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Video: Designer Methamphetamine Bath Salts Chemicals Criminalization Bill Passes in New Jersey
Wow! I had no idea about these drugs – bath salts which mimic the effects of methamphetamine. But, new legislation has passed the New Jersey State Senate to control the chemicals used in “bath salts.”
New Jersey’s assault on a methamphetamine-style drug known as “bath salts” continued today, as legislation criminalizing six chemicals used to make the powders cleared the state Senate.
Pamela’s Law — named for a slain Rutgers senior whose alleged killer may have used the powerful stimulants — passed the Senate unanimously. The move is the latest in a flurry of legal action aimed at chasing the dangerous “designer drugs” from the state.
“The more the truth behind these products masquerading as bath salts comes out, the more banning these powerful chemicals makes sense,” said state Sen. John Girgenti (D-Passaic), one of the bill’s sponsors. “There’s only one reason people purchase these products, and that is to get high.”
The state Division of Consumer Affairs issued an emergency order banning the six chemicals on April 26. A bill similar to the Senate measure and also called Pamela’s Law, awaits action in an Assembly committee.
Bath salts, drugs that have nothing to do with bathing but can mimic methamphetamines and cause severe psychotic episodes, made headlines in New Jersey earlier this year when Rutgers senior Pamela Schmidt was killed in the basement of her boyfriend’s Cranford home.
OK, Congress over to you.
And, where is the Obama Administration’s DEA in all of this?
Oh yeah, seizing state’s supplies of sodium thiopental, so they cannot execute murderers.
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Arizona Sidesteps Obama Justice Department Over Sodium Thiopental and Executes Murderer
Donald Edward Beaty
Despite the Obama Administration’s best efforts to prevent it, Arizona last night executed Donald Edward Beaty.Donald Edward Beaty, 56, died at 7:38 p.m. local time at a state prison in Florence, Arizona, officials said, in an execution delayed for more than nine hours by a legal dispute over one of the drugs used to kill him.
Beaty, convicted of killing newspaper carrier Christy Ann Fornoff, had won a temporary stay from the Arizona Supreme Court after his lawyers objected to the last-minute substitution of a drug to be used in the lethal-injection mix.
But the court lifted the stay after conducting a special hearing on Wednesday morning, rejecting arguments that the state breached Beaty’s constitutional due process rights and protections against cruel and unusual punishment.
Petitions to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court were unsuccessful.
So, a lesson to the other states, including California – use pentobarbital rather than sodium thiopental and executions can continue.
I still don’t think there will be any executions in California within the near future. anti-death penalty activists will come up with another excuse and litigate it.
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Obama Administration Watches as States Scramble for Sodium Thiopental
The old San Quentin Prison Gas Chamber
Here is another story about the Obama Administration and their involvement in states desperately seeking to acquire sodium thiopental in order to comply with state court execution orders.The highest levels of the United States government were initially unsure how to respond last year when California and other states began a worldwide scramble for a scarce lethal injection drug, e-mails between federal officials show.
Ten states went abroad to purchase sodium thiopental, an anesthetic and part of the three-drug cocktail frequently used for executions, Drug Enforcement Administration records show. California was one of eight that made their transaction with Dream Pharma Ltd., a one-man London drug wholesaler operating from the back of a driving school.
In November, as states filed paperwork to import the anesthetic, e-mails between officials at the DEA, the Food and Drug Administration, and Customs and Border Protection document the federal agencies fretted [PDF] over how to respond.
“The White House is involved and trying to sort things out,” wrote a DEA official to unknown recipients in a Nov. 11 e-mail.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California obtained the records last week through a Freedom of Information Act request. The organization has filed numerous records requests with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and various federal agencies.
Records released to the ACLU have served as the primary source of information about states’ frantic international search for sodium thiopental as domestic supplies of the drug expired or ran out.
Last week, the DEA released 90 pages of internal correspondence to the ACLU. Fifteen of those pages were completely redacted, along with the names of a majority of officials sending and receiving notes.
What remains of the exchanges casts the federal government as worried about the drugs states were brining home for executions.
Read the entire piece.
As I have written before, the federal government and anti-death penalty California POLS are obstructing the use of sodium thiopental for use in executions.The fact is switching to other drugs will only lead to a circular argument method of obstructing enforcement of the death penalty. Then, there will be the physicians who will need to administer the drugs and the ethics involved with that.
So, just go back to the old gas chamber like the one above, which does not require a physician to administer the drugs or you could hang the convicted criminals.
Those methods are good enough and much more humane than these felons deserve anyway.
How long do you think it would take California to change the law with Jerry Brown as Governor and Kamala Harris as California Attorney General?
Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the conservative Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, thinks one way to impede stall-inducing litigation would be to reinstitute the gas chamber, but use nontoxic gas to replace oxygen. “It gets rid of this whole notion of a quasi-medical procedure,” he explained, when execution is in reality “a punishment” for horrific crimes.
Of course, first Sacramento would have to pass a law. Then there’d be administrative law reviews. Add another decade.
Don’t look for any California executions anytime soon.