By Ross Parker ticklethewire.com A young woman from Michigan we will call Janice started using heroin in her early 20s. Her family stuck by her and financed several rounds of rehabilitation. Each of these was followed after a short period of time by a relapse and her family or friends rushing Janice to a hospital…
By Ross Parker ticklethewire.com Three months ago the mother of an Ypsilanti Township man found her young son slumped over in his bed, dead, with a syringe still in his hand. He was one of the latest victims of the deadly combination of heroin laced with the prescription drug fentanyl. Zachary Burdette is charged in…
By Ross Parker ticklethewire.com Eight hundred years ago today, a group of rebellious English barons met with despotic King John at Runnymede near the Thames River and agreed to a peace treaty , the Magna Carta. Negotiated by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the charter was meant to settle an aristocratic uprising over the unpopular king’s…
By Greg Stejskal ticklethewire.com It took about 5,000 years from the discovery of glass until a process was developed to economically mass produce flat glass, and only a few years before the technology was stolen. Glass is one of the great fundamental inventions – not at the level of the wheel or fire, but up…
By Ross Parker ticklethewire.com If you haven’t viewed the NPR video of President Obama’s conversation with David Simon, the creator of the HBO series “The Wire,” on the subjects of drugs, criminal justice policies and law enforcement, it is worth watching. The President lauded the series as one of the greatest pieces of art in…
By Ross Parker ticklethewire.com A British study found recently that the risk of first time psychosis among users of high THC cannabis was three times greater than for non-users, regardless of the age of the user or the frequency of use. Frequent users were found to have more than five times the risk. The study…
By Ross Parker ticklethewire.com Anthony (Tony) Bertoni, a legendary law man both at the Detroit Police Department and as United States Marshal, died this past Sunday at the age of 95. The Bertoni family grew up on the eastside of Detroit during the difficult years of post World War I and the Depression. Like many…
By Greg Stejskal ticklethewire.com Webster Bivens may have been a drug dealer, but his place in law enforcement history is not proportional to his status as an alleged dealer. In the fall of 1965, Federal Bureau of Narcotics agents raided Bivens’ Brooklyn apartment. The FBN agents had neither an arrest warrant nor a search warrant….
