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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…

Social media feeds are rife with memes depicting exhausted women guzzling wine in giant glasses, with phrases like, “Technically, you’re not drinking alone if your kids are home.” They refer to wine as “mommy juice” or to the hour of “wine o’clock” — a time that all moms apparently look forward to as a way…

Victoria Toline would hunch over the kitchen table, steady her hands and draw a bead of liquid from a vial with a small dropper. It was a delicate operation that had become a daily routine — extracting ever tinier doses of the antidepressant she had taken for three years, on and off, and was desperately…

Over at Reason, Jacob Sullum has written a much-needed corrective to the prevailing narrative about opioid addiction — that there is a widespread problem of “accidental addiction” among pain patients. It’s a destructive narrative, because it makes it more difficult for people in real pain to find doctors willing to treat them. From Sullum: Contrary…

By The Editorial Board An overdose is often a lonely way to die. Overdoses happen when a toxic amount of a drug, or a combination of drugs, overwhelms the body’s basic functions, first slowing and eventually stopping the brain’s drive to breathe. If someone notices the signs of an overdose — lips turning blue, restricted…