Drug Abuse

You might think reaching for that cup of coffee or cigarette is a simple decision. But scientists believe the way we act to satisfy cravings involves a little-understood automated response - one we have no control over - and researchers in Baltimore are using brain scans to unlock its secrets. "If there's an automated component to craving, we really want to understand how it works," says Elliot Stein, director of the neuroimaging lab at the Bayview campus of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in East Baltimore.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- It doesn't seem like yesterday, but it doesn't seem that long ago, either. It was 1984, to be exact, and Major League Baseball was faced with its biggest public embarrassment since the Black Sox threw the World Series. The great Pittsburgh cocaine scandal, which really wasn't confined to Pittsburgh, shocked the nation and sparked the first serious call for strict measures to assure that the national pastime was protected against a national epidemic of drug abuse.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- Questions over the death of Anna Nicole Smith, like those over the paternity of her 5-month-old daughter, or her stake in her late husband's $450 million estate, will remain unanswered for now. But after an autopsy yesterday, Broward County medical examiner Joshua Perper reached one important conclusion: "We did not see any mass quantities of pills in her stomach," he said. "There are no findings to indicate continued drug abuse." Smith, 39, collapsed Thursday afternoon in her sixth-floor room at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, authorities said.

Turn back the hands of Doomsday Clock Kudos to The Sun for the editorial describing and bringing attention to the advance of the Doomsday Clock ("It's late," Jan. 18). However, one connection the editorial did not make explicit is the one between global warming and its effects on the national security situation of nuclear-armed countries. As populations are displaced, and ecosystems and access to resources such as food and water change, it is not difficult to imagine these situations pushing countries into a nuclear "resource war."

George Soros, the Hungarian Holocaust survivor whose fortune is matched only by his philanthropy, in Baltimore and elsewhere around the world, pioneered a kind of self-styled approach to global reform that made him, in the words of the Carnegie Endowment's Morton Abramowitz, "the only private citizen who had his own foreign policy." With no sluggish bureaucracy to answer to, he rose to prominence with stunningly practical bequests delivered in a timely manner. There was his $50 million donation to the besieged citizens of Sarajevo in 1993 that financed a water plant so that women did not need to rely on the public wells where Serbian snipers picked them off with ease.

WASHINGTON -- Fewer teenagers are abusing illegal drugs, although the rate of illicit drug use among all Americans has remained steady over the past three years, according to a government report released yesterday. The proportion of youths ages 12 to 17 reporting that they had used illegal drugs - a category that includes marijuana and cocaine, but not alcohol or tobacco - in the previous month decreased by about 370,000, from 11.6 percent to a little less than 10 percent, between 2002 and 2005, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health showed.

Lacking state assistance to cover operating costs, Carroll County officials say they will hire a private vendor to run a planned $3.3 million drug treatment center in Sykesville, shifting the focus of the project to provide shorter stays for more patients. County officials, who had pushed the project for more than six years, had hoped the state would help fund the facility's expected $1.8 million in annual operating expenses. However, the Maryland Alcohol and Drug Abuse Administration recently informed them that the state would not provide the money.

Plastic surgeon Ronald S. Perlman thrives in the limelight. He has served as a celebrity judge at top-flight beauty pageants, helped run a charity that assists abused women - even raffled off his services at a society auction. His Perlman Plastic Surgery Center, which specializes in breast implants and laser facial surgery, is a fixture in Washington's Spring Valley neighborhood, a few blocks from the Maryland line. He also ran a satellite office in Greenbelt for 15 years and is licensed in Virginia.

It wrecks neighborhoods, families and lives, and might be the most important public health problem faced by Western societies. Yet since chemists first isolated cocaine, morphine and heroin in the 19th century, physicians and scientists have struggled to explain the nature of addiction. There is still much to learn, but with advances in genetics, medical imaging technology and neuroscience, scientists say they are closer than ever to understanding why some people who try drugs become addicted, and some do not. "I think we made more progress in the last 10 years than in the previous history of mankind," said Frank Vocci, director of treatment and research at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which spends $1 billion annually on drug research.

In November, Harford County District Judge Mimi R. Cooper sentenced a drug-addicted lawbreaker to long-term treatment instead of jail. A bed was not available for him, so Cooper sent him to jail to wait for one to open up. But none did before he finished his two-month sentence, and he was released in January. "He's been arrested at least two more times since then, and he still needs treatment," Cooper said. During the past year, Cooper has signed more than 11 orders to send similar drug-abusing criminals to rehabilitation rather than jail or prison -- a drug diversion program that Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. streamlined last year.