(Reuters) - Teen heartthrob Justin Bieber has opened up about his past heavy drug abuse, calling it an escape from the pressures of fame that he decided to stop only when he felt he was dying.
Bieber, 25, has written on social media in the past year about his struggles with depression, drugs and fame, but he went into detail on camera for the first time in a documentary series about his life.
Bieber said he started using marijuana when he was about 13, the age at which he rose to fame as a baby-faced singer in Canada. He soon moved onto other substances, including ecstasy, psychedelic mushrooms, pills and alcohol.
“People don’t know how serious it got. It was legit crazy scary. I was waking up in the morning and the first thing I was doing was popping pills and smoking a blunt and starting my day. It just got scary,” Bieber said in the latest episode of his YouTube documentary, “Justin Bieber: Seasons,” released on Monday.
“I decided to stop because I was like, dying. My security and stuff would come into my room at night to check my pulse,” he recalled.
Bieber said that like other young people, he was experimenting and using drugs to escape. “But my experience was in front of cameras and I had a different level of exposure. I had a lot of money and a lot of things,” he said.
The 10-part documentary chronicles the making of the Canadian singer’s first album in four years, as well as giving fans glimpses of his private life with his new wife, model Hailey Baldwin, and other family members. It follows a long period out of the public eye after Bieber abruptly pulled out of his “Purpose” world tour in 2017, citing the need for rest.
Bieber’s new album, “Changes,” will be released on Feb. 14, followed by a North American tour starting in May.
Reporting by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Leslie Adler
The U.S. Justice Department announced Tuesday the indictment of two Chinese producers of fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that causes a rising share of the country's 60,000-plus annual overdose deaths.
But questions remained over whether the Trump administration will go after the US makers and distributors of legal opioids that have fuelled the nation's addiction crisis.
Early Tuesday President Donald Trump's nominee to head the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Congressman Tom Marino, withdrew after news reports tied him to legislation that protected prescription drug distributors from prosecution for indiscriminately dumping hundreds of millions of tablets of highly addictive opioids like Oxycodone into the U.S. market.
"Rep. Tom Marino has informed me that he is withdrawing his name from consideration as drug czar. Tom is a fine man and a great Congressman!" Trump tweeted.
Legal and illegal synthetic opioids were behind most of the 64,000 drug overdose deaths across the country in 2016, a record level expected to further rise this year.
US Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said Tuesday that 20,000 of those deaths resulted from fentanyl that is cheap to manufacture and is up to 50 times more potent than heroin.
With the supply of prescription opioids on the market cut back in the past two years, addicts have turned to the cheapest alternative, fentanyl or heroin cut with fentanyl.
Two Chinese, Zhang Jian and Yan Xiaobing, were indicted for supplying two separate distribution networks with fentanyl, one of them also operating in Canada.
They said Yan operated at least two chemical plants in China able to produce fentanyl by the tonne. Yan could allegedly alter the chemical makeup of the fentanyl to evade U.S. laws, and had at least 100 distributors working for him.
US officials alleged Zhang had four fentanyl-producing laboratories and sold the drug over the Internet, paid for by crypto-currencies and shipped by international parcel services.
Zhang and Yan "represent one of the most significant drug threats facing the country -- overseas organized crime group capable of producing nearly any synthetic drug imaginable," said DEA Acting Administrator Robert Patterson.
US officials would not say if the two traffickers had been arrested or their plants shut by the Chinese authorities.
Tuesday's announcement came days after The Washington Post and 60 Minutes reported on how intensive lobbying in Congress by producers of prescription opioids and the support of a few legislators including Marino led to a 2016 law that weakened DEA efforts to crack down on them and prevent their drugs from hitting the streets.
Patterson insisted that the DEA has not let up on policing the industry and has the tools to do so, but would not say if the agency was investigating any of the major prescription opioid distributors.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
WASHINGTON - Drug manufacturer Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals was fined $35 million Tuesday for supplying and not reporting suspicious massive orders of its highly addictive oxycodone, helping to fuel the US addiction crisis.
The Justice Department said the company agreed to pay the amount to settle allegations that it did not meet obligations to report to the Drug Enforcement Administration suspect orders from pharmacies in Florida and elsewhere.
Mallinckrodt, which manufactures drugs in the United States but keeps its corporate headquarters in London, has been under investigation since 2011 by the DEA for shipping huge amounts of oxycodone via distributors to small communities that could not possibly generate demand.
The barely controlled pumping of hundreds of millions of doses of opioids into US communities by major drug manufacturers during the past decade is blamed for a sharp surge in addiction and overdose deaths which totaled an estimated 60,000 last year.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a speech Tuesday that the United States "has paid an increasingly high price for drug abuse. We have paid for it in broken relationships and broken lives and death rates the likes of which we have never seen before."
"Mallinckrodt's actions and omissions formed a link in the chain of supply that resulted in millions of oxycodone pills being sold on the street," he said in a separate statement on the settlement.
The $35 million settlement was equivalent to 7.2 percent of the company's 2016 net profits.
In a statement, the company said it disagreed with the government's allegations and denied it violated any laws.
"We are proud of the fact that Mallinckrodt has long been an industry leader in actively combating the serious issue of prescription drug abuse," said the company's general counsel Michael-Bryant Hicks.
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source: news.abs-cbn.com
