TIME TO WIG OUT? – April 7, 2022 – First, too much booze on a regular basis can weaken your hair and lead to breakage. Alcohol can “inflame your scalp, so if you have any scalp-related issues, it exacerbates them,” says Gregorio Ruggeri, a hairstylist and trichologist in New York City. “It chokes the follicle of the hair, which prevents it from living to its full life expectancy. It strangles it, and your hair then becomes really fragile and thin.” Next, there’s the dehydration factor. “Alcohol can dehydrate you just in general,” says Dr. Kazin. “And so if you’re…
Author: Leonard Buschel
VIDEO – WORDS CAN HEAL YOU – April 8, 2022 – “Trying to be a positive influence and role model now on everyone that’s wanting and willing to make changes,” Borel said. “The hardest part for me was realizing I had a problem so I started expressing myself through my poetry and it’s a much easier way to bring it out.” He says the 12 Step Program and a new faith have helped him. “You have to be willing to change yourself, that’s the only way you can change yourself,” Borel said. “Now these programs can give you structure,…
IT’S BLACK AND WHITE – April 5, 2022 – In guidelines published Tuesday, the department’s Civil Rights Division said employers, health care providers, law enforcement agencies that operate jails and others are violating the Americans with Disabilities Act if they discriminate against people for taking prescription drugs to treat opioid use disorder. “People who have stopped illegally using drugs should not face discrimination when accessing evidence-based treatment or continuing on their path of recovery,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said in a statement. The nation’s addiction overdose crisis has intensified in recent years. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and…
LISTEN TO THE SHRINK – April 6, 2022 – Drug addiction is something that has been battled in various ways. But till date, there is no full-proof method of curing it. There are rehabilitation centers to help addicts but even after that people tend to relapse and go back to consuming drugs. Psychologists say that the most important factor of drug addiction for one is to understand the root cause of the problem rather than trying to stop the person from consuming drugs. The motivation of self-harm comes from the deep-rooted traumatic experiences in one’s life. Nicole categorised drug addiction…
AUDIO – KICKS BOOZE FOR KICKBOXING – April 7, 2022 – I had no education, so I started thinking about what I was going to do. Since I was a hoodlum, I liked to start fights, I thought professional fighting could be a way out. It worked for a while. I became a national kickboxing champion while drinking. Then it got to a point where I couldn’t do it anymore. “I didn’t drink for a while,” Pereira added. “I thought I had it under control. I went to a bar, I ordered one can of beer. I drank it.…
GUILTY AS SIN? – April 5, 2022 – Florida, led by Attorney General Ashley Moody, contends that Walgreens has been an integral part of the opioid epidemic. As examples of excess, Moody said in a statement that one Walgreens outlet sold 2.2 million opioid tablets in the town of Hudson, Florida, which has about 12,000 residents. Other Walgreens locations, according to the state, increased their orders for opioids by 600% in a two-year period. “It’s time for Walgreens to face accountability for their part in fueling the opioid crisis, and my team is prepared to vigorously try our strong case…
GROWING UP BUT NOT GROWING – April 1, 2022 – More than 60% of teens in the study with severe substance use disorder had at least two symptoms of it as adults, the researchers. These teens were more than 50% more likely to misuse prescription drugs as adults, with more than half abusing prescription opioid pain medications, according to the researchers. “This is a major wake-up call,” study co-author Sean Esteban McCabe said in a press release. “We must rethink how we screen and prescribe to individuals who have multiple substance use disorder symptoms in their past,” said McCabe,…
AUDIO – SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN – April 4, 2022 – Trevor’s parents, Angela and Billy had been trying to understand why there are so few therapeutic interventions for children with depression. Trevor, the child of well-off, educated parents, had far better mental-health support than most American children, but was not saved by it. Angela wanted to lobby for legislation to mandate services her son had needed; she considered setting up a center to undertake research and provide clinical treatment. Because I have written about depression, she and Billy encouraged me to address child suicide, and agreed to tell…
THE PALE BLUE DOT – April 11, 2022 – She cites many factors that have contributed to this dystopian moment—among them, smartphones, the gig economy, the contactless economy, the growth of cities, the rise in single-person households, the advent of the open-plan office, the replacement of mom-and-pop stores with anonymous hyper-chains, and “hostile” civic architecture—but she believes that the deepest roots of our current crisis lie in the neoliberal revolution of the nineteen-eighties and the ruthless free-market principles championed by Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, et al. In giving license to greed and selfishness, she writes, neoliberalism fundamentally reshaped not just…
THE MUSIC MAN – April 7, 2022 – Q: We’re surrounded by sobriety-inspired artwork and books here in your house, it’s clearly something that’s important to you and that you’re proud of, as you should be. How has that journey been for you? A: It’s the best decision that I’ve ever made. I always believed it was unattainable. I thought that I was who I was: You’re going to be the life of the party, you’re going to drink too much, you’re going to have a hangover, you may have to apologize for a couple of things you did…
GREEN PARTY WINS – April 1, 2022 – The vote was 220 to 204. Republicans Tom McClintock of California, Brian Mast and Matt Gaetz, both of Florida, joined the majority of Democrats in supporting the bill, while Democrats Henry Cuellar of Texas and Chris Pappas of New Hampshire voted against. The bill, sponsored by Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, will prevent federal agencies from denying federal workers security clearances for cannabis use, and will allow the Veterans’ Administration to recommend medical marijuana to veterans living with posttraumatic stress disorder, plus gains revenue by authorizing a sales tax on…
CARL HART WAS RIGHT – April 1, 2022 – “The approach, known as … CM, has racked up a slew of successes. It has been shown to dramatically reduce people’s smoking during pregnancy and to help decrease binge drinking. It is also highly promising for combating methamphetamine addictions.” Stop right there, many taxpayers will say. Why should somebody be paid not to do something they already shouldn’t be doing? And won’t somebody who gets paid just be tempted to go buy some more drugs? Those are fair questions. But the answers are that CM has shown significantly above-average results in…
STOCKS DID OK – April 4, 2022 – “This epidemic has impacted virtually all of West Virginia,” Morrisey said. “Our lawsuit speaks for all West Virginians who have suffered due to the defendants’ unlawful, callous and destructive conduct.” West Virginia has accused the drug manufacturers of creating a “public nuisance” by deceiving prescribers about the risks of opioid painkillers and said their marketing efforts caused opioids to become a common treatment for chronic pain in West Virginia, leading to an increase in substance abuse and overdose deaths. The companies have denied the allegations in their opening statements, which Reuters viewed…
EUPHORIA IN ADDICTION – April 5, 2022 – But that’s not to say that the show’s creators aren’t providing a brutally honest portrayal of how addiction affects those around you. After all, the only other TV show that I believe truly shows addiction for what it is, is BoJack Horseman. And he’s a cartoon horse. The setting doesn’t need to be overtly realistic for addiction to be explored effectively. If anything, some light relief or slightly unrealistic elements make the message more poignant. BoJack’s best friends are a pink cat and an overenthusiastic dog. But for all his jokes, when…
THE SLAP HEARD ROUND THE WORLD – April 7, 2022 – Poor confused Will Smith. There he was, sitting ringside on what should have been a glorious Oscar night, surrounded by friends and colleagues, and he couldn’t remember if he had been nominated for “Concussion” or “I Am Legend” or “Wild Wild West” or “Ali” or “King Richard.” So he just combined all his favorite roles and stomped onstage and “hitch” slapped Chris Rock. Slapped? Yes, children, a slap is more demeaning than a punch, bordering on emasculation. A slap is the deeper disrespect in the Black community since slave…
PROBABLY NOT – April 8, 2022 – To add to the problematic nature of most people’s response to beauty, we found a complementary “anomalous-is-bad” stereotype. People with facial anomalies (e.g., scars, birthmarks, developmental abnormalities) are often regarded as less intelligent, less competent, and less trustworthy, in ways that suggest that they are being subtly dehumanized (Hartung et al., 2019; Jamrozik et al., 2019; Workman et al., 2021). In a recently published paper, we asked the question: Do these effects of beauty on inferences of goodness go only in one direction, or do judgments of goodness also shape our impression of…
BRAVE NEW WORLD – April 6 – These same variants can then also be linked to the measured levels of a biomarker in blood. For example, a variant in a particular gene may increase the risk of developing schizophrenia and also be linked to a decrease in the levels of a vitamin circulating in the blood. Most of these variants are individually associated with very small changes in something like risk of a mental illness, but they may add together to produce larger effects. To take one example, there was a positive genetic correlation in our study between white blood…
AUDIO – RYAN HAMPTON QUOTED…AGAIN – April 6, 2022 – “There’s a ton of discrimination out there, including in the medical system,” said Joshua Sharfstein, Johns Hopkins University’s vice dean for public health practice and community engagement. Bias against medication use is particularly pronounced, causing complications for those seeking treatment for opioid use disorder. “Discrimination against people taking effective medications for their addiction to opioids is all too common,” Sharfstein said. “Bias reduces use of medications and leads to more overdoses and more deaths.” As noted in a DOJ release, the department recently leveraged the ADA in enforcement actions involving…
“You can’t always expect to be the smartest person in the room but you can promise to be the hardest working.” —KETANJI BROWN JACKSON
FINALLY A TEST WE CAN PASS – Mar. 30, 2022 – The percentage of working Americans testing positive for drugs hit a two-decade high last year, driven by an increase in positive marijuana tests, as businesses might have loosened screening policies amid nationwide labor shortages. Of the more than six million general workforce urine tests that Quest Diagnostics Inc., one of the country’s largest drug-testing laboratories, screened for marijuana last year, 3.9% came back positive, an increase of more than 8% from 2020, according to Quest’s annual drug-testing index. That figure is up 50% since 2017. Since then, the number…
THERE’S AN APP FOR THAT – Mar. 28 – She replied with a menu offering acid ($40), ecstasy ($20), mushrooms ($120) and half a dozen other drugs. They cut a deal: a gram of cocaine and two oxycodone pills for $160, plus a $30 delivery fee. Mimi, whose full name is Mirela Todorova, dispatched an aspiring television actor, Kather Sei, to drop off the drugs, authorities say. The next morning, a maintenance worker walked into Mascolo’s house on North Beverly Drive. The Chihuahua led him to Mascolo’s body on the kitchen floor. The drugs had been laced with fentanyl. With…
NO SLOWING DOWN ON SUNSET BLVD. – March 29, 2022 – None of that is new. Parents have always been crazy. And kids have been using speed to get better grades for decades. There are New York Times and Time magazine articles from 1937 about college kids using amphetamines to improve their grades. A 1983 episode of Family Ties had Michael J. Fox’s character hopped up for a test. A 1990 episode of Saved by the Bell had Elizabeth Berkley’s character doing the same. But the pandemic made crazy L.A. parents even crazier. “Parents were not used to being with…
MAKES ME NERVOUS – March 30, 2022 – A new study found that psychedelic drugs such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) may be effective at reducing symptoms of stress-related anxiety and in mental health treatment. The study’s research team was led by Dr. Gabriella Gobbi, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Center (RI-MUHC) in Montreal, Canada. The study, published in the journal NeuropsychopharmacologyTrusted Source, also involved eight other neuroscientists and involved a collaboration between RI-MUHC, Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Italy, and the Pharmaceutical and Pharmacological Sciences center at the University…
KEEP YOUR MIND OFF THE ROAD – Mar. 29, 2022 – 1. Find an anchor: To distract from the anxiety of bumper-to-bumper traffic, Peck recommends focusing your attention on an outside object. 2. STOP and breathe To intercept what she refers to as the “stress snowball,” try a technique called STOP: Stop, Take a breath, Observe and Proceed. First, stop what you’re doing by taking a timeout from your thoughts. Then take a few deep breaths and observe the moment. 3. Notice your senses. “A mindfulness technique I use is the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique,” she says. It focuses on each…
HELP FOR THE HELPERS – Mar. 31, 2022 – On the morning of January 18, Joshua Paredes came home to an empty apartment. His roommate and good friend Michael Odell wasn’t there. They were both working as nurses – Paredes at the University of California, San Francisco hospital and Odell at Stanford Health Care – and initially, Paredes didn’t think much of his friend’s absence, since he typically came home a little later. When he didn’t hear back, and Odell didn’t answer his call either, Paredes looked for his friend’s location on his phone – they shared locations with…
AUDIO – KICKING IT IN THE ZONE – March 31, 2022 – That might have been good for some positive earned media, had former NFL head coach Brian Flores not filed a lawsuit later that same day against the league and several teams, alleging systemic racial discrimination against Black coaches. But in the analysis of Ricky Williams, in the cannabis research announcement, the league revealed its long-term cannabis strategy—and how marijuana has always been a tool for the league to burnish its image with the public and with players. more@Forbes
AUDIO – WILL MONEY CHANGE ANYTHING? – Mar. 30, 2022 – Amid the opioid crisis, West Virginia is introducing a new way to encourage addiction treatment providers to do better. That new idea is to pay providers based on how stable and sober their clients are months and even years after initial treatment. “It’s not just a medical issue, it’s a societal issue … because you want to get these folks back in the workforce, paying taxes, staying clean, taking care of their kids,” said Sen. Ron Stollings, D-Boone. Senate Bill 419, sponsored by Sen. Ryan Weld, R-Brooke, will change up…
SURRENDER TO WIN – March 31, 2022 – It was then that Jones, an Army combat veteran who served in Iraq in 2004-05, turned to a different kind of army — Sage’s Army. Jones, a Donora resident, is now a certified recovery specialist with Hempfield-based Sage’s Army, helping those deal with and recover from the addiction he struggled with. “Whatever keeps the needle out of your arm and bottle out of your mouth, we support it,” Jones told more than 100 people who had gathered at the Westmoreland County Community College campus near Youngwood to celebrate the 10th anniversary…
A REFLECTION OF THE TIMES – Mar. 31, 2022 – As we regularly do when The Times writes about an issue that touches the lives of young people, we used our daily Student Opinion forum to ask teenagers to share their perspectives on social media and body image. Many students said that social media has been “detrimental” to the way they feel about their looks, and that even though they are aware it doesn’t show the full picture, they still struggle not to compare themselves to the people they see online. Thank you to all those from around the…
VIDEO – TAKING MATTERS INTO HER OWN PAWS – Mar. 30, 2022 – A Los Angeles police dog is getting some extra praise after the hard-working K-9 helped authorities find 104 pounds of illegal drugs. According to KABC and KTTV, Lillian Carranza, commanding officer of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Gang and Narcotics division, tweeted Tuesday that proud pup Keisa alerted officers and FBI agents to the methamphetamine and heroin during a recent bust. Authorities did not release any additional information about the bust, according to the news outlets. more@ABC7