"Although it's filthy now, this place has been filthier"

Crack users openly suck on glass pipes, gang members deal drugs on sidewalks and streets are speckled with human feces.

Yet the Los Angeles Police Department and some people who live and work on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles _ the city with the nation's largest population of homeless people _ say that crime is dropping and that the streets are safer and cleaner than they were just two years ago.

They credit the turnaround to a police crackdown launched 18 months ago and call it a rare success in dealing with homelessness, one of the most troubling social problems facing urban areas nationwide. Read more

"These are clearly difficult questions for which there are no easy answers"

The government is evaluating a new version of OxyContin -- the potent painkiller sometimes called "hillbilly heroin" -- designed to be harder to abuse.

A plastic-like coating fuses to the tablet, making it harder to crush -- and turning into a gooey mess if abusers try to inject it, maker Purdue Pharma LP said in documents released by the Food and Drug Administration Thursday.

The FDA will ask its scientific advisers on Monday if the reformulated drug seems tamper-resistant enough to allow on the market, before the required long-term studies are done to see if the changes thwart at least some abuse. Read more

Hi I'm Rebecca Field with today's UPI entertainment update on this Wednesday, April 30, 2008. via ClipSyndicate

A 12-year-old girl died of a methadone overdose after taking pills she bought from a 15-year-old boy, authorities said.

The boy has been charged as a juvenile with criminally negligent homicide, criminal sale of a controlled substance and endangering the welfare of a child, his lawyer said Wednesday.

The boy took the pills - knowing what they were - from his father's drawer March 10 and brought them to the girl, Dana Marie Regan, police youth investigator Charles Lopez testified Wednesday in Family Court in Westchester County. Methadone is best known as a prescription drug that curbs heroin addiction, but it increasingly is prescribed as a painkiller. Read more

"It really is all about the money. It's phenomenal."

Officers fighting networks of indoor marijuana factories took out what they called a major operation Wednesday in a secluded back room of a house where a nice older lady sold ice cream to kids.

The raid targeted a sophisticated pot-growing operation that could net more than $300,000 a year, authorities said. The woman, Juana Betancourt, sat drinking coffee, appearing calmly resigned to the bust, as local police and federal agents carted away the crop. She wouldn't comment.

Bad luck found Betancourt on a quiet suburban street, the kind that often leaves neighbors dumbfounded when officers show up. Read more