Addiction

Legendary singer-songwriter Judy Collins will be the keynote speaker at the fifth annual Women in Recovery Luncheon May 22 at Father Martin's Ashley, a non-profit alcoholism and drug addiction treatment center near Havre de Grace. The luncheon celebrates and honors the lives of women in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction. Collins overcame addiction when entering treatment in 1978, and has been living a life of recovery for over 30 years, according to her biography. Collins has been a strong advocate for addiction recovery and also suicide prevention since losing her son to suicide.

It was April 1978, and singer Judy Collins hadn't had an inspirational thought in four years. She'd been an alcoholic for 23 years — "and I was proud of it. " She'd toured and made records, but she knew the ride she was on — her father had been an alcoholic — and "as long as I was on it, I was going to enjoy every minute. " But in those last four years, she'd been drinking around the clock. Three-black-outs-a-day drinking. Jelly-jars-full-of-booze drinking. So her accountant and her assistant, the only people who would have anything to do with this version of Judy Collins, put her on a plane to a rehab facility.

I think it's fantastic that Rev. Milton Williams is sticking his neck out on behalf of addicts in Baltimore by proposing to open his clinic to more people in serious need of methadone treatment ("Pastor to open on-demand methadone clinic at church," June 24). One thing the article did not mention is that methadone does not make addicts high but reduces cravings that lead to drug-seeking behavior and crime. However, it's imperative that readers know that methadone is also a highly effective primary treatment for chronic pain.

Tattoos aren't just for outlaws anymore. Maybe they never were, but for years, popular culture suggested otherwise. Just think of the movies: Robert Mitchum's homicidal preacher in "The Night of the Hunter," with "Love" and "Hate" tattooed on his knuckles; Robert De Niro's vengeance-crazed ex-con in "Cape Fear," his torso covered in soulless ink; or Ralph Fiennes' serial killer, Dolarhyde, in "Red Dragon," his back emblazoned with an elaborate, and...

America has suddenly become aware that there is a trade problem with China ("Export policy No. 1: getting China to play by the rules," Sept. 21). Once again, who could have predicted it? The American public is an addict. China is our supplier and the big discount chain stores are the dealers. We are addicted to easy money and bargain prices. The problem is that now we recognize that this is killing us and we want out of the arrangement. Whatever the solution, when an addict and his supplier break up, somebody is going to get hurt.

More than 20 years ago two neighborhood women, Jaye Burtnick and Gloria DeBarry, established a safe and warm place for the street people of the Cross Street Market area. "Their first epiphany was that almost all the guys who came there were veterans and they had addiction issues," said Michael Seipp, executive director of what is now called the Baltimore Station, an agency that defines its mission as "a therapeutic residential recovery program for men who are homeless largely due to chronic substance abuse.

Howard Markel's "An Anatomy of Addiction" starts, like a shot, on May 5,1884. A Bellevue Hospital orderly summons Dr. William Stewart Halsted to save the leg of a laborer who has fallen from a scaffolding. Famous for the speed and virtuosity of his surgery, Halsted notes the shattered shinbone piercing through the skin — and abruptly retreats from the examination table, because he's not fit to operate. He takes a cab home and sinks "into a cocaine oblivion that lasted more than seven months.

America is witnessing an epidemic of hand held phone lust! We have become a nation of techno-addicts — and there is a trillion-dollar industry feeding the hunger! Those overnight lines for the new Apple device are a clear symptom. Why are we relentlessly tethered to instant communication? Today Americans suffer from isolation and loss of physical contact from one another. It's frightening to see folks crave the iPhone 4s ("Apple fans get early dose of iPhone fever," June 25)

G eorge Gregory "Blue" Epps, a recovering addict and an addiction counselor whose struggle was depicted in "The Corner," the book which later became a critically acclaimed HBO miniseries, died of undetermined causes Nov. 15 at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The Highlandtown resident was 59. "We are waiting for the results of an autopsy for a cause of death," said his wife of nine years, the former Valerie Bolling. Mr. Epps was born in Baltimore and raised in West Baltimore.

The first interim report on Baltimore's efforts to reduce heroin addiction through expanded use of a promising drug shows that the city's strategy is working relatively well, but that results could be even better with broader participation by doctors and hospitals. In a city with such abundant medical talent, that should not be an impediment to helping eliminate a major scourge. Baltimore's buprenorphine initiative is a worthy effort, led by the city's Health Department, to help addicts by using a synthetic opiate that is an effective antidote to heroin.

Legendary singer-songwriter Judy Collins will be the keynote speaker at the fifth annual Women in Recovery Luncheon May 22 at Father Martin's Ashley, a non-profit alcoholism and drug addiction treatment center near Havre de Grace. The luncheon celebrates and honors the lives of women in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction. Collins overcame addiction when entering treatment in 1978, and has been living a life of recovery for over 30 years, according to her biography. Collins has been a strong advocate for addiction recovery and also suicide prevention since losing her son to suicide.

A Baltimore prosecutor offered jurors in a murder trial a painful and troubling portrait Wednesday of the victim's final moments, describing how a killer "suffocated and butchered" the boy , whose screams for help she said went unheard by a relative   who had passed out from heroin, The Sun's Peter Hermann reports: Assistant State's Attorney Jennifer Hastings held up two oversized pictures of 15-year-old Jason Mattison Jr., pointed...

ARLINGTON, Texas — Bye, Josh. It's too bad because Josh Hamilton might be the most talented baseball player who has ever run around Arlington. Josh Hamilton's relationship with baseball is as pure as anybody ever born. It's his relationship, however, with some other stuff that muddies everything. That puts the Rangers in the no-win position of having to say, "No, thanks" when the money gets stupid, which it will when some ambitious owner gives Hamilton the years and the money he, his agent and his union collectively seek.

Singer Mario knows from first-hand experience how it is to grow up with a parent with substance abuse problems and now he wants to use what he knows to help other kids. The Baltimore native, whose mother has suffered from drug abuse for years, is using his non-profit to help prevent substance abuse in middle and high school students in the Baltimore area. The Mario Do Right Foundation will house the program at the REACH! School, a Baltimore school that focuses on getting kids into college.

As I write this, the thermometer indicates 17 degrees Farenheit in Baltimore, and Terry Reed's whereabouts are unknown. He's no longer at Union Memorial Hospital, where I saw him last, just before Christmas. Tuesday night, when I checked, he had not returned to his customary panhandling spot along President Street in downtown Baltimore. Perhaps he made it back to the North Avenue motel room he rents when he has enough money, or to the flophouse on Pennsylvania Avenue that charges him $50 a night.

Ten years ago, a television commercial aired simultaneously on all of the TV stations in Baltimore. It was paid for by the private dollars of principled Baltimore business leaders. It began with the words of a little boy. "My grandmother says we're all part of one big fire. I don't know if that's true, but I know there's a fire inside me. " So began our very public campaign to awaken Baltimore's truer sense of self - to tap the fire inside - and to call upon the power of that spirit to confront the violence of drugs and drug addiction that was killing 300 to 350 of our young men every year - and increasingly, our children.

I guess you had to be there. You need to have lived through the collapse of the scandalous Nixon presidency, the shameful conclusion of the Vietnam War, the anger and alienation that was the fallout of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, the assassinations, the race riots and the student riots. You need to have lived through a time when we came to believe that our government was hostile and venal to appreciate the shocking candor, the frankness, the refreshing honesty of Betty Ford.

A few days ago, Anthony Graves called his mother and asked what she was cooking for dinner. She asked why he wanted to know. He said, "Because I'm coming home. " Maybe it sounds like an unremarkable exchange. But Anthony Graves had spent 18 years behind bars, 12 of them on death row, for the 1992 murder of an entire family, including four young children, in the Texas town of Somerville. It wasn't until that day, Oct. 27, that the district attorney's office finally accepted what he'd been saying for almost two decades: He is innocent.

It's a good thing Gertrude Stein never said, "A phone is a phone is a phone. " Clearly, these days, her tautology would be a disconnect, received like a dropped call. The mobile devices we're so dependent on, attached like an extension of our brains, are so much more. Ultimately, they allow everything to be knowable. But while the smooth, mirrored glass on an iPhone presents a funhouse from which anyone can observe all the YouTube videos, Facebook updates, Tweets and apps, ad infinitum and at an instant - when blended with the speed of driving, it's enough to send a person careening through the glass of a car windshield onto the hard, real world pavement.

After releasing her 1997 debut album "Baduizm," it didn't take long for Erykah Badu's jazzy R&B feel and bold, earthy style to earn her the title of "first lady of neo-soul. " Four Grammy awards and four albums later, she is still inventing her own sound. Her latest project is the Cannabinoids, a digital band made up of musicians and producers from her hometown of Dallas. With its debut album set to be released in early 2012, the group hopes to create a sensational, electronic musical experience for its audience.