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Canada’s largest mental health and addiction treatment and research centre is calling for the legalization of marijuana, with strict controls that would govern who could buy weed, from where, and in what quantity. In a policy statement released Thursday, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto said cannabis should be sold through a government-controlled monopoly and with limited availability and an age limit, possibly through outlets similar to provincially operated liquor stores. “Legalization means that we remove all penalties for cannabis possession and use by adults,” said Jurgen Rehm, director of social and epidemiological research at CAMH. “Canada’s...

An on-air regular at Fox News Channel is working his way back into the lineup. TVNewser reports that Gregg Jarrett, who has been off the air since he checked himself into alcohol rehab earlier this year, is attempting to make his return.

Strict laws must be put in place to combat New York City’s massive tobacco smuggling problem, former Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives Assistant Director Rich Marianos told The Daily Caller News Foundation.“Street gangs, narcotics crews, Russian and Asian organized crime networks, and terrorists are trading cigs for guns, narcotics — even humans,” Marianos, who was with the ATF for 27 years, said.NYC’s disproportionately high cigarette tax is allowing hardened criminals and even terrorists to fund illicit activity and make huge profits, with almost no risk, thanks to lax tobacco smuggling laws.Since 2006, the tax rate on NYC...

In the spring of 2000, Zogby International asked more than a thousand U.S. adults whether they had ever visited a sexually-oriented web site. Only one in five had done so. Among born-again Christians, 18 percent had gone to such sites, just three percentage points less than the general public. Well, fast forward to today. A group called Proven Men Ministries commissioned the Barna Group to examine current pornography use. You might want to sit down for this—Barna found that 64 percent of American men and 20 percent of women view pornography at least monthly. And for Christian men, that number...

Author Insights: Legalizing Medical Marijuana May Reduce Opioid Deaths BY BRIDGET M. KUEHN on AUGUST 26, 2014 Marcus A. Bachhuber, MD, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar at the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and colleagues found that states that legalize marijuana experience lower rates of opioid deaths, on average, compared with states that don’t allow medical marijuana. Image: University of Pennsylvania Opioid-overdose deaths increased in states across the country between 1999 and 2010, but states that legalized medical marijuana saw less-steep increases than those without, according to a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine this week. Growing use...

Gene Simmons is anything but sympathetic when it comes to depression. “Drug addicts and alcoholics are always, ‘The world is a harsh place.’ My mother was in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany,” the Kiss front man, 64, said in an interview with SongFacts.com last month. “I don’t want to hear x all about ‘the world as a harsh place.’ She gets up every day, smells the roses and loves life.”

How Robin Williams 'fell off the wagon on set of recent TV series and demanded real alcohol instead of props' - as Broadway theaters dim their lights for one minute in his memory Robin Williams fell off the wagon not long before his suicide when he demanded real alcohol during shooting of his failed TV series, insiders say. According to Page Six, the 63-year-old funnyman asked for booze during a scene shot inside an LA restaurant in May 2013 as he begrudgingly returned to the small screen in The Crazy Ones. As more of the details of the tragic actors...

Hi all, I never, NEVER, thought I'd post this here. But at this point, I have no one to turn to. I'm a 51 year-old housewife/reporter and photographer who tries to make money doing proofreading, editing, writing,taking pictures, and oh, yes, selling ads for a phone book belonging to a dear friend of mine who was on Gatineau's city council (that's how I met him; we broke a lot of stories here). I need to make a profile on FR; it would save a lot of time. :) Long story short. I grew up in Des Plaines, IL, met my...

The public will have more time to weigh in on a federal proposal to regulate electronic cigarettes and other tobacco products. The Food and Drug Administration said Friday that the public comment period slated to end July 9 is being extended an additional 30 days to Aug. 8 after getting lots of input on how to regulate e-cigarettes. Those are battery-powered devices that heat a liquid nicotine solution, creating vapor that users inhale. The FDA also proposed extending its authority to regulate cigars, hookahs, nicotine gels and pipe tobacco.

England has seen a 10% fall in the number of opiate and crack [the top 2 illicit drugs abused] users since 2005 with the largest reductions being seen in the last few years. This also includes a significant fall in the number of people injecting these drugs: from 93,401 in 2010 to 2011, to 87,302 in 2011 to 2012. THE DIFFERENCE: England approaches the issue as a "public health" issue. In the USA we approach substance abuse as a "legal" issue. Until we fund treatment adequately, attacking demand, law enforcement attempts to shrink supply will just make profit margins greater...

London - A group of 53 leading scientists has warned the World Health Organisation not to classify e-cigarettes as tobacco products, arguing that doing so would jeopardise a major opportunity to slash disease and deaths caused by smoking. The UN agency, which is currently assessing its position on the matter, has previously indicated it would favour applying similar restrictions to all nicotine-containing products. In an open letter to WHO Director General Margaret Chan, the scientists from Europe, North America, Asia and Australia argued that low-risk products like e-cigarettes were "part of the solution" in the fight against smoking, not part...

A married former Washington Post vice president has been found dead in a gay bar in Manhattan with drug paraphernalia near his body. Guyon Knight was found dead around 8am on Saturday in a bar called the Out in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York. The New York Post reported the circumstances of the 64-year-old's death, saying that he was seen with a needle, a pipe and unspecified pills near his body. The club where Knight was found describes itself as being gay-but-straight friendly, but a person familiar with the bar told MailOnline that it is mostly frequented by...

INDIANAPOLIS - Colts owner Jim Irsay voluntarily checked into a health care treatment center after he was arrested in Carmel on DWI charges linked to prescription pills. (snip) When police stopped Irsay late Sunday, they found several prescription drugs in pill bottles in his car and he was preliminarily charged with driving under the influence and four felony counts of possession of a controlled substance. Police said the drugs found in Irsay's car weren't associated with the prescription bottles found inside.

An Oklahoma nonprofit that works with sex workers is holding a candlelight vigil for a 21-year-old woman whose naked body was found last week on a conveyor belt inside an Anaheim trash-sorting facility. Outreach workers with No Boundaries International, a nonprofit based in Edmond, Okla., said they had frequent contact with Jarrae Nykkole Estepp in Oklahoma City in 2012, when she was featured in several videos of street life posted on YouTube and elsewhere. The nonprofit planned to hold the vigil Monday evening. Estepp's body was found Friday morning amid the trash at the Republic Services recycling plant in an...

Stephanie Predel is off heroin. But the Bennington, Vt., area, where she lives, is in the throes of an epidemic. BENNINGTON, Vt. — Stephanie Predel, a stick-thin 23-year-old freshly out of jail, said she was off heroin. But she knows precisely where she could get more drugs if she ever wanted them — at the support meetings for addicts. “I can get most of my drugs right at the meeting,” she said. “Drug dealers go because they know they’re going to get business.” She added, “People are going into the bathroom to get high.” Bennington, a pre-Revolutionary town of 17,000...

<p>Two former Navy Seals found dead aboard the Maersk Alabama, the ship hijacked in the Tom Hanks' film Captain Phillips, are believed to have died of drug overdoses. Mark Daniel Kennedy, 43, and Jeffrey Keith Reynolds, 44, were found dead on Tuesday in a cabin with drugs and hypodermic needles as the ship berthed in the Seychelles.</p>

A drug treatment center in Vancouver, Canada has installed a crack pipe vending machine at its facility — going retail in an effort to reach hardcore addicts and keep them off the streets. The bright, polka-dotted machine dispenses crack pipes like candy or snacks: Each glass pipe costs a quarter, and rolls off a spindle into a tray. A sign on the machine says simply, “Pipes 25¢” About all that’s missing is a picture of Toronto’s crack-smoking mayor, Rob Ford.

Philip Seymour Hoffman had a "hard-core" drug addiction and injected twice as much heroin a day as a typical addict, according to his alleged dealer. Robert Vineberg, a jazz musician, was arrested two days after the 46-year-old actor's death as police hunted through New York trying to find who supplied the fatal dose. Speaking from the Rikers Island prison, Mr Vineberg denied selling Hoffman the 73 packets of heroin found near his body. Mr Vineberg, who also struggles with heroin addiction, told the New York Post that Hoffman was injecting 10 bags of heroin every day.

For a magazine that styles itself Reason, it’s surprisingly unreasonable. Nick Gillespie of Reason attacks Truth Revolt’s Ben Shapiro for writing that “Philip Seymour Hoffman['s] self-inflicted death is yet another hallmark of the broken leftist culture that dominates Hollywood, enabling rather than preventing the loss of some of its greatest talents. Libertarianism becomes libertinism without a cultural force pushing back against the penchant for sin; Hollywood has no such cultural force.”It’s a point that’s rather hard to argue with. Freedom opens up the arena for individual character to define how people will use it. Freedom alone is a blank slate...

Mr. Norris, with Washington and Colorado recently legalizing pot smoking and their football teams (Seattle Seahawks and Denver Broncos) being in the Super Bowl, some have asked whether there is going to be added marijuana use during this year’s Super Bowl. And President Barack Obama recently said that he doesn’t think marijuana is as dangerous as alcohol. What do you think, Chuck? Is it? – “Trying to Make Sense of Sensimilla” in Seattle I understand the arguments for the legalization of marijuana: It can generate tax revenue. It can reduce illegal supply and demand. It can strip power from cartels...