By Zach Johnson

Rob Lowe has a lot to be proud of, both personally and professionally. The 49-year-old Parks and Recreation star celebrated a major milestone May 10, which he shared with his 634,000 Twitter followers. "Celebrating 23 years sober tonight," Lowe wrote. "It works if you work it." The actor spent the past week surfing in Oahu's North Shore, which he documented via the social networking site.

The West Wing alum and married father of two quit drinking in 1990 when he entered a rehabilitation clinic, which he described in his 2011 memoir Stories I Only Tell My Friends as "one of the most exhilarating, liberating and exciting four weeks of my life."

Lowe elaborated on his rehab experience while promoting his book during a May 2011 appearance on CNN's Piers Morgan Tonight. "It was great. I loved it. Because I was ready," the actor said. "Problem is, people go into rehab and they're not ready. You want to get sober for your parents, you want to get sober for your job, you want to get sober for the cops, you want to get sober to protect your image. A lot of good reasons, by the way, but unfortunately, the only thing that works is that you have to want to get sober for you."

Continue Reading: usmagazine.com

 WASHINGTON, May 13, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- "Talk. They Hear You." a new national public service announcement (PSA) campaign that empowers parents to talk to children as young as nine years old about the dangers of underage drinking was launched today by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). The kickoff occurred in conjunction with SAMHSA's 2013 National Prevention Week--an annual health observance dedicated to increasing awareness of, and action around, substance abuse and mental health issues.

SAMHSA's latest report on underage drinking shows that more than a quarter of American youth engage in underage drinking. Although there has been progress in reducing the extent of underage drinking in recent years, particularly among those aged 17 and younger, the rates of underage drinking are still unacceptably high.

"Talk. They Hear You." raises parents' awareness about these issues and arms them with information they need to help them start a conversation about alcohol with their children before their children become teenagers.

"These young people are our future leaders--our future teachers, mayors, doctors, parents, and entertainers," said SAMHSA Administrator Pamela S. Hyde. "As our youth and young adults face challenges, we as a community, need to effectively communicate with them in every way possible about the risks of underage drinking so that they have the necessary tools to make healthy and informed choices."

"Talk. They Hear You." features a series of TV, radio, and print PSAs in English and Spanish launching today. The PSAs show parents "seizing the moment" to talk with their children about alcohol such as while preparing dinner or doing chores together. By modeling behaviors through these PSAs, parents can see the many "natural" opportunities for initiating the conversation about alcohol with their children.

The strength of "Talk. They Hear You." is in its diverse network of campaign partners that will help implement the campaign in local communities across the country.

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By Ellie Krupnick

Urban Outfitters can't stay out of trouble.

The latest controversy brewing in connection to the popular retailer is over "prescription" shot glasses and other medical-themed drinking paraphernalia. Urban Outfitters is currently peddling shot glasses, flasks and beer koozies designed to resemble prescription pill bottles, as well as "Syringe Shot Shooters" (so you can squirt alcohol into your moth instead of just drinking it).

But using prescription drugs as a fun, cheeky theme hasn't gone over well. The Partnership at Drugfree.org released a statement condemning Urban Outfitters for "making light of the real prescription drug abuse epidemic that's claiming lives of teens across the country."

According to Marcia Lee Taylor, senior vice president of Government Affairs of The Partnership at Drugfree.org, "Tongue-in-cheek products that normalize and promote prescription drug abuse only serve to reinforce the misperception about the dangers associated with abusing medicine and put more teens at risk."

Natalie Costa, producer of a film that focuses on teen prescription drug abuse in Orange County called "Behind the Orange Curtain," has also spoken out about Urban Outfitters' products. "It's not fun, it's not a novelty, and parents are losing their kids. We have a huge addiction problem. They need to find something else to sell," she told KABC in Los Angeles.

It goes without saying that this isn't Urban's first time in the headlines. The youthful retailer has been slammed for pro-drinking t-shirts, a "Navajo" clothing line, Jewish star shirts accused of making light of the Holocaust and St. Patrick's Day clothes that mocked the Irish, among other things.

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Alicia M. Cohn

Drug courts -- a judicial process that puts nonviolent substance-abuse offenders into treatment instead of the prison system -- seems like a heavy cause. But with Matthew Perry as celebrity spokesman, expect to hear a lighter side.

"Eight years ago, when I was having to rush to the bathroom to try to make the toilet to vomit in it, and missing slightly and vomiting all over my shirt, I thought to myself, 'Someday, I'm going to get an award for this,' " Perry joked to Yeas & Nays on Monday.

At the White House earlier in the day, National Drug Control Policy Director Gil Kerlikowske presented the Champion of Recovery Award to the actor and the man Perry calls his "best friend and the best interventionist in the country," Earl Hightower. (Hightower praised Perry right back, calling him the best-case scenario of a celebrity advocate and a man who "walks like he talks.")

Perry then spoke at a congressional staff briefing on Capitol Hill with the National Association of Drug Court Professionals, already working on increasing appropriations funding for next year.

"It's no secret that I've had my own troubles with addiction in the past," Perry said. "One of the ways that I crossed over into recovery was finally understanding that one of the ways out is to live for others, and to get outside yourself and help others. I do a lot of one-on-one work with people in Los Angeles, but through [NADCP] I'm able to help people on a much grander scale through drug courts."

Drug courts might seem ripe for a legal drama -- perhaps a plotline on "The Good Wife," a show on which Perry recently guest starred -- but Perry said he'd rather work on the topic in real life than fiction. Same for a hypothetical role on another political drama, such as the role he called "really fun" on D.C.-favorite "The West Wing."

Continue Reading: washingtonexaminer.com

By Christina Boyle

Former President Bill Clinton joined the fight against prescription drug abuse Monday, vowing to cut within five years the number of senseless deaths caused by overdoses.

"We have lost the balance between the legitimate use of pain medicine and the systematic abuse or misuse of it," Clinton said during a NYU panel discussion that included Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and NYU President John Sexton.

The Clinton Foundation initiative is especially aimed at 18- to 26-year-olds who abuse prescription drugs like OxyContin and Vicodin or stimulants such as Adderall.

Overdoses from these drugs currently kill more Americans than heroin and cocaine combined.

The Clinton Foundation hopes to raise the profile of the issue and work with agencies to improve drug monitoring programs and get universities to join campus initiatives.

"This is insane to have the brightest of our young people dropping out under conditions of which their addiction has not been treated or their abuse is out of ignorance," Clinton said.

Kelly, who served under Clinton as U.S Customs Service commissioner, said prescription drug abuse brings with it violent crime.

 Last April in East Harlem a retired police officer shot dead an armed gunman who held up a pharmacy looking for Oxycontin and Percocet. The suspect's accomplice surrendered.

"The NYPD has seen firsthand the destructive power of addiction to Oxycontin," Kelly said. "One of our own police officers who became addicted to the pills after incurring an injury on the job began robbing drug stores at gunpoint. He, like many others we've seen, demanded Oxy by name, but left the cash in an open register untouched.

"If that doesn't illustrate the power of addiction, nothing does."

Between 2004 and 2010 the rate of emergency room visits related to painkillers nearly tripled in the city, Kelly said.

In response, the NYPD and the Drug Enforcement Administration has formed a new unit that allows police access to a national database that tracks how controlled substances are distributed.

Police also started "Operation Safety Cap." The department now has a database of nearly 6,000 area licensed pharmacists, Kelly said.

Continue Reading: nydailynews.com

By Melissa Healy

It doesn't take stacks of research to demonstrate that medicating painful feelings with alcohol or drugs is a dangerous and ultimately futile strategy (although those studies do exist). But the relationship between emotional difficulties and alcohol addiction has always been a complex one, in a chicken-and-egg way: does alcohol -- a depressive agent -- make people who use it become depressed? Or are depressed people more likely to drink heavily to self-medicate, and then to become dependent on alcohol?

Two new studies explore the links between mood and alcoholism in an effort to predict who becomes alcohol-dependent and which alcoholics are most likely to relapse.

One of those studies -- published online this week by the journal JAMA Psychiatry -- uses brain scanners to help tease out a possible "biomarker" for the most stubborn forms of alcoholism, and finds one that implicates mood as a key factor.

The other, published in JAMA Psychiatry, is much more low-tech: In face-to-face interviews, researchers asked people who were at higher than usual risk of alcoholism whether they drank to improve their mood or to calm down, and then went back two to four years later and looked at who had become, or stayed, alcohol-dependent.

Short answer: those who drank "to alleviate mood symptoms" were three times more likely to become dependent on alcohol than were those who did not use alcohol to calm themselves down or improve their mood.

Not only were the self-medicators more likely to become alcohol-dependent: among those with established alcohol dependence, those who drank to salve their emotions were less likely to have become sober than those who didn't drink to dampen painful feelings.

The brain-scan study appearing in the same issue of JAMA Psychiatry examined the working brains of 45 alcoholics in the first four to eight weeks of a 12-step program and residing at an in-patient treatment and research facility. Each recovering alcoholic was prompted to think specifically about situations that were either neutral and relaxing, or highly stressful, or were associated with past heavy drinking, while researchers watched their brain's response to each.

Alcoholics who would go on to relapse tended to show a curious and distinct pattern in their brain responses: In the relaxed, neutral condition, they showed heightened activity in a group of brain regions associated with regulation of mood and emotional arousal and cognitive control (the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, the ventral striatum and the precuneus). But compared to a group of healthy control subjects, and compared to recovering alcoholics who would not go on to relapse, the relapsers showed low activity in these same regions when they were prompted to dwell on stressful situations or situations that were associated with drinking.

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By Eric Hartley

A few weeks ago, teams of federal agents and sheriff's deputies fanned out across Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside counties, searching 17 businesses and arresting three people.

For more than a year, they'd been investigating what they called a massive drug conspiracy involving illegal sales out of front businesses and parties at which scores or hundreds of people got high. The product seized had a street value of about $20 million.

The charges? All misdemeanors.

The feds were investigating not cocaine or methamphetamine, but nitrous oxide, a mood-altering gas people inhale for the euphoric effects.

The relatively minor charges that resulted from the March 22 raid carry a maximum of a year in prison and a $100,000 fine, illustrating the difficulty authorities face in combating a growing substance abuse problem.Nitrous oxide, or "nozz," is a prescription drug whose euphoric high can be addictive, and using it without oxygen mixed in can cause permanent neurological damage.But because it's also a legal product that can be used in medicine or to boost car performance, the penalties are limited even under federal law.

Selling it for ingestion without a prescription is only a federal misdemeanor. And there's almost nothing state or local prosecutors can do if people are of age.

"A 19-year-old can purchase and huff all the nitrous they want, and the person that sells it to them cannot be prosecuted by the state of California," said Joseph O. Johns, who heads environmental prosecutions for the U.S. attorney's office in L.A. "That is a gigantic regulatory gap."

Possessing nitrous with the intent to ingest it (other than in medical or dental uses) is a misdemeanor in California. But intent is difficult to prove.

Until 2009, selling nitrous to anyone was legal under state law. A new law passed that year making it a misdemeanor to sell it to a minor.

The L.A. City Attorney's Office hasn't prosecuted many people on nitrous charges, and a spokeswoman for the L.A. County District Attorney's Office had no record of any prosecutions.

Continue Reading: dailynews.com

By Meg Murphy

A Norwood officer empties out the drug kiosk in the police station.

Norfolk District Attorney Michael W. Morrissey likes to say that a simple idea has gone a long way in the battle against widespread opiate addiction in area cities and towns.

"Get the stuff out of your medicine cabinets," said Morrissey in a recent interview about the National Prescription Drug Take-Back Day, happening this year on Saturday.

He said the annual event inspired a long-term initiative that has proven to be a "slam-dunk" in more than 25 communities in the Boston area. Beginning in March 2011, local and state agencies have worked together to place drug kiosks -- clearly marked, secure containers -- inside the lobbies of police stations.

"We took a simple idea and ran with it. We don't have to wait for take-back. Why not have take-back every day?" said Morrissey.

In the suburbs south of Boston, addiction to opiate narcotics, such as OxyContin and Percocet, is an epidemic striking young people, with police warning that prescription pain pills are leading habitual users to heroin, since prescription pills on the street can cost an addict $250 per day while a bag of heroin is $10.

The first "MedReturn Kiosks" appeared a few years ago in secure police foyers in Braintree, Milton, Quincy, and Weymouth. The containers, which cost an estimated $900 each, were paid for by Impact Quincy, which was funded in 2009 with a grant from the state Department of Public Health's bureau of substance abuse specifically geared toward addressing opiate overdoses.

Other communities soon got on board, said Morrissey, pointing out that research shows young people often fall into drug addiction by taking pills from the home medicine cabinet. Prescription drugs such as OxyContin, Percocet, and Vicodin, among others, are linked to addiction.

"It is the cheapest and most effective thing we've ever done to get drugs off the street," he said of the drug kiosks. "It is safe and secure. No questions asked; you can throw your pills in and nobody checks what is inside the bottle, and then it all goes right to the flame. It all gets burned."

Continue Reading: bostonglobe.com

A Seattle man who lost his parents and whose wife and infant son were critically injured by a drunk driver is speaking out against driving under the influence.

By DONNA GORDON BLANKINSHIP

A Seattle man who lost his parents and whose wife and infant son were critically injured by a drunk driver is speaking out against driving under the influence.

Dan Schulte said at a news conference on Tuesday he may decide to devote his life to stopping preventable tragedies like the one that struck his family when they went for a walk in their north Seattle neighborhood less than two weeks after his son was born.

"All of us need to do what we can," Schulte said, adding that he hopes people will pledge to not drink and drive.

In the meantime, lawmakers in Washington's state Capitol are debating a proposal to increase jail time for repeat drunken driving offenders and to bar some of them from drinking.

Schulte, who believes the laws need to be tougher, said he was happy people were starting to talk more about it.

"We really want to do our part," he said, but added that his family was still trying to figure out what that would be.

Mark Mullan, of Seattle, has pleaded not guilty to vehicular homicide, vehicle assault and reckless driving in the March 25 crash in which his pickup truck hit four members of the family as they crossed a Seattle street.

The crash killed Schulte's parents, Dennis and Judith Schulte, retired teachers from Kokomo, Ind., who had recently moved to Seattle.

One of the doctors treating Dan Schulte's wife, Karina Ulriksen-Schulte, and baby, Elias, also spoke passionately on Tuesday about the need to do something about drunken driving.

"I want to take the word accident out of it," said Dr. Saman Arabbi, who noted that more than half of injuries this severe involve alcohol. "This is a tragedy, but this is not an accident. It was preventable."

Arabbi and another doctor at the news conference said both patients will have a long road to recovery and it was not clear yet how long that recovery will take or how complete it would be.

Ulriksen-Schulte suffered a major pelvis fracture as well as a head injury, but one of the most difficult parts of her recovery involves a stroke she had within a day of the crash, the doctors said. She has been moved to a hospital rehabilitation center, but the doctors and family members would not say where.

"She has a pretty long road ahead of her," Dan Schulte said. "There's a lot of unknowns."

He said his wife recognizes people and knows who he is, taking baby steps toward her recovery every day.

Continue Reading: seattletimes.com

Dr. Howard Samuels

One of my most powerful memories is of my sister crying.

Now, it's important for me to tell you that I come from a very large family, and that over the course of our lives, I'd seen my sister cry many, many times. When you're all living under the same roof, you learn a lot about each other -- how to tolerate one another, how to love one another, and in some instances, how to keep secrets from one another.

But, what made this time different -- what burned this particular instance into my brain -- was the fact that she was standing in a dirty city street with traffic everywhere while flashing lights rioted against her tear-stained face as I was being loaded onto the ambulance after ODing on heroin and cocaine.

Now, it's also important for me to tell you that even though I would go on to survive that overdose, it would still be years before I'd stop drinking and using addictively.

Years.

And it was all because I'd never really gotten a handle on my beast.

And, it's funny, I can feel you rolling your eyes at this, but, the truth is, everybody has a beast. I mean, this isn't a concept that's exclusive to addicts and alcoholics. The beast is an entity that lives inside of everybody; it's your negative self-talk. It will create resentments in you, it will create judgements of other people, and it will create fear, it will create crisis -- in my work as a psychotherapist, I can tell you firsthand that I deal with people all the time who come to me and they turn little issues into huge, complicated problems -- because that's what the beast does. It doesn't matter if you're a "normie" (someone who doesn't have addiction issues) or an addict/alcoholic, chances are you have this thing inside you already and it is informing your decisions.

The difference between these two groupings (normies and addict/alcoholics) is that, if the addict/alcoholic listens to their beast and gets seduced by their beast, the addict/alcoholic, in order to deal with their beast, will go out and medicate themselves (whether its alcohol or heroin or weed or whatever). And they will medicate themselves to such an extent that they will lose control of their lives and, still, they will continue to use their "medication" to quiet the noise from the negative beast within.

The normie isn't quite so driven to self-destruction. Normies will usually tolerate their beast; they'll just live with it and put up with it. They will become depressed or try to repress it; they may have issues in relationships (maybe they're in a bad relationship and are afraid to end it), maybe they're in a job and they're scared to move onto another job, so they stay in that job and get depressed -- they're fear-based, but their beast doesn't allow them to grow. The normie, unlike the addict/alcoholic, isn't motivated to change. Many of them eventually do, but it isn't as if they've got a gun to their head.

When a normie gets seduced by their beast, they become unhappy and lead grey, dull, repetitive lives that are still punctuated by moments of joy and self-awareness.

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