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Meth is not mirth

It would be one thing to depict a ravaged meth addict, if the object were to wake readers up to the horrors of addiction. But instead, you aimed for humor: Your caricature, dressed in a stained “wife beater” tank top, gives us her biggest, tarnished grin and cheerily displays a prescription that says her name is “Suzie […]

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I want a new drug

House Bill 1235, authored by Rep. Ben Sherrer, D-Chouteau, seeks to make pseudoephedrine, which is also a component of many cold and allergy medications, available to Oklahomans by prescription only. The brewing legislative battle appears to pit law enforcement officials against drug companies that argue the change would be an undue burden on law-abiding allergy-sufferers. […]

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Pipe dreams

The Oklahoma City Democrat announced his proposed crackdown — “crackdown,” get it? — after accompanying state Bureau of Narcotics officers on a Jan. 9 raid of an OKC convenience store that had been selling them. Under current law, which Shelton authored a couple of years ago, a retailer can face up to a year behind […]

Posted inArts & Culture

Mr. Nice

Here, the switch from mere Oxford student to corrupt bad boy is flipped with one look at the stunner Elsa Pataky (“Fast Five“) and a taste of cannabis. From there, the path of Marks (Rhys Ifans, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1”) is marked with marriage, divorce, the IRA, MI-6, LSD, hashish, arrests, […]

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Bar examination

“You read the statistics, you interview educators about it, people who are in positions of authority, but not until you’re in the actual prisons do you see what’s going on,” said Cassie Ketrick, associate producer and assistant editor of the documentary “Women Behind Bars,” made by several University of Oklahoma students and graduates. In the […]

Posted inMusic

Jake brake

Since the Stillwater-based musician first started taking guitar lessons in middle school, music has been the love of Jake Moffat’s life. But that love got lost somewhere along the way of his long battle with drugs. For some time, it looked like the last note had rung. “There’s a few years when I was down-and-out, […]

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Bitter pills

The one-page report listed five painkillers — oxymorphone, morphine, hydrocodone, hydromorphone and oxycodone — and the anti-anxiety medication alprazolam as causing “probable mixed drug toxicity,” which led to central nervous system depression, pulmonary edema and aspiration pneumonia. “The chemicals found in his system were not those that had been prescribed by a physician, and we […]

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Gun violence is society’s cancer

Our war on drugs has been an expensive and ultimately cruel exercise in futility. It has been a failure at every level. He possesses a very clear understanding of the lethal power of any firearm, and I appreciate that. From there on, I’m afraid our views diverge. He fails to appreciate that guns create a […]

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