Alleged Drug Dealer Facing Murder Charge in Man’s Overdose Death
Nearly two years after a man died from a fentanyl overdose in his car in Hollywood, the dealer who allegedly sold him the drugs is facing a murder charge, police said.
Jordan Guy Villagi, 22, was charged Wednesday with murder resulting from the distribution of a controlled substance, Hollywood Police officials said.
The man was pronounced dead at the scene, and officers found small white powdered substances on the center console of the car, according to an arrest report.
Vallagi, of Boca Raton, had been captured on a nearby surveillance camera going into and out of the victim’s car from a nearby house, the report said.
Investigators made contact with Vallagi, who said he had been friends with the victim since high school and said he had met up with the victim since Vallagi owed him money for fixing his car, the report said.
A family member of the victim later told detectives that Vallagi is a well-known drug dealer in the Boca Raton area, specifically near Florida Atlantic University, the report said. The family member said a friend of theirs had died of a drug overdose at Vallagi’s apartment in Boca Raton a year earlier, the report said.
The white powder found in the victim’s car later tested positive for cocaine. A similar powder found in Vallagi’s car also tested positive for cocaine, the report said.
A baggie containing a brown substance that was found in the trunk of Vallagi’s car also tested positive for fentanyl, the report said.
When investigators searched the victim’s phone, they found 75 text messages between the victim and Vallagi beginning Christmas night and into the next morning, the report said.
The messages contain multiple references to the victim requesting drugs and Vallagi saying which ones he has, the report said.
In one message, the victim tells Vallagi the “stuff” they did the night prior got him sick, the report said.
In one of the final messages, Vallagi asks the victim if he “feels it” and the victim replies “yeah I feel it,” the report said.
The report concluded that had the victim not met with Vallagi, “he would not have overdosed and died.”
Vallagi was being held without bond Thursday, Broward County jail records showed. Attorney
Deaf Dog Changes A Little Girl’s Life Forever
It’s no secret that therapy dogs can be brilliant for helping people of all ages who are suffering from stressful and difficult situations. There are therapy dogs for any problem out there, from hyperactive disorders to seizures. One particular type of therapy dog helps children feel safe when they are testifying in a courtroom. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that testifying can be a stressful event, especially for a child. That’s why a therapy dog is great for comforting them in these times. Karl, a therapy dog, changed a little girl’s life forever. This is their story.
A Court Dog
Adult matters are known to be incredibly frightening for children. This is especially the case when it comes to testifying in court. However, many children need to testify in court. One little girl had to take the stand when someone wronged her.
The most important effect of this drug is that it improves the creative ability of the user. Other effects include a sense of extreme happiness and a high level of energy. The consumer’s body relaxes with no cravings for food.
Risk and Opportunity in the Coca/Cocaine Economy of the Bolivian Yungas
Bolivia is one of the poorest countries of the hemisphere and its rural people have among the lowest life expectancy, health-care standards and educational levels of all Latin Americans. It is the only country in South America with a ranking of ‘low’ on the Human Development Index for 1991 compiled by the United Nations, a measure combining the per capita product with such factors as longevity and access to education. Bolivian Cocaine Online or any kind of cocaine.
The Cocaine Industry in Bolivia – Its Impact on the Peasantry
For the indigenous people of Andean Bolivia who have been growing and consuming the coca leaf for several thousand years, the rising demand for cocaine in the United States is rapidly restructuring their economic and social relations. In recent years, underground, illegal economic activities have emerged on a grand scale. Surpassing most other legal economic endeavors, these underground activities are distorting patterns of economic development and the social well-being of the Andean peasant majority.
While Bolivia produces approximately 40 to 45 percent of the world’s supply of coca leaf and coca paste, the Chapare tropical rain forest area in the Department of Cochabamba alone supplies 70 percent of the nation’s coca leaf crop. Farmers from the highlands who migrated here cleared tens of thousands of hectares of forested lands to grow the plant on small plots.
Coca-paste making and international trafficking, however, traditionally has been the domain of elites such as the cattle ranchers of the Beni Department, the agro-business groups within the Department of Santa Cruz and a small group within the Bolivian military. But in 1982, when a major military drug trafficking group lost national power and a civilian, the democratic government took office, the Cochabamba peasants began making coca paste because of its incomparable profits and wages.
The growing international demand for cocaine has stimulated increased coca leaf production in Bolivia by these small farmers. The United States Drug Enforcement Agency estimates the flow of cocaine into the United States has climbed from 35 metric tons in 1981 to 85 metric tons in 1985. Bolivian coca leaf production likewise jumped from 35 metric tons to 120 metric tons between 1978 and 1985 according to official Bolivian government figures.
Meanwhile, elites have continued their coca-paste production and some have turned to the production of pure cocaine, which Colombians previously controlled. These groups enjoy greater political protection than the peasants and have the capital and other resources to engage in direct international cocaine trafficking.
Economic Depression Stimulates Production
Bolivia’s economic depression and a severe drought in the mountain provinces during the 1982-83 growing season, have made the coca/cocaine trade attractive. Caught in an international debt-repayment squeeze, Bolivia’s gross national production since 1980 has fallen by 17 percent, it’s per capita consumption by 30 percent, and its per capita income by 20 percent. During this same period, unemployment doubled. In addition, inflation went from 297 percent in 1982 to 328 percent in 1983. In 1984 it soared to 2,800 percent and then to about 10,000 percent during 1985 (Central Bank of Bolivia). Small farmers in all regions of Bolivia continue to suffer declining terms of trade from such inflation – a trend that began in the late ’60s.
Against this background, it might appear that the flow of economic benefits from the coca/cocaine trade has been unambiguously positive. The 35,000 producers of coca leaves in the Chapare region can each net up to $9,000 annually from the production of 2.2 acres. The next most profitable crop in this area, citrus, earns producers only $500 from the same size plot. In addition, small farmers benefit from the coca leaf’s unusual characteristics which make it a “wonder crop.” Fine-tuned over a millennium in the Andean ecosystem, coca grows relatively well on poor soil, has comparably few problems with blight and pests, four to five harvests annually, and a life expectancy of 18 years. Its lightweight and non-perishable qualities also make it ideal for low-cost, long-range mountain transport and its production requires no imported petrochemical products or expensive institutional credit. Cоlоmbіаn Cосаіnе-96 рurе іѕ аlѕо uѕеd bу dосtоrѕ bу mіxіng іt wіth dіffеrеnt іngrеdіеntѕ thаt аrе uѕеful fоr humаn hеаlth.
Highland peasants who do not own land in the Chapare are increasing migration to the area to earn wages in coca-leaf production activities and as pisadores. These workers stomp the coca leaves with their feet in the clandestine paste-making laboratories.
Wages for coca leaf production are higher than for any other cash crop in Bolivia, and wages for paste-making are greater even than wages earned in urban areas; they are also six to eight times higher than any other skilled or unskilled labor in the legal, rural economy.
Despite the increased income for small farmers in the Chapare, the coca/cocaine boom is leading them and their country down an illusory development path. The coca trade has induced peasants to shift land from food production for such crops as rice, bananas, yucca, maize, citrus, and pineapples to coca leaf production. This mono-cropping trend leads to greater dependency on purchased foodstuffs, raises food prices, and creates shortages of these crops. This could, however, stimulate food production in other areas of Bolivia.
In the coca-growing and paste-making areas of the Chapare and upper Cochabamba Valley during 1984 and 1985, inflation has reached the highest levels in Bolivian history. In the Chapare town of Shinahota, the cost of a piece of bread has risen to $1.00 and the daily cost of living has ranged from $20 to $100 in recent years (Los Tiempos, July 18, 1985). The regional urban capital city of Cochabamba, once one of Bolivia’s least expensive cities, is presently the most expensive.
Coca Trade Creates Labor Shortages in Highlands
In the Chapare, wage labor is displacing traditional forms of exchange that have provided stability, continuity and even equity to peasant communities. Reciprocal labor patterns and mutual support structures, characteristics of local Andean life, are breaking down, and there is a marked increase in the monetarization of the peasant economy (Flores, 1984). In the highland areas, such as the upper Cochabamba Valley and Norte de Potosi, there are reports of labor shortages for such crops as potatoes and maize, because so many peasants have fled to the proliferating “cocaine factories” to work as pisadores. Coca Trade Destroys Environment. Buy Cоса-Cоlа MDMA Pіllѕ
In the pursuit of quick profits the peasants’ rush to produce coca leaves and coca paste also is taking its toll on the Cochabamba region’s ecosystem (Flores, 1984). In the upper Cochabamba Valley, recent reports indicate that chemicals used in making coca paste sometimes are dumped into the streams and irrigation ditches contaminating agricultural lands and livestock. The basic quality of life remains poor, as well. Most communities in the Chapare still have no potable water, electricity and indoor plumbing (Flores, 1984). In Bolivia, these services are provided by the Ministry of Health and the regional public development corporations, who are not receiving revenues from the coca trade. Serious levels of infant mortality, malnutrition and gastrointestinal illnesses remain prevalent.
‘I like the way MDMA gives you a deep sense of connection to your friends’
I’m no fiend. Most nights I’d rather share a bottle of wine with some friends than stay up till 6 am getting sweaty and boggle-eyed on a bender. But while I associate alcohol with talking about past experiences, I associate drugs with making new ones. Party drugs can often make a stranger feel like a confidant; a simple trip to a town center feels like an Enid Blyton escapade.
I probably take class-A party drugs such as MDMA or cocaine once a fortnight and have done since I was 16 (I’m 27 now). I like the way cocaine gives you a new lease of life, like a mushroom in Super Mario, to carry on with a night out. I like the way MDMA softens the edges of reality and gives you a deep sense of connection to your friends that you can never get when you meet them for dinner and they moan about their jobs. I like how when you’re coming down from a pill another person’s touch has a comforting, almost electric capacity. If you’re suffering from exhaustion, anxiety or stress, recreational drugs can give you a bit of a leg-up.
Drugs can also be a total pain. Ecstasy can make you feel like you’re floating in a cloud, but just as often it’s an admin nightmare: you come up at different times from your friends; only half the people in a group remembered to get sorted and there’s an endless hassle at a party trying to get more. Even when you’re having a great time, there’s a self-doubting internal monologue running through the whole process: Have I done enough? Am I coming up? Do I look like a prick?
I would just like to have that conversation about drugs being sometimes brilliant and occasionally annoying. Yet I feel like there is no one who is willing to talk about drugs in those terms.
When children ask their parents where babies come from, they get a white lie – a stork delivers them, you find them in a cabbage patch, you order them from Ocado. That’s the closest thing I can think of to explain the difference between the perception and the reality of drug use by young people in the UK. There is a societal stork myth that is propagated by the media and popular culture to hide a basic reality. Even users themselves are entirely unwilling to talk about drug-taking honestly. Everything in the drugs world tries to stifle this conversation. Take nightclubs. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that staying up till 6 am listening to dance music at an ear-splitting volume would not only be unenjoyable without some kind of mind-altering stimulant but a painful test of endurance. Most people in big nightclubs are on drugs. The clubs know that: that’s why they charge so much for entry and, often, for bottles of water. They know that not many people will be buying drinks. Most of them have in-house dealers too, so they can sort out their DJs. Bigger DJs put requests for drugs on their riders. “We just put it on expenses as ‘fruit and flowers,” a promoter at a major nightclub told me this year. But there’s still a stork charade, with the venue covered in posters promising to eject drug users and bouncers searching punters – but not too thoroughly. The pretense is that this could all be above board.
I suppose the reason for this false picture of drug-taking is that most people don’t take drugs. The statistics show that only a small fraction of the UK population are regular drugs users, and a smaller fraction still do anything harder than weed. But drug use is not spread evenly across the country, nor across age groups. In my demographic – under 30, living in London, job in the creative industries, disposable income – almost everyone is a recreational drugs user.
Where I grew up in south London, it was pretty uncommon to find someone who didn’t at least smoke weed. The children of more middle-class parents were taking cocaine, ecstasy, ketamine and mephedrone almost every weekend. These were not reprobates ruining their lives: they were intelligent, bright people who got three As at A-level and went to good universities.
We would go to raves in places such as Camberwell and Hackney Wick, to warehouse venues where almost no one was over 18. White powders flowed as freely as the Fanta Fruit Twist and Malibu we were drinking. Festivals played a big part, too. Parents, even quite strict ones who wouldn’t dream of letting their kids out past midnight, were happy to send their kids to music festivals, perhaps because of the reverent music-focused coverage in the media.
If you go to somewhere like Reading or Benicàssim, almost everyone is under 20. Half of them barely leave the campsite. Festivals are drugs playgrounds where teenagers experiment with copious amounts of uppers in presumably quite dangerous combinations. Some of the best moments of my life took place going to festivals as a teenager. I remember one muddy year at Glastonbury, racing down the hill arm-in-arm with a bunch of people, all off our faces on MDMA, feeling happier than I had ever felt. Another year, I remember taking mephedrone with a girl I fancied during Blur’s headline set, both weeping with joy at a band we’d grown up with our whole lives.
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Again, everyone knows this; no one thinks the thousands who watch the sunrise at the stone circle in Glastonbury every year are just on a high from seeing Mumford and Sons. But the festivals keep up the pretense that they are drug-free zones. Even a recent BBC3 show, Festivals, Sex, and Suspicious Parents, which was supposed to show parents what their kids really got up to at festivals, ignored the fact that as the cameras panned around the festival, many revelers were plainly as high as a kite, their jaws swinging back and forth like pendulums, a side-effect of taking ecstasy. The voiceover just kept talking about people being “drunk”.
I am also part of the first generation of people whose parents are likely to have been drug users. Of course, some adults would be outraged, as the parents on BBC3, to see what their kids got up to. But many more knew only too well – plenty of people I know would smoke weed or share dealers with their parents. In some families, drug use had less stigma than smoking.
I thought all this was normal, but at university, I met, for the first time, young people who totally abstained from drugs. They mostly came from outside major cities, or outside the UK, and many shivered in horror when they saw the rest of us dabbing our gums with mysterious white powders. I thought there would be a rift in social lives, an us-and-them situation, but it was around that time that mephedrone happened. Known by literally no young person ever as “meow meow”, mephedrone was a legal high that changed attitudes towards drug-taking. Polite do-right kids who would never dream of taking illegal drugs were happy to chow down on bombs (self-made wontons of mephedrone powder wrapped in Rizla) like they were no more risqué than chocolate liqueurs.
Mephedrone was incredibly cheap – about a tenner a gram – and incredibly available. You could order it with next-day delivery to your university PO box. Mephedrone was a drugs phenomenon of which I have never seen the likes before or since. Everyone started doing it. I remember visiting a friend at Leeds University during this period. We went to a club and the queue for the men’s bogs was at least 70 people long. When I finally got inside the place stunk of mephedrone, you could hear everyone loudly sniffing.
On nights out during this time, everyone would be raging – making out with one another, dancing with total abandon. But the comedowns were immediate and severe, far worse than ecstasy. By 4am people would be lying on the floor sharing the most intimate and personal shames and secrets as if the drug was somehow compelling them to be honest. Some people called it truth serum. Friendships were forged in the hot irons of that emotional exposition, as were the most horrendous hangovers.
Mephedrone was banned within two years of it taking off. People talk a lot about one legal high being banned only for another to take its place, but the real legacy of mephedrone was to numb the stigma of harder drugs. By the time I left university, many of the drug abstainers who had tried mephedrone became relaxed about most illegal drugs, too.
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Ecstasy and mephedrone make it pretty hard to get much done in the days after taking them. You can’t regularly use them and be a successful, functioning adult, so they become a rarer treat once you leave student life. In their 20s most people are overworked: they have second jobs and work incredibly long hours. If they’re going to go out on a Friday night they need a pick-me-up. And that is why cocaine remains the young professional’s drug of choice.
I see cocaine usage almost every weekend wherever I go: clubs, pubs, people’s houses, dinner parties. At fancy celebrity parties, the sort you see on Mail Online, cocaine is so prevalent that it’s almost boring. Everyone does it – butter-wouldn’t-melt TV presenters, wholesome pop stars adored by your mum, people who would immediately lose their job if anyone found out. Those tabloid stings where they catch someone doing cocaine are kind of hilarious in that respect. If you followed any celebrity around with a secret camera on a Friday night you’d be almost guaranteed to find them doing coke. But cocaine users are like hipsters in the way they will vehemently deny they are one, and cast aspersions on others. “It was just full of self-aggrandizing wankers doing coke and talking about themselves,” someone will say about a party where they did cocaine and talked about themselves. Most of my friends are cocaine users, but I’ve never heard them say one nice thing about cocaine.
No doubt some people will have read this piece and think that I am just a monstrous twat, that this has all been little more than infantile boasting in a vain attempt to try to sound cool. But that, too, is part of the cover-up, that any open discussion of using drugs or enjoying them is necessarily a boast. We can talk about great food, great films, great sex, but if we talk about great drugs we immediately sound like we’re engaging in some teenage bravado. That’s why the biggest taboo surrounding drugs today isn’t taking drugs, but saying that they’re fun.
I’m not saying that people are lying about the negative effects. I have, of course, seen lives ruined by drugs. Rarely has this been because of an overdose or because someone has ruined themselves financially because of addiction (although I am only 27 – that may yet come). Far more often I have just seen people become dulled through regular drug use: their youthful spark extinguished by a never-ceasing quest to get on it; brains frazzled by overheated synapses. There are friends I want to slap every time I see them doing another line, but I can’t because that would be hypocritical.
I also appreciate that’s it’s easy to be blasé about drug use when you’re a well-adjusted middle-class white guy who has never been stopped by the police and has a distant non-social relationship with their drug dealer. For many people, drugs aren’t something they can dip in and out of and separate from their lives. People entangled in the economic and legal realities of drugs – dealers, those convicted of possession, addicts – don’t have the luxury of my relaxed attitude.
But until we stop pretending that getting high is inherently bad – that drugs can never be brilliant, can never enhance human experience for the better – how can we properly deal with people whose lives have been made worse by drugs? At some point, kids grow up and learn the facts of life. I think it’s time we all had the talk.
In Jurbarkas, criminals detained 1.2 kilograms of psychotropic substance – amphetamine and two Jurbarkas residents
2021 December 2 Marijampole county Officials of the Criminal Police Organized Crime Investigation Division of the LSC Jurbarkas d. Savn. A total of 1.2 kilograms of amphetamine was removed.
Due to this criminal act, the detainees were suspected in accordance with Article 260 of the CC of the Republic of Lithuania. 3 d. One of the suspects was sentenced by a court to the most severe detention order. The pre-trial investigation is led by the Kaunas Regional Prosecutor’s Office. The circle of suspects may expand. MDMA is often considered the drug of choice within the rave culture and is also used at clubs,