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Disposition of Toxic Drugs & Chemicals in Man | Pentobarbital

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Occurrence and Usage. Pentobarbital (pentobarbitone, Nembutal) is a very popular short-acting barbiturate derivative first prepared in 1930. The drug is available alone and in combination with other agents in amounts of 15-200 mg for oral, intramuscular, or rectal administration. It is supplied as the racemic mixture in the form of both the free acid and the sodium salt, the latter being strongly alkaline in aqueous solution.

Blood Concentrations. After a 5-minute intravenous infusion of 50 mg, plasma concentrations in 5 subjects averaged 1.18 mg/L (range, 1.05-1.33) at 0.08 hours, declining to 0.54 mg/L by 1 hour and 0.27 mg/L by 24 hours (Smith et al., 1973). Plasma concentrations averaged 3 mg/L at 6 minutes after intravenous injection of 100 mg of pentobarbital to 7 volunteers and fell to 1.6 mg/L by 1 hour, when they began to decline with a half-life of 22 hours (Ehrnebo, 1974). A single oral dose of 100 mg produced Occurrence and Usage. Pentobarbital (pentobarbitone, Nembutal) is a very popular short-acting barbiturate derivative first prepared in 1930. The drug is available alone and in combination with other agents in amounts of 15-200 mg for oral, intramuscular, or rectal administration. It is supplied as the racemic mixture in the form of both the free acid and the sodium salt, the latter being strongly alkaline in aqueous solution.

Blood Concentrations. After a 5-minute intravenous infusion of 50 mg, plasma concentrations in 5 subjects averaged 1.18 mg/L (range, 1.05-1.33) at 0.08 hours, declining to 0.54 mg/L by 1 hour and 0.27 mg/L by 24 hours (Smith et al., 1973). Plasma concentrations averaged 3 mg/L at 6 minutes after intravenous injection of 100 mg of pentobarbital to 7 volunteers and fell to 1.6 mg/L by 1 hour, when they began to decline with a half-life of 22 hours (Ehrnebo, 1974). A single oral dose of 100 mg produced...

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Disposition of Toxic Drugs & Chemicals in Man | Cocaine

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Occurrence and Usage. Cocaine is the most potent of the naturally occurring central nervous system stimulants. The compound is found in the leaves of Erythroxylon coca, a South American shrub, in amounts of up to 2% by weight. It was first isolated in pure form in 1855, and has been widely utilized in medicine as a local anesthetic and increasingly by drug abusers for its stimulant properties. For anesthetic uses cocaine is administered topically as the hydrochloride in 1%-4% solutions for ophthalmological procedures and in 10%-20% solutions for the membranes of the nose and throat. When self-administered it is commonly taken as the hydrochloride by nasal insufflation or intravenous injection or as the free base by smoking, in doses of 10-120 mg.

Blood Concentrations. The chewing of powdered coca leaves containing 17-48 mg of cocaine produced peak plasma concentrations of 0.011-0.149 mg/L within 0.4-2 hours in 6 volunteers (Holmstedt et al., 1979). A 2 mg/kg (140 mg/ 70 kg) intranasal application of

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Bringing Science To Digital Forensics With Standardized Forensic Corpora

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1. Introduction

Much of the work to date in digital forensics has focused on data extraction and for presentation in courts. Researchers have developed technologies for copying data from subject hard drives, storing that data in a disk image file, searching the disk image for document files, and presenting the documents to an examiner. As both the variety and scale of forensic investigations increase, forensic practitioners need tools that do more than search and present: they need tools for reconstruction, analysis, clustering, data mining, and sense-making. Such tools frequently require the development of new scientific techniques in areas such as text mining, machine learning, visualization, and related fields. One of the hallmarks of science is the ability for researchers to perform controlled and repeatable experiments that produce reproducible results. Science is based on the principle that phenomena can be observed and results can be reproduced by any one there are no privileged experimenters or observers (given sufficient training and financial resources, of course)...

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Social Psychology and the Law

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In 1984, a 22-year-old college student named Jennifer Thompson was raped at knife point by an intruder in her apartment. Despite the terror and pain of being raped, Jennifer was determined to bring the rapist to justice. She paid careful attention to the man’s facial features, hair, and identifying marks, trying to commit them to memory so that she could identify the man later. Based on her memories, Jennifer identified a man in a police photo as her rapist. Jennifer felt completely confident that this man, Ronald Junior Cotton, was the man who had raped her.Jennifer was confident enough to pick Cotton out of a lineup of possible suspects. In fact, she was so confident that she testified against Cotton in a criminal trial.

Although Cotton maintained his innocence, the trial ended in a guilty verdict, and Cotton was sentenced to life in prison. However, the case took a surprising turn when another prison inmate named Bobby Poole began bragging that he actually had been...

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Best Practice Recommendations for Eyewitness Evidence Procedures

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Abstract

This article provides “best practice ” recommendations for collecting and preserving evidence using eyewitness identification procedures. Suggested procedures are based on decades of social science research as well as the recommended practices found in the recent report on the Robert Sophonow case in Manitoba and in a 1999 U.S. National Institute of Justice document distributed to all police services in the U.S. These recommendations currently guide training programs for several police services in Canada, the U.S., and around the world, and experienced criminal investigators will recognize many of the procedures as practices they have employed in their own cases. The overarching goal of this article is to accumulate these recommendations in one place in order to allow investigators to take advantage of them and achieve a maximal level of accurate eyewitness identifications while minimizing the rate of inaccurate choices.

New Ideas for the Oldest Way to Solve a Case

Criminal investigators know that it often takes many pieces of converging evidence to solve a complex case....

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Propofol Sedation: Who Should Administer?

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PROBLEM: Using propofol (DIPRIVAN) to sedate patients during endoscopic and other diagnostic procedures is gaining momentum in a growing number of hospitals, outpatient surgery centers, and physician offices.1 In trained hands, propofol offers many advantages over other drugs used for sedation because it: Has a rapid onset (about 40 seconds) and a short duration of action Allows patients to wake up, recover, and return to baseline activities and diet sooner than some other sedation agents Reduces the need for opioids, thus resulting in less nausea and vomiting.2 Trained nurses in most critical care settings often administer propofol safely to patients who are intubated and ventilated. However, some practitioners have been lulled into a false sense of security, allowing the drug’s good safety profile to influence their beliefs that propofol is safer than it really is. In untrained hands, propofol can be dangerous, even deadly; administration to a nonventilated patient by a practitioner who is not trained in theuse of drugs that can cause deep sedation and...

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Information Attracts Attention: A Probabilistic Account of the Cross-Race Advantage in Visual Search

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Abstract

People are better at recognizing faces from their own race than from different races (Shapiro & Penrod, 1986; Bothwell, Brigham, & Malpass, 1989), an effect commonly known as the other-race effect. The causes of this effect have been attributed to the fact that people have more experience with faces from their own race during development (Feingold, 1914; Chance, Turner, & Goldstein, 1982; Shepard, 1981; Valentine, Chiroro, & Dixon, 1995). However, in visual search tasks, cross-race (CR) faces are found faster than same-race (SR) faces (Levin, 1996, 2000). This advantage of CR faces in visual search tasks seems at first to be inconsistent with the advantage of the SR face in recognition tasks. To account for this discrepancy, Levin proposed that there is a race feature, which is active only for CR faces. By explicitly assuming this feature, the face search data fits into a visual search paradigm in which the search asymmetry can be explained. In this paper, we will present an alternate

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Criminal Groups and Transnational Illegal Markets

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Abstract

In the study of organised crime, the traditional view of criminal groups as centrally controlled organisations has been replaced by the notion of criminal networks. However, little use has been made of concepts and theories of social networks that have developed in other social sciences. This paper uses concepts from social network theory to describe and tentatively explain differences in social organisation between criminal groups that perform three types of transnational illegal activities: smuggling and large-scale heroine trading, trafficking in women, and trading stolen cars. Groups that operate in the large-scale heroin market tend to be close-knit, cohesive and ethnically homogenous. Groups active in the trafficking of women have a chain structure, while those that operate in the market for stolen cars are characterised by three clusters of offenders in a chain. Both groups are less cohesive than criminal groups in the large-scale heroin market. The differences in social organisation between the three types of illegal activities appear to be related to the legal...

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Contract Killings in Australia

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Introduction

The typical homicide in Australia is that of a male aged in his early to mid thirties who in an uncontrollable rage following some type of menial argument stabs another person, usually another male friend or acquaintance, to death. In such one-on-one interactions, the lethal outcome is rarely premeditated, but rather the spontaneous overreaction to a conflict situation. Moreover, there is the direct link between the victim and offender and most importantly, why the offender may have wanted to kill the victim. Important in understanding the context of homicide are the many reasons or motives associated with it, as well as the offender-victim relationship (Mouzos 2000; Polk 1994; Wolfgang 1958). Often a reason or motive can be derived from the offender-victim relationship. A proven motive, whilst not necessary to secure a conviction for murder, provides a sound basis for proving intent to kill and for contextualising the crime. Similar to the scenario described above, a traditional notion of homicide invokes the thought of ...

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Afro-Lineal Organized Crime

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INTRODUCTION

The public, media, and even most law enforcement officials, have traditionally associated the term “organized crime” with Italian ethnic criminal syndicates, commonly called La Cosa Nostra (LCN) or the Mafia. To counter this narrow point of view, the State Commission of Investigation (SCI or Commission) has, for some time, emphasized that LCN, while a serious problem, represents only part of the organized underworld which preys on New Jersey and the rest of the country. Among the criminal groups which should receive more attention than they have in the past are those of African ethnic background. Such Afro-lineal organized crime -- composed exclusively or predominantly of persons of African ancestry -- includes criminal syndicates of African-Americans, Jamaicans, Nigerians and others. The neglect of this problem stems, in part, from the erroneous stereotype that African ethnic groups lack the stability to organize and are not capable of structuring a syndicate of any consequence. In addition, law enforcement resources are limited, and they have been devoted...

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