On a single weekend in June 2021, seven people died of drug overdoses in Rochester, New York. On that Saturday morning, three adults were found dead on a front porch on a quiet, residential street. Inside the house were six orphaned children. Lab tests showed that the lethal agent was heroin laced . . . . Continue Reading »
How are we to assign responsibility for the opioid epidemic? Patrick Radden Keefe—the New Yorker staff writer who in 2017 wrote a lengthy profile of the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma—offers an easy answer in his new book Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the . . . . Continue Reading »
Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence by alex berenson free press, 272 pages, $26 The smoking of marijuana, with its careful preparation of the elements and the solemn passing around of the shared joint, was the unholy communion of the counterculture . . . . Continue Reading »
My name is Gil Costello, and I live at one of the Pike Place Market’s senior housing buildings, the Stewart House. I am seventy years old. In 1955, at eight years old, I began my on-and-off life of homelessness. At age eleven, before becoming addicted to drugs, I learned to ride rails around . . . . Continue Reading »
Ending the devastation wrought by opioids in American communities requires us to acknowledge that the crisis exists. Continue Reading »
There have always been drug addicts in need of help, but the scale of the present wave of heroin and opioid abuse is . . . . Continue Reading »
I never meant to start an argument about addiction. I had carried my private doubts on the subject around in my head for years, in the “heresy” section where I keep my really risky thoughts. And I don’t recommend disagreeing in public with Hollywood royalty, either, which is how it happened. . . . . Continue Reading »
The focus on the increase in death rates for white Americans between ages 45-54 in the media obscures equally troubling results in Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife . . . . Continue Reading »
We’re in the midst of a crisis. The New York Times reports that Angus Deaton and Ann Case, two Princeton economists, have identified increases in suicide and drug and alcohol related deaths among high school educated white Americas as the cause for a remarkable spike in the overall death rate for . . . . Continue Reading »
The weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal featured an article advocating the decriminalization of drugs. Economists Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy argue the war on drugs has failed, and social costs of continuing with our current laws are too high. Their solution is to legalize drugs use, and . . . . Continue Reading »
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