Tag Archives: drugs

So sorry: Texas woman who pooped in cop car to hide drugs in her feces gets prison time

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Chacour Koop of the Star Telegram reports a woman who pooped in cop car to create a hiding spot for her drugs is going to prison, officials say.

Two years ago, Shannen Martin, 34, was arrested during a theft investigation at an H-E-B grocery store in Corsicana, Texas, police said. She was handcuffed and put in the patrol vehicle after resisting the cops, police said.

On her way to jail, Martin “intentionally defecated” in the car and hid 2.3 grams of crack cocaine, a crack pipe and a Valentine’s Day card in the poop, police said.

An officer had to dig through the poop to find the evidence, police said.

Martin pleaded guilty to possession of a controlled substance and tampering with evidence. She also pleaded guilty to injury to a disabled person for macing a relative during an argument, according to the Navarro County District Attorney’s Office.

Last year, Martin was sentenced to probation instead of prison.

As part of her sentencing, she also was required to write a letter of apology to the officer who had to dig through her poop, court records show.

However, Martin’s probation was revoked in September after she violated terms of her agreement multiple times, prosecutors said. Last week, she was sentenced to three years in prison.

UK cops say suspect has refused to poop for 3 weeks

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I poop about three times a day.

Probably not the image you wanted, but it affects my ability to go for a morning run, and dates back to working construction 40 years ago (corn silks can be versatile).

Essex Police in the UK are on #poowatch and tweeting about it. This after a suspected drug dealer believed to have drugs hidden in his body has now for 21 days refused to poop. The BBC reports the 24-year-old was arrested Jan. 17 and has been under supervision since then, with the department’s Operation Raptor team that arrested him providing updates like this one, tweeted Wednesday: “Day 21/3 weeks for our man on #poowatch still no movements/items to report, he will remain with us until Friday when we are back at court where we will be requesting a further 8 days should he not produce anything before that hearing.”

Last Friday they tweeted that the man is being watched by doctors and was in fine health at the time. Per the BBC, police decided to keep the public informed of the man’s bowel movements in an effort to quash any illusions that drug dealing is “glamorous.”

In an industry rife with substance abuse, restaurant workers help their own

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The manager of a Little Caesars Pizza in Shelbyville, Indiana, and her boyfriend have been arrested for allegedly using and buying drugs during work. According to police, Sasha Fletcher and Joshua Parson were taken into custody after an anonymous source told the feds the couple was regularly using heroin in the restaurant and preparing food with open sores.

The arrest underscores the well-known problem of drug and alcohol use and abuse in American restaurants.

Tove Danovich of NPR reports that while alcohol is eschewed in most places of employment, it’s a constant in restaurants. And the late night culture means that most socializing happens at bars after work hours. “We’re an industry that’s a little bit different,” says Mickey Bakst, general manager of Charleston Grill in South Carolina. But this also means restaurant employees are at serious risk for problems with substance abuse.

In 2016, after Charleston chef Ben Murray committed suicide after struggling with addiction and depression, Bakst and restaurateur Steve Palmer decided to start a support group of sorts to keep it from happening again.

Ben’s Friends, as the organization is called, now has Sunday meetings in three cities in South Carolina and Georgia. Bakst describes the meetings as “open-ended, gut wrenching at times, discussions about the difficulties of working in the industry.” They might talk about what to do when you’re in recovery and at work in the kitchen and the restaurant is packed, your chef is screaming. “You’re doing everything you can to stay sober but the stress level is through the roof.”

It’s kind of like AA, but tailored to the restaurant business — their only requirement is that attendees have a desire to overcome their addiction.

“You need someone who gets that, and understands the specific pressure of being surrounded by alcohol and revelry and drugs all the time,” says Kat Kinsman, senior food and drinks editor for Extra Crispy. In 2016, Kinsman also founded Chefs with Issues, a resource dedicated to de-stigmatizing mental health issues in the industry by providing a safe space for restaurant workers to share information and discuss their problems.

She has been open about her own experiences with depression and anxiety and wrote a book called Hi, Anxiety. She frequently had chefs confide in her about their own struggles and wanted to create a forum to publicize how rampant addiction, mental illness, and other issues are for people in the restaurant industry.

According to a 2015 study by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the food service and hospitality industry has the highest rates of substance use disorders and third-highest rates of heavy-alcohol use of all employment sectors.

Is writing still #1?

Hope for future drugs? Exploring vulnerabilities of Cryptosporidium

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Cryptosporidium parvum is a gastrointestinal parasite that can cause moderate to severe diarrhea in children and adults, and deadly opportunistic infection in AIDS patients.

crypto.glcolysisBecause C. parvum is resistant to chlorine disinfectant treatment, it frequently causes water-borne outbreaks around the world. A study published on Nov. 12th in PLOS Pathogens provides a detailed analysis of a C. parvum protein that is central to glycolysis — the only pathway by which the parasite can generate energy — and identifies it as a potential drug target.

Guan Zhu and colleagues, from Texas A&M University in College Station, USA, study the parasite’s metabolism during its complicated life-cycle. C. parvum exists both in free stages (where parasites are in the environment or in the host’s digestive tract) and intracellular stages following host cell invasion, during which the parasite occupies a specialized compartment — the parasitophorous vacuole — which is delineated by a host-cell derived border called the parasitophorous vacuole membrane (PVM).

For this study, the researchers focused on lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), an enzyme central to glycolysis. Glycolysis is the only metabolic process by which organisms like C. parvum — that lack functional mitochondria to derive energy from oxygen — can generate ATP, the universal biological energy storage molecule. They found that the C. parvum LDH (CpLDH) protein is found inside the parasite’s cells during the free stages, but is then transferred to the PVM during intracellular development, indicating involvement of the PVM in parasite energy metabolism, and specifically, in lactate fermentation. They also demonstrate that two known LDH inhibitors, gossypol and FX11, can inhibit both CpLDH activity and parasite growth.

The researchers summarize that their observations “not only reveal a new function for the poorly understood PVM structure in hosting the intracellular development of C. parvum, but also suggest LDH as a potential target for developing therapeutics against this opportunistic pathogen, for which fully effective treatments are not yet available”. Acknowledging that the ultimate validation of CpLDH as a drug target requires tools for knockout or knockdown of genes of interest in Cryptosporidium, they say recent advances towards this goal raise hope that such validation will be possible in the near future.

Overall, they conclude that “the present data, together with the fact that C. parvum relies on glycolysis for producing ATP, support the notion that CpLDH is worth exploring as a potential target for the development of anti-cryptosporidial therapeutics.”