Patient Zero

[Hoss]

Not trying to pick on anyone but there's no excuse for guns being stolen from vehicles.  If you are going to leave it in the car, get a gun safe.  Under the seat, out of sight, locked and cabled to your seat frame.  If someone gets it from there, it won't be without mucho effort and lots of noise to attract curiosity seekers and neighbors.

And no, that is NOT my gun safe. 

BS, Conan.  You're stalking me.  That's two threads now I've been grumble-slapped by you today!

[Conan71]

BS, Conan.  You're stalking me.  That's two threads now I've been grumble-slapped by you today!

Wasn't your love up, it was your buddy's

[patric]

A Miami man on Monday described how he watched in horror after spotting a naked man gnawing away at the face and neck of another man in a ghoulish attack on a highway ramp in downtown Miami.
What would cause someone do attack another person like this?  Meth?  Some other drug? 

Police said they found no evidence of drugs or paraphernalia at the scene. Toxicology tests of Eugene's blood will likely take several weeks.
http://www.tampabay.com/news/bizarre/new-video-shows-more-grisly-details-of-face-eating-attack-in-miami/1233688

Maybe there were no drugs.  Maybe it was a homeless mental worse-case scenario.  Until the toxicology report, no one knows.

[Conan71]

Or maybe just a cop set up so they could get their jollies on a beat-down.

[heironymouspasparagus]

Chew unto others as you would have them chew unto you!





Complements of a guy at work...

[Vashta Nerada]

Don't blame drugs for violence

Casting about for a reason why Rudy Eugene gnawed off most of a homeless man's face in an attack on Miami's MacArthur Causeway last month, his girlfriend suggested he may have been the victim of a voodoo curse. Or maybe he was drugged, she told the Miami Herald, adding, "I don't know how else to explain this."

Although the voodoo hypothesis did not gain much traction, the idea that drugs turned Eugene into the "Miami Zombie" was repeated by one news outlet after another, though there was little more evidence in its favor. This pattern of credulous reporting, characteristic of drug panics, reflects our perennial readiness to believe that satanic substances hijack people's souls and compel them to sin.

As "Theodoric of York, Medieval Barber" in an old "Saturday Night Live" sketch, Steve Martin tells a patient's father that people once foolishly believed disease was caused by demonic possession, but "nowadays we know that Isabelle is suffering from an imbalance of bodily  humors, perhaps caused by a toad or a small  dwarf  living in her stomach." Likewise, whereas people used to think the devil was the source of evil, today we know that drugs are — even if we're not sure which drugs, or whether a particular criminal has actually consumed them.

A few days after Eugene's grisly assault, which a police officer stopped by shooting him dead, the head of the local police union, Armando Aguilar, declared that Eugene must have been on "bath salts," quasi-legal stimulants that are sold over the counter. Aguilar's speculation, which was uninformed by toxicological tests, spawned alarmist headlines like  "Bath Salts, Drug Alleged 'Face-Chewer' Rudy Eugene May Have Been On, Plague Police and Doctors" (CBS News) and  "Miami's 'Naked Zombie' Proves Need to Ban Bath Salts, Experts Say" (U.S. News & World Report).

The media frenzy started with WFOR, the CBS affiliate in Miami. "We have seen, already, three or four cases that are exactly like this," Aguilar told the TV station. Later, in an interview with ABC, he clarified that "the cases are similar minus a man eating another" — i.e., the single most salient aspect of Eugene's crime. Quoting Aguilar and a local emergency room physician, WFOR said people who use what it called "the new LSD" have "super-human strength," such that six men might be required to restrain a single individual.   

Stories about psychoactive substances that transform people into violent monsters with superhuman strength have been tied to various chemical agents over the years, including cocaine, PCP, methamphetamine and even marijuana. They always prove to be grossly exaggerated, if not utterly fictitious.

A 1989 analysis of "crack-related homicides" in New York City, for example, found that the vast majority of the violence stemmed from black-market disputes, as opposed to the drug's psychoactive effects.

That does not mean people who use these drugs are never violent. But focusing on extreme cases and presenting them as typical — as police, E.R. physicians, psychiatrists, reporters and politicians tend to do — suggests such incidents are much more common than they actually are.

It is clear that drugs do not "cause" violence in any straightforward way. Otherwise, given the millions of people who have used drugs reputed to trigger violence, we'd have a lot more murder and mayhem.

By mindlessly repeating the claim that "bath salts" made Eugene eat a man's face, the press asks us to believe these drugs are disturbingly popular even though they commonly cause outbursts of vicious violence in otherwise pacific people. If that seems plausible to you, you may be qualified to write about drugs for a major news organization.

[nathanm]

And no, that is NOT my gun safe. 

I hope not. One could cut through that cable with a pair of electrician's pliers. You want something thick enough that the tool necessary to cut it will be both unwieldy and stupidly obvious to onlookers.

[Townsend]

So the guy who's face was eaten is up and walking around.

I'm trying to not see his "after".  If he gets on the morning shows I'm "The Most Dangerous Game"'ing Matt Lauer.

[patric]

MIAMI –  Authorities may never know why a Florida man viciously attacked and chewed on the face of an older homeless man in Miami last month after lab tests failed to find components of "bath salts" in the system of the assailant, who was killed by police.
Armando Aguilar, president of the Fraternal Order of Police, told CNN affiliate WPLG last month that he suspected Eugene was under the influence of "bath salts," a drug that contains synthetic stimulants that can "cause chest pains, increased blood pressure, increased heart rate, agitation, hallucinations, extreme paranoia and delusions," according to the National Institute of Drug Abuse.
An expert on toxicology testing said that marijuana alone wasn't likely to cause behavior as strange as Eugene's.

Maj. Delrish Moss, a spokesman for the Miami Police, said he hoped the medical examiner's report would end speculation that bath salts, a mind-altering hallucinogen, had possessed Eugene to attack Poppo.
Moss said he also hoped the ME's report would correct reports that official police department spokesmen — and not union officials — were the source of the bath salts rumors.
"The Miami police have never said bath salts," said Moss. "Al-Jazeera even called us on this. But we did not notice an uptick in the use of bath salts before this, and in fact I never heard the term before this."

[nathanm]

Sometimes, folks just aren't healthy in the head. If only all mental illness (or things that appeared to be mental illness) were caused by drugs. Life would be so much easier in that case.