New study says it’s the lifestyle, not the alcohol. Ever since the first studies showed modest statistical health benefits for people who drank a light to moderate amount of alcohol, the...

Obama's September proclamation. Recovery Month, an annual September observance highlighting the benefits of substance abuse treatment, kicked off on August 31 when President Obama issued a...

Punish the crime, treat the disorder. The alcoholic in A.A. and the cocaine addict on the street share a common appetite. This shared appetite, and the behaviors that come with it, are played...

FDA remains conflicted over safety concerns. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a controversial Safety Alert over electronic cigarettes, known as “e-cigarettes,” then held a press...

How a pill for alcoholism became a blockbuster antidepressant. Back in the 1970s, while doing research on antidepressants at Eli Lilly and Co., several organic chemists had been working on...

Quitters do better on 6-month regimen. It may sound like dream propaganda for the makers of nicotine patches. And it is. Moreover, at least one of the study authors has worked in the past as a consultant for GlaxoSmithKline, maker of Nicoderm CQ, one...

Does cheap liquor encourage excess? Last year, Sir Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer in England, touched off a storm of controversy with his call for a government-mandated minimum pricing schedule for the sale of alcohol. Donaldson’s...

A symbol of need.  Getting off drugs, or learning to stop drinking, is very often easier than staying off them. As Mark Twain remarked about tobacco, quitting was easy—he’d done it dozens of times. Relapse, the biological imperative, will have...

L.A. set to close most marijuana dispensaries. Medical marijuana advocates in Los Angeles appear to have overreached themselves, angering the City Council by establishing more than a thousand medical marijuana dispensaries in commercial and...

  Canada considers the case. The link between cigarette smoking and respiratory disease is irrefutable. But what about pot smoking? A long history of contentious argument and clinical inference has left the picture as fuzzy as ever. Despite...