"Health & Medical News"

A Texas middle-school student found sniffing a teacher’s alcohol-based hand sanitizer was not committing a crime, prosecutors in Denton County have ruled.

The Dallas Morning News reported Jan. 26 that the 15-year-old seventh-grader at Killian Middle School in Lewisville picked up a bottle of hand sanitizer from a teacher’s desk, rubbed it on his hands, and sniffed it. The boy was sent to the principal’s office, subjected to in-school suspension, and then referred to police on suspicion that he was inhaling the gel to get high.

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Texas is the only state in the U.S. that still does not have a needle-exchange program, but one 73-year-old lay chaplain is risking arrest to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS among drug users, the Los Angeles Times reported Jan. 28.

Bill Day, who has AIDS and heads the Bexar Area Harm Reduction Coalition, was recently arrested and faces up to a year in prison for distributing clean needles to addicts. But Day says the ban on needle-exchange programs is immoral and that he will continue his work.

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A $2-million state appropriation to pay for a controversial addiction treatment regimen is now being reexamined by Texas officials, the Dallas Morning News reported Jan. 20.

Texas Rep. Jerry Madden, chairman of the House Corrections Committee, requested the funding for Prometa, a cocktail of drugs touted as a treatment for methamphetamine and other drug addiction but not backed by much research or Food and Drug Administration approval.

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Hoping to encourage more students to call for help when they or friends get in trouble with alcohol, the University of Texas is promising not to punish callers or victims even if they are underage, Fox News reported Jan. 15.

“Students are going to drink, and especially students who are not seasoned drinkers are going to put themselves at risk, so my belief is that it removes one barrier to saving a life,” said Chuck Roper, head of the school’s alcohol and drug education program.

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A Texas law that went into effect on Sept. 1 allows police to write tickets for misdemeanor marijuana possession rather than arresting and imprisoning offenders, but so far few jurisdictions appear to be embracing the law, the Dallas Morning News reported Dec. 31.

Lawmakers hoped the law would help ease jail overcrowding, but only one county?  has adopted it, and officials in others say they don’t have procedures for processing the misdemeanor citations and don’t plan to develop any.

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Texas Medical Board leaders hope to have a new process next year to handle minor violations that some physicians complain cost them too much time and money to resolve.

If the plan is approved by the board after hearings, violations such as failure to release medical records would be handled in a streamlined process, likely within 30 to 60 days.

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Lawmakers have touted restrictions on sales of cold medicines containing ephedrine as a necessary price for preventing homegrown methamphetamine labs, but Texas officials say police aren’t following through on monitoring sales of medications that could be used to make meth.

The Austin American-Statesman reported Nov. 4 that Texas and federal law requires that buyers of drugs containing ephedrine and pseudoephedrine — which can be used to make meth — must sign a log detailing their purchase. The log is intended to prevent multiple purchases of the drug, but many police and sheriffs agencies now say they don’t have time to review the records, blaming the absence of a centralized database of the information.

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