The relationship between substance use, drug selling, and lethal violence in 25 juvenile murderers

The goal of the present study was to determine the relationship between substance use, drug selling, and lethal violence in adolescent male homicide offenders and their victims. The study employed a retrospective review of criminal justice databases and medical examiner records for murders committed by 25 adolescent males incarcerated in the Commonwealth of Virginia juvenile correctional centers from February 1992 to July 1996. The perpetrator sample was 84% African American and 16% white. The average age at the time of the offense was 15.0 years (range = 13.0 to 17.7 years). The victims were 84% male, 60% African American and 32% white. The median victim age was 28.0 years (mean = 34.8, range = 17 months to 75 years). The results indicated that 52% of the murders were committed by juveniles with identified involvement in drug selling, and 28% of the murders were drug-related. Toxicology results indicated recent drug or alcohol use in 27% of the victims; while 74% of the perpetrators reported substance use, 35% indicating daily use. Using discriminant analysis, it was possible to accurately classify 86% of the drug-related murders with the variables of recent victim drug use and perpetrator substance use history. The results indicated that adolescent males involved in the sale and distribution of illegal drugs comprised a significant percentage of those incarcerated for murder. Recent victim drug use and perpetrator substance use may be important variables in identifying drug-related juvenile homicides. These results underscore the link between substance use, drug selling, and lethal violence.     

Heavy Traffic: Trucking Deregulation, Federalism, and Canadian-U.S. Trade

Trucking deregulation, in the interest of competition and efficiency,removes rate controls and grants free entry to the market. Whenthe United States deregulated trucking in 1980, it opened theinterstate market to Canadian carriers. Heavy volumes of tradeby trucking between the two countries make entry conditionsan important bilateral issue. Deregulatory symmetry betweenthe two countries would produce a de facto regime of free tradein trucking services. In 1987 the Canadian federal governmentadopted deregulatory measures similar to those of the UnitedStates, but with more complex and problematic results. The reasons,broadly characteristic of the evolution of Canadian federalism,lie in the ability of the provinces to thwart federal initiatives.Trucking regulation is under provincial control, and to achievea practical effect, the federal government depends upon theprovinces to bring their practices into accord with its policy.Because of differing provincial views about deregulation andpressures from Canadian truckers for continued protection fromAmerican competition, much diversity and contention have delayedand compromised the federal governments purpose. Regulatoryreciprocity is also a question of the provinces and states,with a mixture of strict and easy entry policies complicatingthe achievement of bilateral balance and equity. The largerimplications of deregulation and transborder trucking for Canadalie in the ability of a decentralized federal system to pursuenecessary initiatives coherently.     

NO place to hide: the unfeasibility of using an independent expert commission as a blame-avoidance mechanism in Westminster polities - the case of the Ontario Health Services Restructuring Commission

Abstract: The argument presented in this article is that the appointment of an ad hoc expert commission to carry out governance is unlikely to depoliticize difficult restructuring issues or to deflect blame from governments dealing with such problems in Westminster-style polities. Unlike in American-style presidential systems and parliamentary systems with proportional representation experiencing frequent minority governments, such commissions can never be truly independent as there are no serious checks on the government's ability to remake the agency, its mandate, its composition, nor even any barriers to the government's premature termination of an ad hoc expert commission's authority. When governments in a Westminster-style polity seek to establish the appearance that such a commission is an independent agency of governance they must work at cross-purposes to the basic rules for insuring accountability by giving such a body a very vague mandate. This will almost certainly lead to disputes between political actors and the commission over its powers and refocus blame on the government. The ministers of a government employing this strategy must also be extraordinarily careful so as not to engage in any activities that would undermine the ad hoc expert commission's already fragile claim to autonomy, otherwise the blame focused on the government will magnify even further. The difficulties involved in employing an ad hoc expert commission as a means to depoliticize decisions and as a blame-avoidance strategy for governments in Westminster-style polities are illustrated in the Ontario government's experience with the Health Services Restructuring Commission (hsrc).     

Assessing and predicting the competency of juvenile court volunteer probation officers

The volunteer movement in criminal justice settings is burgeoning. It has been estimated that by the end of 1982 there will be over one million volunteers working in criminal-justice-related functions. The volunteer role that appears to be increasing most rapidly is that of the one-to-one counseling relationship with delinquent and young adult offenders on formal or informal probation. While the demand for volunteer probation officers is increasing rapidly, few of our courts have attempted to develop and validate screening instruments capable of assessing and predicting the general competency of the volunteer. The need for such instruments has been emphasized recently by Judge Keith J. Leenhouts, Director of Volunteers in Probation, a division of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency. The present study attempts to assess the usefulness of one such potential screening device, the Critical Incident Response Test (CIRT) developed by Traitel (1972) and others at the Oakland County Juvenile Court in Pontiac, Michigan. It is hoped that this study will motivate other probation departments and court volunteer programs to develop and validate similar selection instruments.     

Metal and metalloid multi-elementary ICP-MS validation in whole blood, plasma, urine and hair. Reference values

Four multi-elementary metal and metalloid quantification methods using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) were developed and validated in human whole blood, plasma, urine and hair by means of a single preparation procedure for each sample. The ICP-MS measurements were performed using a Thermo Elemental X7CCT series and PlasmaLab software without a dynamic reaction cell. With this procedure 27-32 elements can be simultaneously quantified in biological matrices: Li, Be, B, Al, V, Cr, Mn, Co, Ni, Cu, Zn, Ga, Ge, As, Se, Rb, Sr, Mo, Pd, Ag, Cd, Sn, Sb, Te, Ba, W, Pt, Hg, Tl, Pb, Bi, U. Whole blood, plasma and urine samples (0.4 ml each) were diluted with purified water, acid, triton X100 and butanol. Rhodium was used as internal standard. The urine sample results were corrected for enzymatic creatinine determination. Twenty-five milligrams hair samples were acid mineralized after a decontamination procedure and diluted as previously described for biological fluids. To be validated, each element had to show linearity with a correlation coefficient higher than 0.99. The intra-assay and inter-assay inaccuracy, measured as the variation coefficient, were below 5 and 10% respectively. Global performance was assessed by a quality control program. Our laboratory is a registered participant of the Institut National de Santé Publique du Québec (Sainte-Foy, Canada) inter-laboratory comparison program for whole blood, urine, and beard hair of non-occupationally exposed individuals spiked with selected elements. In our study multi-element metal and metalloid analysis was assessed for 27 elements in whole blood, 27 elements in plasma, 30 elements in urine and 32 elements in hair, from 0 to 25, or 250 to 1000 ng/ml, depending on the element. Quantification limits ranged from 0.002 ng/ml (U) to 8.1 ng/ml (Al) for whole blood, from 0.002 ng/ml (U) to 7.7 ng/ml (Al) for plasma, from 0.001 ng/ml (U) to 2.2 ng/ml (Se) for urine, and from 0.2 pg/mg (Tl) to 0.5 ng/mg (B) for hair. Normal values were determined in whole blood (n=100), plasma (n=100), urine (n=100), and hair (n=45) of healthy volunteers, leading to approximately 10,000 analyses. All results are presented and discussed. Clinical toxicology and forensic toxicology applications are also reported. ICP-MS has made significant advances in the field of clinical biology, particularly in toxicological analysis. This is due to the use of extremely effective equipment that permits better clinical and forensic toxicological analysis of metal and metalloid status of each individual patient.     

Mitochondrial DNA error prophylaxis: assessing the causes of errors in the GEP'02-03 proficiency testing trial

A qualitative and quantitative analytical method was developed and validated for the determination of 49 licit and illicit drugs in oral fluid. Small oral fluid samples, volume 1mL, were collected from volunteers using a modified Omni-Sal device and the analytes were extracted from an oral fluid/buffer mixture using a single Bond Elut Certify solid phase extraction cartridge. Liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS-MS) and gas chromatography-repetitive full scan mass spectrometry (GC-MS) were used in parallel to analyze the extracts for the targeted drugs. Extracts were analyzed by GC-MS in their underivatized form and as their pentafluoropropionyl derivatives. Deuterated internal standards were used for quantification of drugs of abuse by LC-MS-MS to minimize matrix effects. Methadone-d(9) and tumoxetine were used as the internal standards for quantification of non-derivatized and derivatized analytes respectively by GC-MS. Linearity was demonstrated over the range 5-200 ng/mL and limits of detection were less than 4 ng/mL for each drug analyzed. The method demonstrated acceptable recoveries for most of the analytes and good intra- and inter-day precision. Acquisition of data by repetitive full scan GC-MS allows the addition of further analytes to the target menu.