(Photo courtesy of Pixabay) It is a new year, and that traditionally is a time for resolutions, for a fresh start, but most—80{b340406b661c1e5732b86e4172a84f651d0df9d8967334cfa4a3aae0d4c8bfbd}--of New Year’s resolutions made in January fail by the end of the second week of February. According to Don Stenhoff [...]
Politics keeps interfering with substance abuse policy, including addiction treatment, but progress is being made. The question is if it will continue. The 2008 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA)—more familiarly known as “ObamaCare”—required that insurance coverage include 10 Essential Health Benefits including “Mental [...]
Opioids were over-prescribed and their harms downplayed. Now 30-plus states want the makers and distributors to pay. (Pixabay) As the costs of responding to the opioid epidemic rise, more states, cities, and counties are opting to sue "Big Pharma"---the large pharmaceutical companies---and the [...]
Marijuana legalization continues to make strides. If authorities wish to put reasonable restraints on use, they must put forward factual information, call for more research, and stop dragging their feet on enacting the laws their citizens approve through ballot proposals. Recreational marijuana legalization has reached [...]
David Sheff (Steve Carell, right) helps his meth addict son Nic (Timothee Chalamet) into rehab in Beautiful Boy. (Official web page) Films based on true events, whether personal stories or great historical moments, are nevertheless often factually challenged. Such films—A Beautiful Mind, Hidden [...]
Methamphetamine in blue crystal form. (Wikimedia commons) Drug dealers don’t belong to the Better Business Bureau, but you’d think they would at least want their customers to live to continue to buy their products. Maybe not. First, opioid drug dealers started supplying their [...]
Vaping may be safer than smoking, but is it safe? (Pixabay) In 2016 the-US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released Facing Addiction in America: The Surgeon General’s Report on Alcohol, Drugs, and Health. It was intended as akin to an earlier Surgeon General’s 1964 [...]
(Pixabay) On Nov. 2, the Food and Drug Administration approved the opioid Dsuvia, a sublingual tablet (it is placed under the tongue until it dissolves, providing faster pain relief than intravenous or swallowed tablet painkillers) five-to-10 times stronger than fentanyl (itself 100 times [...]
Photo courtesy of Pixabay As hard as it may be to believe, we still have a lot of privacy in this country. For instance, when you die, it isn’t always clear how you died. If your heart is stopped and there are no [...]
(Pixabay) There’s a saying often attributed to Voltaire (though similar antecedents date back to Shakespeare and even Confucius) that is often translated or paraphrased: “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” It was sometimes used in politics to urge compromise [...]
