Look, I have to level with you people: This is a fairly good and poignant novel about family miscommunications and thwarted love, wrapped around a disingenuous, mediocre, and kind of infuriating novel about heroin addiction.Good stuff first, I hear that substance abusers lack self-discipline so let's eat our dessert first. The book is about a once-wealthy New England family riven by divorce; patriarch Edward is insufferably smug, his wife Katharine is losing her memory, their daughter Julia … [Read more...]
“The Vast Majority of Illegal Drug Use Is Not Problematic”: Substance.com
August 21, 2014 by
Go here to see the chart. … [Read more...]
“Journalists, Radio Hosts, Addicts, The Imprisoned, And the Pro-Life Movement”
August 14, 2014 by
an incomplete list of people St Maximilian Kolbe is the patron of. Whoa. His feast day is today. That list via David Freddoso. … [Read more...]
“The New York Times’s Coverage of Other Drugs Still Doesn’t Cut It”: Maia Szalavitz
August 6, 2014 by
at Substance.com: ...Schwarz goes on to describe how deputy/pharmacist Logan sometimes actually jumps over the counter and arrests people “on the spot” if they come to one of his stores with a forged or otherwise illegitimate prescription. That’s a real health-care pro in action!And throughout, Schwarz tells the story of one of Logan’s arrests, describing a sobbing mother—the one he’d holstered his guns and put on his bulletproof vest to go out and arrest—now in jail. She was charged with “d … [Read more...]
Tenn. Mother Charged with Assault for Drug Use While Pregnant: ThinkProgress
July 12, 2014 by
uses an unnecessarily tendentious headline, but these laws really are a bad idea, as I discussed here: At the beginning of July, 26-year-old Mallory Loyola gave birth to a baby girl. Two days later, the state of Tennessee charged her with assault. Loyola is the first woman to be arrested under a new law in Tennessee that allows the state to criminally charge mothers for potentially causing harm to their fetuses by using drugs.The legislation, which officially took effect about a week ago, … [Read more...]
Massachusetts Sued for Imprisoning Addicted Women Who Haven’t Committed* Crimes
July 8, 2014 by
*should be "haven't been convicted of any crimes," sorry; also I fixed the link: “As Governor Deval Patrick has acknowledged, we are actually the only state that incarcerates people who are suffering from addiction to drugs and alcohol, who haven’t been convicted of a crime. And imprisoning people because they have a disease is wrong, and it’s also unconstitutional,” ACLU staff attorney Jessie Rossman told the News Service. She said the lawsuit is specifically focusing on women because they are … [Read more...]
“Ten Ways Addiction Is Different in America”: The Invaluable Maia Szalavitz
July 3, 2014 by
at Substance: We Americans like to think of ourselves as exceptional, the land of the free and the home of the brave, the City on the Hill and all that. When it comes to the politics and culture of drugs, we are indeed special—or at least dramatically different from the rest of the Western world. Too often, however, we are special for the wrong reasons. more … [Read more...]
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