From The Oregonian, March 22, 2005 – not available online

Ronald R. Riebling Jr. held an umbrella wrapped in a cloth when he came out of his ex-girlfriend’s duplex early Sunday. Portland Officer Terry Kruger thought the concealed object was a rifle and fired one shot, killing Riebling, police said Monday.

Kruger, a law enforcement sniper and member of the Portland Police Bureau’s Special Emergency Reaction Team, fired his M-16 rifle, striking Riebling, 40, in the head.

The shooting at 4:25 a.m. ended what began as a domestic dispute and turned into a hostage standoff in the 9600 block of Southeast Woodstock Boulevard. It was Kruger’s second fatal shooting in 16 years with the bureau.

Teresa Bartle, Riebling’s former girlfriend, called police at 1:32 a.m. and was outside when officers arrived. Her three children remained inside the duplex with Riebling during the standoff. None was injured.

The shooting occurred as SERT officers were taking position around the duplex, freeing up the East Precinct patrol officers who had surrounded the duplex immediately after the call.

In an interview with detectives Monday, Kruger said he saw Riebling come to the door of his ex-girlfriend’s unit holding what he thought was a rifle and swinging it in front of him “as if he was aiming at officers from the hip,” Sgt. Brian Schmautz said.

Riebling went back inside. SERT officers said they heard someone inside yell that Riebling had a gun. When Riebling stepped out again, Kruger saw Riebling turn toward him and raise the object to his shoulder as if he were aiming a rifle at him, Schmautz said.

A Multnomah County grand jury will hear the case next week. Kruger, 39, is off duty on paid administrative leave.

Riebling and Bartle had lived together at the duplex since Jan. 5 but recently broke up. Riebling had left the unit and knocked on neighbor Carol Bales‘ door about 10:30 p.m. Saturday.

Bales said Riebling smelled of alcohol, seemed depressed and complained that he had “just finished paying all the bills” and wanted his former girlfriend to stop nagging him. He asked whether Bales’ husband would go get a beer with him.

Instead, Riebling returned to Bartle’s unit and forced his way in, police said. As Bartle dialed 9-1-1, Riebling pulled the phone away, interrupting the call. Police raced to the unit, found Bartle outside and made phone contact with Riebling, who told them he had an assault rifle and was monitoring their activity on surveillance cameras he had around the home.

East Precinct acting Sgt. Scherise Bergstrom, a crisis-intervention team officer, stood outside, talking to Riebling by phone for more than two hours, police and witnesses said. Riebling said he wasn’t “going back to prison” and talked about blowing up the house and the block, police said.

Neighbors said they heard Bergstrom trying to persuade Riebling to let Bartle’s children — ages 12, 18 and 22 — out. At one point, the eldest walked out with his hands in the air, witnesses said.

At another point, Riebling stepped out and tried to smash the light fixture outside with his fist, said Aster Fenlon, who was watching from the house next door.

Police said they fired two beanbag rounds at Riebling with no effect, and he slipped back inside. Witnesses said that Riebling was inside before police fired and that the beanbag rounds missed.

Police activated the Special Emergency Response Team at 3:35 a.m. The SERT officers were told that Riebling had said he had a rifle and explosives. They also learned that three others, including his former girlfriend, said he had a gun, Schmautz said.

After the shooting, police found no weapons on Riebling or in the duplex.

Court records show Riebling had assault, drunken driving and drug convictions dating to 2001. He had been ordered to undergo domestic-violence and anger-management counseling, as well as mental health evaluations.

He had been on parole since his release from prison March 31 after serving time for fourth-degree assault, harassment and driving while intoxicated. In October 2002, he was arrested on an accusation that he struck his stepfather with a baseball bat in front of his 5-year-old son, according to court papers.

Beverly Reed, his mother, said Monday that she doesn’t understand why police killed her son. “I think the police department needs to have something in place where they train these officers to shoot below the belt and not to kill,” Reed said.

Schmautz said police are trained “to stop the threat.” Once the grand jury’s review is done, police will conduct an internal investigation and evaluate whether the officer acted according to police policy

In 1996, a Multnomah County grand jury concluded that Kruger was justified in using deadly force when he shot 20-year-old Deontae J. Keller in the back on Feb. 28 in North Portland.

Keller was suspected of involvement in a drive-by shooting that wounded a man. Less than an hour later, police pulled over the car Keller was driving. Police said he came out of the car with a gun, turned and ran. Kruger fired a single shot, killing him.

A federal lawsuit that Keller’s father, Joe Keller, filed against the city was dismissed.

From the New York Times, March 14, 2005.

Next to the old mortuary, where the dead were once washed and prepared for burial or cremation, is a locked room without a name.

Inside the room, in a dim and dusty corner of one of many abandoned buildings on the decaying campus of the Oregon State Hospital here, are 3,489 copper urns, the shiny metal dull and smeared with corrosion, the canisters turning green.

The urns hold the ashes of mental patients who died here from the late 1880′s to the mid-1970′s. The remains were unclaimed by families who had long abandoned their sick relatives, when they were alive and after they were dead.

The urns have engraved serial numbers pressed into the tops of the cans. The lowest number on the urns still stored in the room is 01, the highest 5,118. Over the decades, about 1,600 families have reclaimed urns containing their relatives’ ashes, but those left are lined up meticulously on wood shelves. Short strips of masking tape with storage information are affixed to each shelf: ”Vault #2, Shelf #36, plus four unmarked urns,” one piece of tattered tape says.

Most of the labels that once displayed the full names of the dead patients have been washed off by water damage or peeled away by time. Still, a few frayed labels are legible: among the urns stored on one shelf are a Bess, a Ben and an Andrew.

The cremains, as hospital officials refer to them, were as forgotten for more than a century as the patients inside the urns and have only recently caught the attention of Oregon lawmakers and mental health advocates, who on Monday were scheduled to gather here in Salem to discuss a privately financed memorial and proper burial ground for the urns. Officials at the hospital have access to medical records of the patients in the urns and are making a new effort to reach relatives.

”The story about the cremains is in large part a metaphor of what has happened here in terms of the mental health system,” said Dr. Marvin D. Fickle, the hospital’s superintendent, who took over last April. ”That is to say, this has been a system that has been largely ignored and left to its own resources for decades if not longer. And it has now deteriorated to the point where people feel embarrassed and ashamed. It is, of course, ironic that people, in essence, seem more concerned about the dead than the living.”

The fate of the unclaimed mirrors that of those who died over the last century in silence at scores of state mental hospitals across the country. Cemetery restoration or memorial projects have begun since the late 1990′s in at least 18 states, those involved in the projects say. They include one in Georgia, where up to 25,000 patients were buried in rows and rows of numbered graves without names over more than a century in Milledgeville at what is now Central State Hospital there.

In Oregon, hospital officials long knew the ashes were there, and they moved the collection of urns around the 144-acre grounds over the decades, they said, trying to find a better place for them than the storage room where they were shelved in 2000. But with recent public scrutiny of the state hospital’s many other troubles, the urns have now come out of a kind of haunting hiding.

The hospital opened in 1883 as the Oregon State Insane Asylum and was once a national model for mental health care. The 1975 movie ”One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” was filmed there. But when the nation’s state mental hospitals began to empty in the 1970′s as part of a nationwide effort to move patients out of hospitals and into community-based care, the Oregon hospital fell into deep disrepair and suffered from neglect.

Peter Courtney, a Democrat who is president of the Oregon State Senate and a leading critic of the hospital’s conditions, visited the room where the urns are kept last October.

”It was such a stark situation,” he recalled in an interview. ”I remember the day I asked for the key, we were in a tour group, and I had heard this room existed. It was an overcast, eerie day, and all of a sudden you’re in this little room and there they are.”

In the heyday of the Oregon State Hospital in the mid-1950′s, 3,100 patients were treated there, and the landscaped grounds were filled with flowers and ponds.

The hospital now houses about 730 patients in wards that patients and hospital officials say are overcrowded, drafty and decrepit. A majority of the patients were ordered there by the courts, in cases ranging from misdemeanors to murders.

Many of the patients are ready to leave, hospital officials say. But there are few places to send them, mostly, the officials say, because Medicaid cuts have sharply reduced financing of Oregon’s medical system and curtailed options for patients outside the hospital.

Some current patients say the urns, some of which contain the remains of bodies that were cremated after being buried on the hospital campus and later exhumed to make way for a new building, are an especially gruesome reminder that being mentally ill often means feeling neglected.

”If this had happened in a different situation, those remains wouldn’t have been disinterred and stuck on a shelf somewhere in a 123-year-old building,” said Richard Laing, a patient on Ward 50-I at the hospital. He said he was an alcoholic and was ordered, three years ago, to serve 10 years at the hospital after a drunken fight with his landlord. ”The system totally does not care about the patients. They just don’t care.”

Oregon mental health advocates, including Jason Renaud, who founded the Mental Health Association of Portland in January, with the question of how to memorialize the urns at the top of its agenda, have insisted that current and former hospital patients be included in the discussion of how to best pay tribute to the abandoned remains. But at least one former patient said the cremains should stay where they are, in deference to how those patients had truly lived and died — in obscurity.

”To me those cans are a very honest representation of where we were,” said Grace Heckenberg, an advocate who was a patient at the hospital in 1969 and 1970 and said she believes the ashes of one of her ward mates are in an unclaimed urn. ”And to take them out and put them out in some nice cemetery with a nice monument — it would just be a lie, a lie about my life, a lie about his life.”

Meanwhile, as word about the urns has spread, some families who believe their relatives might have died at the hospital have begun to contact hospital officials.

Among those remains claimed recently are those of Gustav E. Metzgus, a sheet metal worker who died of a heart attack on March 18, 1938, at the age of 74. He had spent less than a month there after relatives, concerned because he was wandering the streets and setting fires, committed him. His records describe his diagnosis as ”senility,” said Roseann Ismert, whose husband is the grandson of Mr. Metzgus.

In March, his relatives, who had lost track of his remains over the decades, contacted the hospital and collected his urn, No. 2203. It was a trip Mr. Metzgus’s relatives were too poor to make when he died at the tail end of the Depression, Mrs. Ismert said. On March 6, Mrs. Ismert took the canister with her to church to have it blessed.

Mrs. Ismert and her other relatives sent out a letter to their extended family, saying they had the urn and planned to bury Mr. Metzgus over Memorial Day Weekend at a cemetery near their home in Pistol River, Ore. A gravestone there already bears his name, though he was not buried. It is the same gravestone that marks the death of his wife, who died 30 years after he did.

The letter sent out in March to the family includes a picture of Mr. Metzgus as a young man. He was known in the family as Grandpa Gus.

The letter begins: ”What was lost has now been found.”

From The Oregonian, October 4, 2004

This series of articles, written largely by Steve Suo, illuminated and encouraged Oregon’s legal strategy toward addiction which uses institutional punishment approach versus a medical approach which might offer an individual’s recovery as a primary goal. As of Spring of 2011, Oregon’s strategy has had no affect on the number of arrests or convictions for drug possession or distribution, and has resulted in thousands of deaths, and billions of misspent tax dollars.

Day 1 – Invisible victories. The Achilles’ heel of the meth trade goes unrecognized.
Day 1 – Superlabs – Hidden powerhouses underlie meth’s ugly spread
Day 1 – Inside a superlab (PDF)
Day 1 – Home meth labs and superlabs compared (PDF)
Day 1 – Invisible victories – photo gallery (below)

Day 2 – Lobbyists and loopholes. Attempts to curtail sales of the two essential ingredients to make meth are hamstrung by lobbyists.
Day 2 – Lobbyists and loopholes – photo gallery

Day 3 – Token deterrent.
Day 3 – Token deterrent – photo gallery

Day 4 – Shelved solutions.
Day 4 – Shelved solutions – photo gallery

Day 5 – Child of the epidemic.
Day 5 – Child of the epidemic – photo gallery

READ – Letter of the law becomes law enforcement by letter, Oregonian
LISTEN – Interview with a meth addict – Steve Suo interviews E. J. Mabazzaa, a recovering meth user, at a rehab center in the Philippines.
WATCH – Special Report – Inside the superlab . Convicted drug trafficker Alex Hanson gives a tour of the abandoned house near Vancouver, B.C., where he says he worked with the crew of a methamphetamine superlab last spring. (12/2/06

GRAPHIC: Regional bias – meth versus cocaine (PDF) The politics of methamphetamine have been shaped by geography.

GRAPHIC: How legislation changed meth purity (PDF) The methamphetamine supply is uniquely susceptible to disruption by government, as revealed by changes in the drug’s purity over the past two decades.

GRAPHIC: Federal cases show shifting ingredients (PDF) The number of people charged with ephedrine smuggling or trafficking quarterly peaked in 1995, tapering off as tighter regulation of the meth ingredient drove traffickers to pseudoephedrine.

GRAPHIC: Meth abuse drops after restrictions on chemical ingredients (PDF) The two major declines in meth purity were matched by falling meth abuse. The chart shows three indicators: meth possession arrests; meth rehab patients; and meth-related traumas and overdoses.

GRAPHIC: Meth-related crimes drop after restrictions on chemical ingredients (PDF) In Oregon, police say identity theft, which often appears in crime reports as forgery or fraud, is overwhelmingly committed by meth users. These indicators also fell during periods when meth purity was falling.

GRAPHIC: Meth potency drops after restrictions on chemical ingredients (PDF) The chart shows the purity of meth, or how much the drug is diluted with additives.

GRAPHIC: The spread of meth (PDF) Methamphetamine abuse, as measured by the number of people entering rehab centers, spread eastward during the past decade while intensifying in the West.

GRAPHIC: Inside a superlab (PDF) Contrary to popular belief, most meth users do not operate meth labs. An estimated 80 percent of the U.S. supply comes instead from organized drug cartels, which manufacture meth for national distribution in a small number of massive California “superlabs.”

GRAPHIC: Home meth labs and superlabs compared (PDF)

Academic studies consulted, by topic

A. The demand for addictive drugs, economic studies

Becker, Gary S., and Murphy, Kevin M. “A Theory of Rational Addiction,” Journal of Political Economy, 96 (August 1988): 675-700.

Becker, G., Grossman, M., and Murphy, K. “An Empirical Analysis of Cigarette Addiction,” American Economic Review 84 (June 1994): 396-418.

Caulkins, Jonathan. “Estimating Elasticities of Demand for Cocaine and Heroin with DUF Data,” working paper, Carnegie Mellon University, August 1995.

Caulkins, Jonathan. “Drug Prices and Emergency Department Mentions for Cocaine and Heroin,” American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 91, No. 9 (September 2001): 1446-1448.

Grossman, Michael and Chaloupka, Frank J. “The Demand for Cocaine by Young Adults: A Rational Addict ion Approach.” Journal of Health Economics 17 (August 1998): 427-474.

Rhodes, William, Johnston, Patrick, Han, Song, McMullen, Quentin, and Hozik, Lynne. “Illicit Drugs: Price Elasticity of Demand and Supply.” Paper prepared for National Institute of Justice, Jan. 10, 2002. Link: http://www.abtassoc.com/reports/20008744845311.pdf

Van Ours, Jan C. “The Price Elasticity of Hard Drugs: The Case of Opium in the Dutch East Indies, 1923-1938.” Journal of Political Economy, 103 (April 1995): 261-279.

B. The demand for addictive drugs, animal studies

Bickel, Warren K., DeGrandpre, R.J., and Higgins, Stephen T. “The Behavioral Economics of Concurrent Drug Reinforcers: A Review and Reanalysis of Drug Self-Administration Research,” Psychopharmacology 118 (1995): 250-259.

Rowlett, J.K. “A Labor-Supply Analysis of Cocaine Self-Administration Under Progressive-Ratio Schedules: Antecedents, Methodologies and Perspectives,” Psychopharmacology 153 (Dec. 12, 2000): 1-16.

Mantsch, John R., Ho, Ann, Schlussman, Stefan D., and Kreek, Mary. “Predictable Individual Differences in the Initiation of Cocaine Self-Administration by Rats Under Extended-Access Conditions Are Dose-Dependent,” Psychopharmacology 157 (August 2001): 31-39.

Campbell, U.C., Thompson, Sherry S., and Carroll, Marilyn E. “Acquisition of Oral Phencyclidine (PCP) Self-Administration in Rhesus Monkeys: Effects of Dose and an Alternative Non-Drug Reinforcer,” Psychopharmacology 137 (May 5, 1998): 132-138.

Carroll, M.E. and Lac, Sylvie T. “Acquisition of IV Amphetamine and Cocaine Self-Administration in Rats as a Function of Dose,” Psychopharmacology 129 (Feb. 19, 1997): 206-214.

Donny, Eric C., Caggiula, A..R., Mielke, Michelle M., Jacobs, Kimberly S., Rose, Christine, and Sved Alan F. “Acquisition of Nicotine Self-Administration in Rats: the Effects of Dose, Feeding Schedule, and Drug Contingency,” Psychopharmacology 136 (Feb. 25, 1998): 83-90.

Woolverton, William L., English, Justin A., and Weed, Michael R. “Choice Between Cocaine and Food in a Discrete-Trials Procedure in Monkeys: A Unit Price Analysis,” Psychopharmacology 133 (1997): 269-274.

C. Drug abuse and crime

Boyum, David A., and Kleiman, Mark A.R. “Substance Abuse Policy from a Crime Control Perspective,” in the book “Crime,” edited by James Q. Wilson and Joan Petersilia (2001) 2nd edition.

Mocan, H. Naci, and Corman, Hope. “An Economic Analysis of Drug Use and Crime,” Journal of Drug Issues 28 (1998): 613-629.

Desimone, Jeff. “The Effect of Cocaine Prices on Crime,” Economic Inquiry 39 (Oct. 1, 2001): 627.

Corman, Hope, and Mocan, H. Naci. “A Time-Series Analysis of Crime, Deterrence, and Drug Abuse in New York City,” The American Economic Review 90 (June 2000): 584-604.

Donnelly, Neil, Weatherburn, Don, and Chilvers, Marilyn. “The Impact of the Australian Heroin Shortage on Robbery in NSW,” New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research Brief, March 2004. See www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au.

Smithson, M., McFadden, M., Mwesigye, S-E, and Casey T. “The Impact of Illicit Drug Supply Reduction on Health and Social Outcomes: The Heroin Shortage in the Australian Capital Territory,” Addiction 99 (March 2004): 340-348.

D. Impact of federal policies on the drug supply

Abt Associates Inc. “Measuring the Deterrent Effect of Enforcement Operations on Drug Smuggling, 1991-1999,” prepared for the Office of National Drug Control Policy, August 2001.

Reuter, Peter and Kleiman, Mark. “Risks and Prices: An Economic Analysis of Drug Enforcement,” Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, by N. Morris and M. Tonry (ed). University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1986.

Rydell, Peter C., Caulkins, Jonathan P., and Everingham, Susan S. “Enforcement or Treatment? Modeling the Relatively Efficacy of Alternatives for Controlling Cocaine,” Operations Research 44 (September-October 1996): 687-695.

E. Impact of chemical controls on meth use

Cunningham, James K., and Liu, Lon-Mu. “Impacts of federal ephedrine and pseudoephedrine regulatins on Methamphetamine-related Hospital Admissions,” Addiction 98 (September 2003): 1229-1237.

Web links

Title: Drug Availability Estimates in the United States
Source: Office of National Drug Control Policy, December 2002
Web version: Click here This link is no longer available (PDF)
Description: Provides estimates of the total supply of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine as well as the amount of diverted pseudoephedrine.

Title: Chemical Diversion and Synthetic Drug Manufacture
Source: Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Criminal Analysis Branch and Drug Enforcement Administration, Intelligence Division, June 2001.
Web version: Click here This link is no longer available (PDF)
Description: An early assessment of the smuggling of pseudoephedrine to the United States via Canada.

Title: Methamphetamine Precursor Chemical Control in the 1990s
Source: Gene R. Haislip, Drug Enforcement Administration, January 1996.
Web version: Click here This link is no longer available (PDF)
Description: Written by Gene Haislip at a time when ephedrine regulations were first having an effect and the switch to cooking meth with pseudoephedrine was underway.

Title: Chemical Handlers Manual: A Guide to Chemical Control Regulations
Source: U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, June 2002.
Description: The DEA’s own description of how it regulates the chemical trade.

Title: National Drug Threat Assessment 2004
Source: National Drug Intelligence Center, April 2004.
Web version: Click here
Description: Includes a chapter on methamphetamine that describes the current state of knowledge about patterns of methamphetamine production and distribution in the United States.

Title: US Patent 6,495,52: (-)-Pseudoephedrine as a sympathomimetic drug
Source: U.S. Patent Office, December 2002.
Web version: Click here This link is no longer available (PDF)
Description: Warner-Lambert Co.¹s patent on “minus” pseudoephedrine, a form that the patent claims has fewer side effects than current versions on the market and cannot be converted to methamphetamine.

Title: Primary Methamphetamine/Amphetamine Treatment Admissions 1992-2002
Source: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, September 2004.
Web version: Click here
Description: Describes the long-term growth in the number of rehab patients listing methamphetamine as their primary drug of abuse.

Title: Amphetamine and Methamphetamine Emergency Department Visits 1995-1992
Source: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, July 2004.
Web version: Click here This link is no longer available (PDF)
Description: Provides evidence of the eastward spread of methamphetamine abuse based on emergency room admissions for overdoses and traumas.

Title: Measuring the Deterrent Effect of Enforcement Operations on Drug Smuggling, 1991-1999.
Web version: Click here (4.70 MB PDF)
Description: Analyzes effect of major DEA operations against cocaine smuggling on cocaine prices in the United States. Finds a measurable impact for some but not others.

Title: Illicit Drugs: Price Elasticity of Demand and Supply
Source: Abt Associates Inc., February 2000.
Web version: Click here (PDF)
Description: Measures responsiveness of drug users to price changes in heroin, cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine.

Title: The impact of the Australian heroin shortage on robbery in NSW
Source: New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research
Web version: Click here This link is no longer available (PDF)
Description: Report a decline in robberies in New South Wales following a recent shortage of heroin there.

Title: National Drug Control Strategy, FY2005 Budget Summary
Source: White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, March 2004
Web version: Click here This link is no longer available (PDF)
Description: Line by line breakdown of what the federal government spends on drug policies, from treatment to the State Department’s Andean Counterdrug Initiative in Latin America.

Title: Stronger Crackdown Needed on Clandestine Laboratories Manufacturing Dangerous Drugs
Source: Comptroller General of the United States, November 1981.
Web version: Click here (PDF)
Description: A 1981 critique of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s efforts to combat synthetic drugs like methamphetamine, including control of chemical ingredients.

Title: Review Of The Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) Control Of The Diversion Of Controlled Pharmaceuticals
Source: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Inspector General, September 2002
Web version: Click here This link is no longer available (PDF)
Description: Internal Justice Department critique of how the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration deals with illicit diversion of pharmaceutical drugs and of chemical drug ingredients from the legitimate marketplace.

Title: Drug Control: DEA’s Strategies and Operations in the 1990s
Source: U.S. General Accounting Office, July 1999.
Web version: Click here This link is no longer available (PDF)
Description: A 1999 audit that found the DEA had failed to implement performance targets that would allow anyone to assess its progress against illegal drugs.

Title: Report of the Drug Control Research, Data and Evaluation Committee
Source: White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Web version: Click here This link is no longer available (PDF)
Description: Discusses the types of data that are available to evaluate the changing scope of drug abuse nationally.

Title: Performance and Management Assessments, 2004
Source: White House Office of Management and Budget, 2004.
Web version: Click here This link is no longer available (PDF)
Description: Concludes that “DEA is unable to demonstrate its progress in reducing the availability of illegal drugs in the U.S.

Title: Performance and Management Assessments, 2005
Source: White House Office of Management and Budget, 2005.
Web version: Click here This link is no longer available (PDF)
Description: Finds that DEA made “progress achieving its performance goals,” but says problems remain.