News Stories

American schools and parents are failing miserably when it comes to steering teens clear of alcohol, drugs and cigarettes, a sobering new survey shows. And the really bad news is that it's getting worse. The number of students attending drug-infested schools has skyrocketed - from 44% in 2002 to 62% this year for high schoolers and from 19% to 28% for middle schoolers, according to the 10th annual teen survey, unveiled yesterday by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse.

The documentary series INTERVENTION  profiles people who are losing the battle with their addictions, and whose friends and families feel the only remaining option is to hold an intervention.

Each documentary follows the lives of these addicts, taking an unflinching look at the impact of their addictions on their everyday lives, all the while the addicts are unaware that an intervention is being planned.

Each airing ends with the friends, family and a professional interventionist urging the addict to get treatment. If the individual should choose treatment, the addict immediately enters a widely respected treatment facility.

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Peter Jennings, one of the best known names in television news passed away from lung cancer Sunday August 7, 2005. He was only 67 years old. By his own admission he had smoked for many years. He gave them up almost twenty years ago but resumed around 9/11.

He is probably not the first to have died this month from lung cancer but he is one of the more prominent. Tobacco has no favorites. It will take one as fast as the next.

God does not want us to be controlled by substances as he knows that they will kill us in the end. Just as Mr. Jennings has left behind those whom he loved and who loved him so dearly, so we too have those who care about us. Let us not think for a moment that it could not happen to us.

Cigarette manufacturers influenced scientific papers that questioned the link between secondhand smoke and sudden infant death, according to a new study of once-secret industry documents.

The key article, commissioned by Philip Morris and published in a respected pediatric epidemiology journal in 2001, discounts the significance of research showing a link between exposure to secondhand cigarette smoke and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

The article has been cited in at least 19 other scientific papers, misleading physicians, their patients and researchers about the risk of secondhand smoke exposure.

"Undermining people's understanding of the link between secondhand smoke and SIDS places infants everywhere at increased risk," according to Stanton Glantz, PhD, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California - San Francisco (UCSF) and senior author of the new study analyzing the tobacco company documents.