Ferri Tales

(Image from wikamedia commons ) According to a police report in the June 9th Towanda Daily Review, a 34 year-old woman was arrested at the Robert Packer Hospital Behavioral Science Unit for aggravated assault and was sent to the Bradford County Prison in lieu of $20,000 bail. The Review wrote that the woman was "smashing windows with a dinner tray" and "began stripping tissues out of every tissue box in reach and began to explain that she had magical powers and that she was going to burn the building down, and then she would flood the building to put the fire out."  The police were probably called after the hospital security and staff realized that they were unable to properly control the situation, and the woman was subdued by the police after she punched and slapped one of the officers. [ 1 ] The situation seems to have been handled with a minimum of property damage and no serious injuries, and to my knowledge, everyone acted correctly. Yet, a woman with...

" Chasing The Dragon " (s creened at the Keystone theater, Towanda, PA in early June) is an anti-drug documentary produced through the office of the FBI director James Comey. It shows, in vivid detail, the tragedies of seven families resulting from addictions to opioid drugs, typically initiated by prescription OxyContin , and escalating to other opioids, usually heroin. Most of the victims are teens and young adults; two appear to be in their thirties or early forties. Two of the young adults died from overdoses. One died a few days after spending 7 months in rehab. I deliberately referred to the subjects of this deeply flawed documentary as victims because that is exactly what they are--victims of our failed multi-decade, trillion dollar (and counting)  War on Drugs . The War on Drugs has not only failed , it has exacerbated the problem. Our problems with addictive substances would be far less if the War had never existed. The message of the documentary see...

(I live in Towanda, PA--a small town in Bradford County in the northeast part of the state.   According to the CDC , in 2014 Pennsylvania was ranked 8th in the U.S. for overdose deaths at 219 deaths per million age adjusted population.  West Virginia is # 1 at 355 per million, and the lowest is North Dakota at 63 per million. The U.S. average in 2014 was 147 deaths per million . I wrote the item below because of the local response to 3 overdose deaths in 3 days in mid-February, 2016. On May 5, 2016, an Addiction Awareness Rally was held in front of the Bradford County courthouse where local residents spoke about friends and family members with drug addictions, with truly heartrending accounts of the deaths of loved ones to addictions. It is tragically ironic that the backdrop for the speeches was the courthouse with the following words at the top of the building: Justice, Law, Mercy. As presented below, the War on Drugs has provided none of these.) The Uni...