to all of the genetic sequencing information provided by the Wuhan researcher and which was requested by that researcher to be removed.”
The Epoch Times also asked that because “NIH must know who in fact has accessed the data … who did so and when since the Wuhan researcher requested the information’s removal?”
Local authorities' initial plans for a nine-day staggered lockdown in Shanghai have already been dashed, as we reported earlier that the entire city is now under some level of lockdown, despite authorities' promises that the eastern half of the city would see restrictions eased on Friday. And while the CCP scrambles to bring more hospital capacity online to treat the desperately ill (including primarily those who are suffering from non-COVID maladies), locals are complaining that authorities have resorted to separating sick children from their parents in the name of the lockdown.
Parents who brought their children in for treatment have seen them taken by authorities and moved to official quarantine facilities, often leaving families in the dark about their childrens' condition. When both parent and child have tested positive, doctors have used threats to browbeat families into compliance. in some cases, children as young as 3 months old have reportedly been separated from their breast-feeding mothers.
Reuters shared the story of Esther Zhao, a woman who was separated from her 2.5-year-old daughter in Shanghai after the girl came down with a fever.
Esther Zhao thought she was doing the right thing when she brought her 2-1/2-year-old daughter to a Shanghai hospital with a fever on March 26.
Three days later, Zhao was begging health authorities not to separate them after she and the little girl both tested positive for Covid, saying her daughter was too young to be taken away to a quarantine centre for children.
Doctors then threatened Zhao that her daughter would be left at the hospital, while she was sent to the centre, if she did not agree to transfer the girl to the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center in the city's Jinshan district.
Despite pleading with doctors for information, parents are often left in the dark, offered few - if any - updates about their child's status.
Since then she has had only one brief message that her daughter was fine, sent through a group chat with doctors, despite repeated pleas for information from Zhao and her husband, who is in a separate quarantine site after also testing positive.
"There have been no photos at all...I'm so anxious, I have no idea what situation my daughter is in," she said on Saturday through tears, while still stuck at the hospital she went to last week. The doctor said Shanghai rules is that children must be sent to designated points, adults to quarantine centres and you're not allowed to accompany the children.
Making matters worse, images of crying children who had been separated from their parents went viral on Chinese social media, filling Zhao with feelings of dread. The photos and videos posted on China's Weibo and Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) social media platforms depicted wailing babies, crowded three to a cot. In one video, a clearly distressed toddler crawled out of a room with four child-sized beds pushed to one side of the wall. Few adults could be seen. While Reuters wasn't able to independently verify the videos, a sources familiar with the facility confirmed their authenticity, and also confirmed that the facility is situated in at the Jinshan District of Shanghai.
While most of these posts had been deleted by the authorities by Saturday, thousands of comments and complaints remained on the sites.
Some of the videos have survived on American social media.
The separation policy is the latest controversy to elicit widespread outrage across Shanghai. It comes after authorities were caught lying about the number of deaths in the city's nursing homes.
The big question now: will this be enough to derail the political career of Li Qiang, the Communist Party secretary of Shanghai and an important ally of President Xi? Li is (or rather, was) expected to be elevated to the Politburo Standing Committee, China's most powerful policy-setting body during the National Party Congress later this year.
But considering the number of local officials who have been sacked for their failure to contain local outbreaks, it's not outside the realm of possibility that Li could be next.
The future of CAR-T cell therapy research has come a long way over the years, but scientists have still been plagued by one problem: how to cut down on the timeframe, which typically takes between 9 and 14 days.
Except now. Researchers at Penn say that they have shortened the process, enhancing anti-tumor potency in just 24 hours. The preclinical study, carried out by researchers Michael Milone and Saba Ghassemi, has been published in Nature Biomedical Engineering. The results show the potential for a stark reduction of time, materials and labor that’s required to make CAR-T cells, which could be the most beneficial for those who are experiencing rapidly-progressing disease in environments with limited resources.
“In mouse xenograft models of human leukaemias, the rapidly generated non-activated CAR-T cells exhibited higher anti-leukaemic in vivo activity per cell than the corresponding activated CAR-T cells produced using the standard protocol,” the article says. “The rapid manufacturing of CAR-T cells may reduce production costs and broaden their applicability.”
The research builds upon work from 2018 that found a reduction in traditional manufacturing to just three days, Milone said in a statement. The group hopes that this will cut down the cost of the process, as well as the timeframe.
“While traditional manufacturing approaches used to create CAR-T cells that take several days to weeks continue to work for patients with ‘liquid’ cancers such as leukemia, there is still a significant need to reduce the time and cost of producing these complex therapies,” he said.
The trick lies in the quality of the CAR-T cells, rather than the quantity, the team said. When removed from the body too long, T cells can lose the ability to replicate. That makes it less effective as a living drug, which is something the team at Penn set out to solve when starting its research. Research showed that smaller numbers of higher-quality cells generated without a lot of expansion outside the body perform better than a higher number of cells that were expanded outside the body before being returned to the patients.
Traditional manufacturing calls for T cells to be activated to replicate and expand in number. To work around this, Penn’s researchers originally used lentiviral vectors that come from the HIV virus to deliver the CAR gene to T cells. But the process wasn’t efficient, and so scientists worked to find a way to deliver the genes directly to non-activated T cells isolated from the blood. This sped up the process, and dually, did not allow patients to be infected with HIV during the process. The study can set up more research about how engineered CAR-T cells can work in patients with specific cancers. Some of the tech involved in the study has been licensed to Novartis, the release said.
“Not only might it improve the production capacity of centralized manufacturing facilities, but if simple and consistent enough, it might be possible to produce these therapies locally near the patient,” Ghassemi said in a statement. “Which could be tantamount to addressing the many logistical challenges that impede delivery of this effective therapy especially in resource-poor environments.”
Ghassemi does not have a background in biology, Milone said in a call Wednesday. But after a collaboration with Columbia, where she got her PhD in mechanical engineering, Ghassemi was so intrigued by the science of CAR T that she reached out to Milone and joined the his lab. While she was learning about vectors, Ghassemi asked Milone a simple question.
“This project actually originated from a naive question: Why do we have to stimulate the T cells?” he said. “Well, we don’t. But the efficiency is low. So we started talking about that and asking how can we make this more efficient.”
Milone was a key part of the leadership team that developed Novartis’ breakthrough CAR-T drug Kymriah at Penn. In 2018, Milone cofounded a biotech dubbed Cabaletta Bio with Penn’s Aimee Payne and Steven Nichtberger to work with chimeric auto-antibody receptors. Earlier this month, Cabaletta was granted Fast Track Designation for MuSK-CAART, a treatment for the improvement of daily living and muscle strength in patients with MuSK antibody-positive myasthenia gravis.
The Department of Justice has ended its investigation into Yale professor and stem cell pioneer Haifan Lin, Lin’s lawyer tells Endpoints News.
In an emailed statement, lawyer Abraham Rein said DoJ informed him that it had “discontinued” the probe into Lin. The investigation was originally opened in July 2020 after the NIH disputed the accuracy of information Lin and other faculty provided over “outside support” to those who received agency grants, the Yale Daily News previously reported.
Rein’s statement read in full:
On March 30, 2022, representatives of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) informed Abe Rein, Principal, Post & Schell, P.C. and counsel for Dr. Haifan Lin, that the DOJ has discontinued its investigation of Dr. Lin and that the DOJ has so informed the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The findings of the investigation, if any, and reasons for the probe’s discontinuation were not immediately clear. Endpoints has reached out to DoJ and NIH for comment.
DoJ’s inquiry ultimately resulted in Lin’s suspension at Yale earlier this month. Critics, including dozens of Yale faculty, decried the move as “deeply un-American” because the university placed Lin on administrative leave before DoJ concluded its investigation.
The timing of the DoJ probe also drew concerns that Lin was being targeted as part of the Trump administration’s “China Initiative,” set up to stop the purported theft of American intellectual property by the Chinese government. Civil rights activists had slammed the move, saying it created a climate of fear and chilled scientific research.
Last month, President Biden announced his DoJ would drop the “China Initiative” name and change several policies, but continue to investigate possible espionage.
Years after getting swept up in the controversial Trump-era “China Initiative” — and months after being convicted on six felony charges — notable Harvard scientist Charles Lieber is seeking an acquittal or new trial, as his lawyer maintains that the jury’s decision would not stand today.
Lieber was convicted in December of lying to the federal government about his ties to China’s Thousand Talents Program. He was arrested back in 2020 as part of the divisive “China Initiative,” which was set up to stop the purported theft of American intellectual property by the Chinese government.
Civil rights activists and scientists lambasted the program — and last month, President Biden announced the Department of Justice would drop the “China Initiative” name and change several policies. In the wake of several high-profile cases of prosecutors dropping their charges against researchers, Lieber’s attorney told a Boston federal courtroom that the initiative has become “an embarrassment,” according to a Law360 report.
“No rational juror could have found Professor Lieber guilty on the evidence presented to the jury,” Lieber’s attorneys wrote in a motion for acquittal.
That evidence, they added, included:
Antiquated emails from persons halfway around the world who could not be cross-examined at trial, government agents who could not recall questions and answers in their interview of Professor Lieber, interview ‘statements’ that were never properly memorialized and were, in fact, warped by the government, and a post-arrest statement that was puzzling and indecipherable.
China’s Thousand Talents Program was designed to draw scientists from overseas through funding and other resources. Lieber was accused of concealing a relationship with the Wuhan University of Technology, where he agreed to be a “strategic scientist” and open up a lab in exchange for funding and participation in Thousand Talents.
'He repeatedly lied': Feds pile on as Harvard chemist Charles Lieber convicted of lying about Chinese ties
“He repeatedly lied to his employer, the federal government, and taxpayers to fraudulently maintain access to federal research funds,” FBI special agent Joseph Bonavolonta said in a statement.
Lieber, currently on administrative leave from Harvard, was convicted of six felony charges, including two counts of making false statements, two counts of filing false tax returns and two counts of failing to disclose a foreign (in this case Chinese) bank account. The three types of charges carry maximum sentences of five years, three years and five years, respectively, adding up to a 26-year stretch plus hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.
The scientist has yet to be sentenced — but weeks after his jury verdict, prosecutors dropped all charges against another professor wrapped up in the China Initiative, MIT’s Gang Chen. Chen had been accused of lying and omitting information on US federal grant applications.
“The dismissal of Professor Chen’s case, mere weeks after the verdicts against Professor Lieber, came amidst a continued and growing call for an end to the China Initiative – and to the accompanying intimidation and harassment of lawful pursuits by academicians,” Lieber’s lawyers wrote in court documents.
Just yesterday, it was revealed that the DoJ ended its investigation into Yale professor and stem cell pioneer Haifan Lin.
Mukasey declined a request for comment.
“At the very least, the Court should grant a new trial in this ill-conceived and ill-advised case,” Lieber’s attorneys wrote.
