Afghan heroin hits U.S. Midwest

"For the first time, we have more people addicted to heroin than alcohol in my clinic, and these are suburban kids from St. Louis County. More and more Afghan heroin is coming in," says Percy Menzies, president of Assisted Recovery Centers in St. Louis.

Newly elected Rep. Russ Carnahan, D-Mo., plans to use his recently acquired seat on the House International Relations Committee to propose setting up a legal market for Afghan opium for manufacturing pain relief medications.

"You can't just cut off the poppies because that's the livelihood of the people who live there," Carnahan says. "But providing them with alternative legal markets for pain-relief medication is a way to help cut back on that heroin supply." Details from the San Jose Mercury News.

Nicotine: So much for "hitting bottom"

Surgery for lung cancer is not effective as a "hit bottom" experience for many persons addicted to nicotine. A study conducted by Mark S. Walker Ph.D. of the School of Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis found that nearly half of all patients who underwent lung surgery for early-stage cancer were smoking again within 12 months. The study appears in the December issue of the journal Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers & Prevention. Abstract, news story.

Teen smokers become heavier drinkers

Researchers have known for a long time that smokers tend to drink alcohol and drinkers tend to smoke cigarettes. Now, new research indicates that adolescents who smoke are more likely to go on to abuse alcohol than their non-smoking peers.

Richard Grucza is an epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. He says he and his colleagues analyzed the data from more than 73,000 interviews collected over three years in U.S. government surveys.

"We divided adolescents up according to how much they drink, so we put them in groups as light drinkers, moderate drinkers and heavy drinkers," he says. "We saw that regardless of how much they drank, the smokers always had substantially more problems with alcohol use and dependence than did the non-smokers." Source.

Students dramatize tobacco deaths

Buffalo, MO.: Students in black T-shirts moved quietly through the Buffalo and Skyline school halls on Tuesday, Oct. 24. These students joined approximately 42,000 students around the state participating in Project Silenced Voices.

Project Silenced Voices challenged students to start the morning by reading a short story about how tobacco affected their character's life. The students then put on their black T-shirts and were silent the remainder of the day, in remembrance of lives lost to tobacco.

At the end of the day, students wrote a paragraph describing their experience. "I learned that not only am I privileged to speak, but I feel bad for the people who can't speak," said Skyline student Alicia Melton. "It felt like I was disabled and unable to speak. I don't think that I would ever chew tobacco or smoke in my entire life."

"I learned tobacco can ruin people's lives," said Buffalo Prairie Middle School seventh-grader Lindsay Dill. "If you don't do tobacco, your friends or family could be killed by tobacco use. It was really hard not to be able to talk. It was hard to get what you meant across to people." Source.