Myth: Small-town girl goes bad in Big City

Media mogul Donald Trump's explanation for beauty queen Tara Conner's tale of addiction -- small-town girl goes bad in Big City -- didn't wash with the editors of the Lexington (KY) Leader-Journal.

Alcoholism and drugs are big time problems all over the small towns of eastern Kentucky, write the editors. Conner was drinking and doing drugs long before she hit the Big Apple.

What Conner's story really shows, says the paper, is the big gap between celebrities and ordinary folks in access to treatment. Conner got into an upscale residential 30-day program the day she asked for help. In the drug-saturated small towns where the newspaper's readers live, there's one treatment bed for every ten people who need it, and the average wait is four to six weeks -- if you can afford it at all. Source.

Kentucky teens dumping smokes

From an editorial in the Elizabethtown KY News-Enterprise:

A state report that didn’t get as much attention as it deserved during the Christmas holiday hustle and bustle was full of good news for those who understand the value of preventing teenagers from getting hooked on the deadly addiction of cigarette smoking.

The 2006 Kentucky Youth Tobacco Survey of 3,000 students in 65 high schools and 3,700 in 74 middle schools found that decline in youth smoking rates in the state continues despite the obvious efforts of tobacco companies to make smoking appealing to young minds.

That’s good news. The decline has been attributed to the efforts of the state’s public health programs and other organizations to reduce youth smoking, the state’s first hike in the tobacco tax in decades that increased the cost of tobacco products for normally cash-strapped teens and the adoption of smoke-free policies in schools.

In addition, the growing number of bans on smoking in public places that has produced documented influence on adults quitting should get some of the credit for discouraging teens from taking up the dirty, stinky habit, too. Full text.

Serving alcohol? You could be sued.

If you own a home and serve alcohol to guests, and a drinking guest drives and hurts someone, you could be sued in 35 states. Either don't serve alcohol, or put your guests up overnight, or buy extra liability insurance, advises this commentator in the Louisville Courier-Journal.