Killing the buzz of painkiller addicts, the Madness wraps up and I revel in the news of a Turkish coup

- Attention all painkiller abusers out there: The Food and Drug Administration is looking to kill your buzz. The FDA is targeting the popular pankiller known as OxyContin. The drug is being reformulated, according to an FDA release. In its current form, OxyContin is designed to release small quantities of the active ingredients over an extended period of time. However, drug addicts are nothing if not resourceful when it comes to getting their fix and they have found ways to circumvent the drug’s time-release properties and distribute large quanitites of the drug into their body all at once. This new version of OxyContin, approved Monday by the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and research, would “prevent the opioid medication from being cut, broken, chewed, crushed or dissolved to release more medication.” Making the drug impossible to inject or snort is great, but experts say that addicts who ingest the drug orally would potentially still be able to achieve similar highs by taking more of the drug. “Although this new formulation of OxyContin may provide only an incremental advantage over the current version of the drug, it is still a step in the right direction,” said Bob Rappaport, M.D., director of the Division of Anesthesia and Analgesia Products in the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research in the agency’s press release. Stats from the FDA release state that in 2008, nearly half a million people abused OxyContin for the first time, which doesn’t even account for the addicts out there who have been getting their painkiller fix on for many years now. Heck, current and former professional athletes (Brett Favre) have admitted to OxyContin addictions in the past after initially taking it to recover from injuries and surgeries. This is a very real and significant threat, much more of a problem than the perceived crisis with harmless stoners in this country who just want to lay around, get baked and eat salty snack foods. Way to step up and address a real issue, FDA…………..

- With the best opening day in memory and one of the best championship games anyone can remember seeing, this year’s just-concluded NCAA tournament could well be the best of the modern era of basketball - and should remain that way for a long, long time. With the tools who run the NCAA set to selfishly ($$$$$$) expand the tournament field from 65 to 96 teams next season, the event is going to become a bloated, diluted version of its former self and may never approach the fervor and excitement we’ve come to expect from it each March/early April. Although I would have loved to see Butler win last night’s title game for its first-ever national championship, even I can’t dispute that both teams played a great game. Duke did just enough to win the title and earned every bit of that championship trophy, no doubt. But the greatness of this year’s even extends all the way back to the first day, when Murray State stunned Vanderbilt on a true buzzer-beater, Villanova needed a furious rally and dubious officiating to over come No. 15 seed Robert Morris and BYU outdueled Florida in a double-overtime thriller for the ages. Every round had memorable moments, perhaps none more so than the second round, when ninth-seeded Northern Iowa stunned overall top seed Kansas. Four teams seeded ninth or lower advanced to the Sweet 16 and Butler proved once and for all that a school outside the power conferences can not only compete on the big stage, but thrive there. Another so-called “mid-major” in Xavier of the Atlantic 10 conference played a big role in what may have been the best game of the tournament, losing 101-96 in a double-overtime contest to No. 2 seed Kansas State in a game with more twists and turns than a mountain road through West Virginia. There were heroes and there were villains, but most of all, there was a never-abating sense of excitement and drama that showed once again why the NCAA tournament is the best - the BEST - event in all of sports. Here’s hoping that the madness isn’t ruined by a terrible decision to bump the field up to 96 teams…………

- What’s better than a family Easter egg hunt for huge, luxurious prizes? A family Easter egg hunt for huge, luxurious prizes that turns into an all-out brawl, that’s what. That was the scene that unfolded Saturday in Seacoast, N.H., where a local church held an Easter egg hunt, dropping 60,000 eggs from the sky with big prizes on the line. It being a down economy and all, plus the abiding love of free stuff inherent in the nature of every human being, some 10,000 people showed up for the event. The turnout was so large that it even caught organizers off guard. The ginormous crowds created problems that no one was prepared to deal with, sending thousands of children and parents scrambling all over the grounds of the Rochester Fairgrounds. l. "I think it was like chaos," said Sarah Gallo, of Stratham. "I saw some people kneeing people, and it was really, really dangerous, I thought." The first run for eggs was a near disaster, so volunteers attempted to rectify the problem by spreading the eggs out more evenly. That didn’t work because they still had a difficult time holding kids back. "As soon as they said go, we were all in the front going 'whoomp,' getting trampled on top of each other," said Deborah Savage, of Rochester. The result was sheer and total chaos, with parents separated from their children, Making matters worse, the event was organized by Next Level Church. Nothing shows God’s love better than pitting thousands of parents and children against one another in a fight to the death for all manner of exciting prizes, eh? Church leaders expected 1,000 to 2,000 people and when five times that many showed up, they were left to apologize profusely. "We are sorry if they're upset. We did everything we could to give their family a nice time for free," said the Rev. Joshua Gagnon, the church's lead pastor. According to Gagnon, the idea was to provide parents and kids some easy fun in a tough economy and to reach out to its community. From where I stand, the end result was actually far better. In this tough economy, what suits families better? People giving them free stuff without a fight or them having to scratch, claw, tackle, run over and generally maul other similarly needy people to get that free stuff? Everything comes with a fight these days and this event taught those parents and children that lesson in emphatic fashion. Sure, the prizes were nice. There were plasma-screen TVs and skateboards and those things are nice, but a lesson learned about scrapping with your neighbors for what you want is much more valuable. Count your blessings, Next Level Church, count your blessings…………

- No doubt, I loves me a good conspiracy theory or coup de tat. And let’s face it, there is no better place to go for a good conspiracy theory than Turkey. So venture there with me now and let’s check in on an ongoing coup attempt that has now resulted in the detention of 19 officers, including four generals, as part of an investigation into an alleged plot. Turkish police detained the military members for their suspected roles in seeking to topple the Islamic-rooted government. This conflict goes well beyond the normal political strife in a nation in conflict, as the military is a secular entity and the government is deeply rooted in Islamic tradition. The government has good reason to be suspicious of the military, which has ousted four civilian governments since 1960. All police will confirm at this point is that arrests have been made, but they refuse to state how many people have been detained. News agencies within the country are reporting that police staged raids in 14 cities Monday and that more could be forthcoming. Prosecutors are said to have ordered the detention of 95 suspects, mostly active-duty officers. The arrests are set against the backdrop of a much larger throwdown between Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government and the military. The military sees Erdogan chipping away at its power within Turkey and like any good oppressive force, they are fighting like heck to hold onto it. Erdogan wants to put the military under civilian rule and has vowed in late February to put everyone who conspired against the country's government on trial. Truth be told, the prime minister has been on edge ever since 40 other officers, including several generals and admirals, were charged for plotting a 2003 coup against his government. Their plan has operated on the principle of blowing up mosques to trigger a coup and topple the government. As I said, no one loves a coup or a conspiracy theory more than me, so I’m eating this up. It’s political leader against the meatheads of the military and neither side will back down. Erdogan’s party is bent on making a series of amendments to the Turkish constitution that could clear the way for trials of top military commanders by civilian courts. Literally hundreds of individuals could be put on trial and for a dissidence-loving outsider like myself, that makes this a decidedly positive turn of events………

- Color me stunned. Someone is using a social networking site - home to many of the least intelligent, most gullible people in society - for sinister purposes? No freaking way. Facebook is the site of this crime and the perpetrator is an unknown ass hat who has made bogus offer of $500 in free groceries at the Whole Foods Market . The page asks fans to sign up for the alleged giveaway but instead of entering the suckers for a chance at half a grand in free food, it installs malware on their computer and fishes for credit and other financial information. Both the Austin, Texas-based market chain and Facebook are warning users that the offer is a scam, with Whole Foods Market posting a message on its official Facebook page to explain that the scam first cropped up on Thursday, and is an effort to steal people’s personal data. “Dear Fans, Please be wary of Facebook Pages offering you $500 Whole Foods Gift Cards. We only run giveaways and promotions on this Facebook Page and our stores' Pages,” read the post, dated April 2. “We have reported these to Facebook, and you can report these fraudulent Pages by clicking the "Report Page" link on the bottom of the left column on the left column of the Wall view.” By this morning, the page was long gone and all a site search for “Whole Foods” and “$500” turned up was a small group warning people about the scam. The main problem, as with anything on the Wild West world known as the Internet, is that policing scam artists and tools preying on naïve people is virtually impossible. Like navigating your way in a desert full of ever-shifting sand dunes, the online world is always morphing and transforming, with new scam pages going on as the old ones are taken down. Facebook also addressed the scam in a written statement issued early Tuesday, writing, “Protecting the people who use Facebook from spam and scams is a top priority for us. Groups and Pages that attempt to trick people into taking a certain action or spamming their friends with invites violate our policies, and we have a large team of professional investigators who quickly remove these when we detect them or they're reported to us by our users. By becoming a fan of Facebook’s security page, which has nearly 1.7 million fans, users can get updates on the threats that inevitably will pop up from time to time on a site with more than 400 million users.” All of that is fine, but perhaps installing an IQ test people must pass in order to sign up for a Facebook account would be a better way to prevent these sorts of hijinks……….