Today is April 20— “4/20,” in street slang, a day on which the traditional writing of the date coincides with the number “420,” a number representing the total grams of marijuana in a pound. What does it mean for your kids?
In 2016, 63,632 people in the US died from a drug overdose, a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has concluded. And many more of those deaths were caused by potent opioids obtained on the streets than in years past.
Earlier today, Politico provided a preview of what’s believed to be the broad contours of Trump’s grand plan for addressing the opioid crisis. But while some of the details include common sense measures embraced by public health and opioid experts, others are setting their nerves on edge.
Here’s a bit of good news as we recover from our State of the Union-induced hangovers: San Francisco will retroactively expunge thousands of residents’ marijuana convictions from their records, the city’s District Attorney announced Wednesday.
Welcome to WHAT NOW, a morning round-up of the news/fresh horrors that await you today.
When last we checked in on the Donald Trump’s response to the opioid crisis, the news was hardly encouraging: The closest thing to someone at the helm was wildly corrupt New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and extremely bad liar Kellyanne Conway.
A curt travel advisory issued Thursday by the U.S. State Department told Americans not to visit five states in Mexico, all coastal areas the U.S. said has seen an uptick in violent gang-related drug crimes. Those states are Sinaloa, Tamaulipas, Michoacán, Guerrero, and Colima.
Come Monday, recreational use of marijuana will be legal in California. Unless, of course, you’re going through one of the eight Border Patrol checkpoints in the Golden State.
Friday night dinner service at the Salvation Army is halfway over and the front window is fogged with the heat coming off the steam trays. A long stretch of mild weather in Iowa City has finally given over to the cold, and people are trickling outside in heavy layers to smoke and shoot the shit. Sarah Ziegenhorn and…
If you would like to take niacin, a B vitamin that is believed to lower cholesterol and the chance of having a heart attack, you could buy a month’s supply online for about $5. Or you could get a prescription for a bottle of virtually the same pills for almost $300, thanks to a pharmaceutical company using price…
Donald Trump appealed to his late brother’s struggle with addiction while declaring the opioid crisis a national public health emergency Thursday afternoon, an issue he plans to tackle in part by employing “really tough, really big advertising,” telling kids in a very serious voice that drugs are “bad,” and allocating…
Welcome to WHAT NOW, a morning round-up of the news/fresh horrors that await you today.
Every generation has had its breakthrough that promised to, at long last, finally cure cancer, but this time around the chances of actually pulling it off are looking pretty good. Rapid advancement in fields like genetics have led to incredible success using immunotherapies to turn patients’ own bodies into …
The United States has an opioid problem. Heroin overdose deaths rates have tripped since 2010 according to one report—and overall opioid overdose death rates have tripled since 2000. It’s not going away.
Gary Otte is scheduled to be executed by the state of Ohio on Wednesday. In what will likely be one of his last acts, he sent us the following essay.
Opana was a painkiller twice as strong as Oxycontin. Like most opioids sold in the US it was easy to snort, until one day it wasn’t: Its manufacturers, Endo Pharmaceuticals, rigged it with crush-resistant technology in 2012. Within months the largest HIV outbreak in Indiana’s history was underway—addicts had taken to…
Jeff “good people don’t smoke marijuana” Sessions, Attorney General of the United States, is preparing to launch a new front in the (ineffective) war on drugs.
Drug-sniffing dogs in Colorado might soon be out of a job — or at least must be retrained to detect illegal drugs that aren’t weed.
On Wednesday evening, Donald Trump had a chat with the White House press corps on Air Force One as he flew to Paris to meet with French president Emmanuel Macron. During that discussion, he said that his coveted border wall with Mexico must absolutely, positively be see-through.
Larry Krasner, a civil rights attorney who built his professional reputation defending protesters and suing the police, is almost certainly going to be Philadelphia’s next district attorney. Last month, Krasner beat out six other candidates in the Democratic primary—clobbering his closest opponent by a near 18-point…
