Happy Birthday Tom Robbins! Now 90 Years Old!

July 19, 2022 - Timothy Leary, Barbara Hershey and Leonard Cohen are all hanging out with the writer. Nearby a gold record given to him from the Doors.

more@LAConnerWeeklyNews

Beth Macy Proud of Dopesick’s 14 Emmy Nominations audio July 12, 2022 - The drama about the opioid crisis is based on Macy’s book of the same name. The eight-part series, which was set partly in Southwest Virginia, debuted on the Hulu streaming service last fall and can still be watched on that platform. more@Roanoke

Teva Pharmaceutical Lied About Role in Opioid Crisis

July 11, 2022 - New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, said Teva Pharmaceutical lied to evade accountability for helping fuel the opioid crisis and should be restored to litigation where the Israeli company’s U.S. unit had been found liable. more@CNBC

How 4 Doctors Beat the Feds in Botched $500 Million Pill Mill Case June 30, 2022 - “I argued to the jury – ‘You don’t prosecute McDonalds for selling hamburgers. You don’t prosecute KFC for selling chicken. And you shouldn’t convict an interventional pain physician for doing his job and issuing prescriptions for people in pain.” more@Freep

988 National Mental Distress Hot Line NOW ACTIVE 988 

video July 16, 2022 - National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. We can all help prevent suicide. The Lifeline provides 24/7 free & confidential support for people in distress. @SAMSHA

Meet Mckenzie: Pregnant, homeless and living in a tent

July 12, 2022 - The daytime bustle on Sunset Boulevard was giving way to nighttime flash. Netflix employees were badging out of the Icon, the streaming giant’s cantilevered glass tower. The tire shop was closing up, and tenants at... more@LATimes

Man Begged for Mental Health / Addiction Support in Prison Until He Died

July 12, 2022 - Rats, mould, ‘intolerable’ food Opened in the 1850s, HMP has long been criticized for its crumbling infrastructure.”We finally got him accepted into a five-week treatment program, and he was denied the bail to do it — and he committed suicide two days later,” said Courtney, a nurse at St. Johns. more@CBC

Prozac Was Just The Beginning

July 10, 2022 - Sitting with her puppy helped, but her teachers told her it was too distracting on-screen. Her mother decided to put her on Paxil. “She’s an anxious person,” said her mother, “She gets stuck in her head, and her thoughts loop. @Yahoo

Investors See Far Out Profits in Psychedelic Medicine audio July 13, 2022 - It’s been a long strange trip for Brom Rector to become one of the few venture capitalists investing exclusively in psychedelic medicine. The 31-year-old has been experimenting with drugs like LSD for a decade but he never imagined he could turn that interest into a career. more@WSJ

Doctors Urge Access To Psychedelics

July 12, 2022 - Physicians and researchers are urging New Mexico legislators to allow the use of psychedelic mushrooms in mental health therapy aimed at overcoming depression, anxiety, psychological trauma and alcoholism. more@APNews

7 Adult Health Conditions Linked to Childhood Abuse

July 11, 2022 - Two of those health conditions were mental health-related, and five were related to physical health. The five physical health conditions are diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, migraines and cancers. more@Salon

Q&A with Evan York - Artist, Animator, Writer, Producer, Genius July 8, 2022 - Art is the center of everything he does. For the past two decades, Evan York has dedicated almost every waking minute, to creating, growing and expressing himself as an artist, while inspiring others. His film FRUCKUS is premiering at the REEL Recovery Film Festival, October 21-27. more@AReB

Codependency Is a Toxic Myth in Addiction Recovery

by Maia Szalavitz July 8, 2022 - Lois Wilson, who was married to an A.A. co-founder, Bill Wilson, helped found Al-Anon in 1951 to support wives and other family members of A.A. members. The idea that relatives of addicted people have their own disease first took root here. more@NYTimes

Jessica Simpson Through the Years: Sobriety, Divorce and More audio

July 12, 2022 - “I had to strip away all the self-medicating to feel the pain and figure out what was wrong. I’m still doing the work in therapy two times a week resolving those issues.” more@MiamiHerald

What Ethnographers Have Learned from People Who Use Drugs July 11, 2022 - “A huge part of harm reduction is the fact that people who use drugs should not be left out of the conversation, should not be left out of the decision-making progress.” more@Undark

Opinion: Why I Will Never Live Without a Dog Again

July 4, 2022 - Many Brits regard the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show as a preview of heaven. “The Creator, said John Wesley, “saw, with unspeakable pleasure, the order, the beauty, the harmony, of all the creatures.” more@WashingtonPost

Colorado: 200,000 Fentanyl Pills Seized in Life-Saving Bust July 6, 2022 - “Bulk fentanyl quantities like this hold the caliber of weapons of mass destruction-type concern,” Besser said Wednesday. “When we take into consideration the worst possible outcomes of this poison being pushed out in mass in our communities.” more@CPR

Leslie Jordan Recalls Hearing Amy Winehouse’s ‘Rehab’ for the First Time After Sobriety

July 11, 2022 - I had been sober a really long time. And when I heard that song, it made me nervous because I thought, ‘Oh gosh, now people aren’t going to go to rehab that need to go to rehab.’ It made me so nervous. more@Yahoo

A Modern Day Love Story

July 9, 2022 - Ben Lee and Ione Skye had their first date at a documentary about John Lennon and Yoko Ono. It became a blueprint for their own love. ‘I just realised at that moment: I want to laugh through life with this person’... more@TheGuardian

Danny Trejo Congratulates Son Gilbert on 8 Years of Sobriety July 17, 2022 - “I love you so much, and am so proud of the man you’ve become. Any parents out there with children struggling with addiction, I didn’t think my son was going to make it and today he’s my best friend! There is hope!” more@FoxLA

Young Women Say State Abortion Laws Would Influence Where they Live July 13, 2022 - When thinking about where they might live, 2 in 3 respondents will consider a state’s abortion law, the poll found. Thirty-one percent said they would consider it “a lot,” while 27 percent indicated it would “somewhat” influence their decision. more@TheHill

Nonstop Scam Economy is Costing More than Just $$$ 

July 13, 2022 - Constant scam attempts can increase stress levels and strain relationships. Their negative impact on mental health is even worse when the scammers target people based on perceived weaknesses, like advanced age, loneliness or illness. more@WashingtonPost

Tenet Healthcare Exposes Data of 1.2M Patients

July 13, 2022 - A man has filed a class-action lawsuit against Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare and its affiliate Baptist Health System after the companies experienced a data breach this year that affected more than a million patients. Tenet Healthcare and Baptist Health System did not respond to requests for comment. @SecurityInfoWatch

What’s Really Going on in Those Police Fentanyl Exposure Videos? July 13. 2022 - The scientific literature shows, definitively, that brief contact with fentanyl is not sufficient for it to enter the bloodstream and cross the blood-brain barrier to cause such a rapid overdose. more@NYTimes

2 Million Americans Have A Gambling Addiction video

July 14, 2022 - Experts say the rise of sports betting has lead to a spike in gambling addiction in the U.S. more@YouTube

California Social Media Addiction Bill Drops Parent Lawsuit July 14, 2022 - The revised proposal would make social media companies liable for damages of up to $250,000 per violation. But it would only let prosecutors, not parents, file the lawsuits against social media companies.  more@ABCNews

A Path to the Legal Regulation of All Drugs

July 14, 2022 - No nation in human history has spent as much time and money on intoxicating substances as we do today. We are a nation of drug users waging an irrational war against ourselves. more@FilterMag

Supporting Sobriety at Work: How Salesforce Created Inclusion with ‘Soberforce’

July 14, 2022 - In late 2020, working as a regional VP for Salesforce, Marin Nelson sent a message to 50,000 of her colleagues, identifying herself as an alcoholic, sharing her journey to sobriety, and inviting her coworkers to join a new group called Soberforce. 

more@BenefitNews

Tom Arnold Talks About Taking Off 75 lbs. & His 5 Years of Sobriety July 15, 2022 - “I had massive organ failure two years ago. My doctor changed my medication, but I knew I needed to make bigger changes because I really dropped the ball on self-care.” more@YahooNews

Ty Herndon On Being Suicidal After Drug Relapse

July 16, 2022 - He was “inches” away from committing suicide on New Year’s Eve 2020, where he recalls having been awake for days, relapsing on crystal meth and “holding a fistful of Ambien tablets. Ty is now 18 months sober. more@iHeart

Musical Interlude  watch@YouTube

Claes Oldenburg Dies at 93; Pop Artist Made the Everyday Monumental

July 18, 2022 - One of his most famous installations, erected in 1976 — the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence — is “Clothespin,” a 45-foot-high, 10-ton black steel sculpture of precisely what the title indicates, complete with a metal spring that appropriately evokes the number 76 in Philadelphia. more@NYT