Two people have been arrested after drugs worth thousands of pounds were seized in Aberdeen.
Crack cocaine with a street value of about £14,000 was recovered by police in the Torry area.
A 44-year-old local woman and a 37-year-old man from Birmingham were detained.
A Grampian Police spokesperson said they were expected to appear from custody at Aberdeen Sheriff Court on Wednesday.

CHICAGO, Jan 22 (Reuters) – Users of Alli, the first
weight-loss drug approved for sale over-the-counter in the
United States, are finding what they likely suspected all
along: pills are no magic substitute for diet and exercise.
Yet as Americans engage in the New Year’s tradition of
resolving to shed pounds, the market for diet aids is expected
to remain firm, even as the economy is mired in recession.
Americans spend $30 billion a year on weight-loss products
and services, and two-thirds of the population is overweight or
obese.
GSK.L
), a lower-strength version of
Roche’s (
ROG.VX
) prescription-only Xenical, created’ a stir
when it was approved 18 months ago.
Since then, it has become known for its unpleasant side
effects, including incontinence, diarrhea and flatulence with
“oily spotting.”
“It works to inhibit absorption of fat from our diet.
Therefore the fat comes out in the stool, causing diarrhea,
which patients don’t like much,” said Shirley TerMolen, a
Chicago internist.
Because the side effects result from eating too much fat,
TerMolen noted that some of her colleagues use the drug to help
patients modify their behavior.
TerMolen said she has prescribed the drug but has not seen
a lot of success. “For most people, they’re just looking for a
shortcut instead of just eating better and exercising,” she
said. 

One in seven Americans under age 65 went without prescribed medicines in 2007 as drug costs spiraled upward in the United States, a nonprofit research group said on Thursday.
That figure is up substantially since 2003, when one in 10 people under 65 went without a prescription drug because they couldn’t afford it, according to the Center for Studying Health System Change in Washington, D.C.
The current figure may be even higher because of the recent economic downturn, said Laurie E. Felland, a senior health researcher at the center and lead author of the study.
“Our findings are particularly troublesome given the increased reliance on prescription drugs to treat chronic conditions,” she added. “People who go without their
experience worsening health and complications.”
The people who were least able to afford medicine were often those who needed it most, Ms. Felland said: uninsured, working-age adults suffering from at least one chronic medical condition. Almost two-thirds of them in the survey said they had gone without filling a prescription.
provided by their employers were affected: one in 10 working-age Americans with employer-sponsored coverage went without a prescription medication in 2007, up from 8.7 percent in 2003, the study found.
Among low-income Americans, three in 10 said they had been unable to fill a prescription because of cost, and nearly one in four adults on
or state insurance programs said they’d had difficulty affording drugs.
Ms. Felland said a number of factors contributed to the trend, including rising drug prices, the tendency of physicians to prescribe drugs more frequently, the introduction of expensive new specialty medications, and skimpier drug coverage that shifts a greater share of costs onto patients.
“Insurance coverage offers less financial protection against out-of-pocket costs than it did in the past,” she said.
The study was based on results from the 2007 Health Tracking Household Survey, a nationally representative telephone survey of 10,400 adults under age 65, many of whom also discussed affordability of medications for their 2,600 children. Participants were asked whether there was a time in the previous 12 months when “you needed prescription medicines but didn’t get them because you couldn’t afford it.”
Overall, 5 percent of children didn’t have prescriptions filled in 2007 because of cost, up from 3.1 percent in 2003, and 17.8 percent of working-age adults couldn’t afford drugs in 2007, up from 13.8 percent in 2003, the survey found. That translates into about 36.1 million Americans under 65 who were affected, according to the study.
Karen Davis, president of the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation that researches health care issues, said the new study confirms previous Commonwealth studies. In 2007, nearly two-thirds of U.S. adults, or an estimated 116 million people, struggled to pay medical bills, went without needed care because of cost, were uninsured for a time or were underinsured, according to the foundation.
“It has become a middle class problem,” she added, noting that improving health coverage is an integral part of economic recovery.
“It’s not enough just to help people have jobs,” she said. “They need to have adequate coverage, so they can get care when they need it and pay the bills they incur when they do seek care.”

ATLANTA – People who get multiple doses of pain medicine for the same complaint would have a tougher time going undetected under legislation designed to create a statewide drug database.
Rep. Ron Stephens, R-Savannah, introduced House Bill 273, the Georgia Prescription Monitoring Program Act to make it easier to spot cases where people have gotten multiple prescriptions for federally controlled pain medications.
It’s designed to catch two kinds of situations, from either the same physician or from multiple doctors. One situation is where an unprofessional doctor over-prescribes powerful painkillers, as in the case of professional wrestler Chris Benoit who killed his family and himself due to drug overdose. That Carrollton physician pleaded guilty in federal court last week. A second situation is where someone goes to multiple doctors with the same complaint of pain so each writes a prescription.
Some of the people getting multiple prescriptions are abusing the drugs themselves. Some are selling the drugs, experts say.
Because 32 states – many surrounding Georgia – already operate prescriptions databases, Georgia is vulnerable to abuses, said Jim Bracewell, executive vice president of the Georgia Pharmacy Association which supports the bill.
“We know that people are crossing the lines from those states to have suspicious or perhaps illegal prescriptions filled in Georgia,” he said.
Stephens, who owns a pharmacy, sees the bill from a humanitarian perspective.
“It will save people’s lives,” he said. “… We’ll be able to help people that are going down an addictive path.”
State inspectors have the authority to review prescriptions manually, he said, but their staff of eight would benefit from the instant access an electronic database would provide.
walter.jones@morris.com, (404) 589-8424

A Beverly Hills man is in jail following a search warrant for drugs executed at his home on Friday.
Arrested was Enrico Desmond Atkins, 24, of 30 N. Desoto St., Beverly Hills, a convicted felon.
According to the arrest report, the Citrus County Sheriff’s Office had received information that Atkins’ home was a center of drug activity, and executed a search warrant at Atkins’ rented home. During a search of the home, the CCSO Emergency Response Team found, among other things, two baggies of crack cocaine weighing about 2.5 grams each, drug paraphernalia, bulletproof vest, a .12-gauge short-barrelled shotgun, AK-47 type assault rifle, a semi-automatic .380 pistol and digital scales.
According to CCSO records, Atkins is on felony probation until 2013 for possession of a controlled substance with the intent to sell. As a convicted felon, Atkins is not allowed to possess a firearm.
During the search, the arrest report says, Atkins denied having any drugs, that a gun in a closet belonged to his brother, that he didn’t sell drugs anymore and that cocaine deputies had found must have been left there by other people who had been in and out of the home on previous occasions.
Atkins was arrested and taken to the Citrus County Detention Facility, where he was booked on charges of possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, possession of short-barrel rifle/shotgun or machine gun, possession of a bulletproof vest, possession of drug paraphernalia and possession with the intent to sell a controlled substance.
Bond was set at $42,500.

WASHINGTON (AP) — California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is no stranger to athletic competition — or to steroids. And the former champion bodybuilder says there’s no place for drugs in sports these days.
Schwarzenegger says top athletes are inspirations to young people and to people trying to lose weight and stay fit.
The former action star says competition drives athletes to use drugs. His advice: “Come out, be clean and say, ‘Look, I used that, I made a mistake.’”
In an appearance Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” the California Republican added that not using drugs or alcohol should always be a part of the message aimed at children in sports.
Schwarzenegger has said in the past that he used steroids in his bodybuilding days, long before they became illegal without a prescription.

Pharmaceutical industry officials in Kenya estimate that at least 40 percent of the drugs sold in the East African nation are counterfeit, with anti-malarial drugs being especially susceptible to being faked.
Patients continue to be sick or can even die as a result of taking counterfeit drugs, most are believed to originate from China and India.
For more, click on video link.

Eating more fruits and vegetables, cutting down on calories and carbohydrates and increasing exercise are all-important parts of any healthy diet. But according to new research at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, a low-carbohydrate diet burns more excess liver fat than a low-calorie diet.
Researchers in the small clinical study found that people on low-carbohydrate diets are more dependent on the oxidation of fat in the liver for energy than those on a low-calorie diet.
These findings could have implications for treating obesity and other related diseases like diabetes, insulin resistance and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, says Dr. Jeffrey Browning assistant professor in the UT Southwestern Advanced Imaging Research Center and of internal medicine at the medical center and the study’s lead author.
“Instead of looking at drugs to combat obesity and the diseases that stem from it, maybe optimizing diet cannot only manage and treat these diseases, but also prevent them,” Dr. Browning says.
Glucose, a form of sugar, and fat are both sources of energy that are metabolized in the liver and used as energy in the body. For participants on the low-calorie diet, they received 40 percent of their glucose from glycogen, which comes from ingested carbohydrates and is stored in the liver until the body needs it. However, the low-carbohydrate dieters only received 20 percent of their glucose from glycogen. Instead of using their glycogen reserve, the subjects burned excess liver fat for energy.
“Energy production is expensive for the liver,” Dr. Browning says. “It appears that for the people on a low-carbohydrate diet, in order to meet that expense, their livers have to burn excess fat. Understanding how the liver makes glucose under different dietary conditions may help us better regulate metabolic disorders with diet.”
Although the original study was not designed to determine the effectiveness of one diet over the other, the average weight loss for low-calorie eaters was about five pounds, compared to nine and a half pounds for low-carbohydrate dieters. Results indicated that participants on the low-carbohydrate diet increased fat burning throughout the entire body.