Posts by Nate Anderson

BOSTON — To the medical students, the patient was a conundrum. According to his chart, he had residual pain from a leg injury sustained while working on a train track. Now he wanted an opioid stronger than the Percocet he’d been prescribed. So why did his urine test positive for two other drugs — cocaine…

In the shadows of the nationwide opioid crisis, another threat looms. Methamphetamine use is on the rise in small rural pockets of the country, from Oklahoma and Virginia, to Kentucky and Florida, and, as Rolling Stone reported in August, all the way up north in Alaska. The drug’s previous rise to prominence in the 1990s stemmed…

Meet alcohol, the drug making people run around nude and collapse in the streets. What if the media covered alcohol like it does other drugs? This was a question that came up in my coverage of flakka, a synthetic drug that made headlines after law enforcement blamed it for people running in the streets naked…

America’s Invisible Pot Addicts More and more Americans are reporting near-constant cannabis use, as legalization forges ahead. The proliferation of retail boutiques in California did not really bother him, Evan told me, but the billboards did. Advertisements for delivery, advertisements promoting the substance for relaxation, for fun, for health. “Shop. It’s legal.” “Hello marijuana, goodbye…

Parents should be upfront about the risk of substance use and at the same time, avoid fear mongering. The teenage years are a time of huge growth, where children transform into adults who are hopefully well-adjusted and ready to live independently in the world. It’s a huge change, so it’s not surprising that for many…

Nearly half of all clients walking into addiction treatment have an underlying mental illness. Around 40 percent, to be exact. This equates to nearly eight million adults in the U.S., according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Studies show mental illness among minorities is even worse. Take 49-year-old, African American Chicago resident…

My 15-year-old daughter Hannah threatened to cut off my thumbs, kill me in my sleep, and burn down the house with our family inside. Such was the power of her addiction, turning her from moody to malicious in a few short months. “Let me go,” she screamed. “I don’t want to live with you people.”…

SAN RAFAEL, Calif. — For as long as most residents can remember, smoking marijuana has been a part of life here. The fact that California legalized the practice in January went practically unnoticed in this quiet town a half-hour’s drive north of San Francisco, where some say the normalization of America’s marijuana culture got its…

Shocking pictures show the difference between a healthy heart and the heart of someone who drinks too much. It shows the enlarged heart of someone suffering from alcoholic cardiomyopathy (ACM), which causes the heart to swell and lose the ability to properly pump blood around the body. The deadly condition is triggered by drinking more…

Two years ago, I spent a week in Houston helping my stepbrother while he underwent treatment for Stage 4 lymphoma at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. I sat with him while a nurse cleaned his chemo port and made records of her work, to keep his medical team updated. I accompanied him…