It’s Independence Day, and even though it has the temerity and bad timing to arrive mid-week – demolishing any hope of squeezing a three-day or even a four-day weekend out of it – chances are you will want to celebrate. You can, even if you [...]
Methamphetamine is smuggled into US in automobiles and trucks. (US Customs and Border Protection photo via Wikimedia commons) What’s the greater threat facing the United States from over the Mexican border: illicit drugs or undocumented immigrants? To the US executive branch, the answer [...]
The existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote, "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." Or maybe, as William James remembered it, "We live forwards but we understand backwards". The point is that life is not a mathematical equation or, if it [...]
(Pixabay) There are a series of television ads currently running in which a man in doctor's scrubs urges you to call a number for addiction services. Lately, the ads have gotten more belligerent. The man says something like, "You know who I [...]
(Pixabay) It cannot be repeated too often that about half the people with a substance use disorder also have a mental illness or, more correctly, another mental illness. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), "drug addiction is a mental illness." When [...]
Last month a study was published—and widely written about in the media—about a medical condition associated with chronic marijuana use: scromiting. More precisely and often known as cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome (CHS), the catchier name is a portmanteau word combining screaming and vomiting. Actually, screaming doesn't [...]
(Pixabay) Advocates for legal marijuana have just received additional support that not only isn't marijuana necessarily harmful to you, its legalization could save lives and help curtail the opioid epidemic. Two reports in JAMA Internal Medicine -- one by the National Academy of [...]
(Pixabay) Easter is a time of rebirth, renewal. Not only because it's the Christian's commemoration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but also because (in the northern hemisphere) it's the early days of Spring following the vernal equinox, and the setting for many [...]
(PIXABAY) According to historical legend, the Gordian knot was a knot so difficult that it was impossible to unravel. Alexander the Great solved the problem by cutting it with a sword. You could consider that as either cheating, taking the easy way out, [...]
(Pixabay) There's an old proverb that begins, "For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe, the horse was lost." It describes a chain of causation that culminates in disaster, from the loss of a man's life to [...]
