Here’s what you need to know about addressing addiction
in the workplace
Lynne Curry, Alaska Dispatch News
When addressing a workplace issue that appears to be caused by a drug addiction, it's a stunningly common and dangerous problem. Seventy percent of the approximately 15 million Americans who use illegal drugs are employed. Addicts are five times more likely to cause accidents in the workplace that injure themselves or others, and addiction is a downward spiral. Do you know how to handle this situation?
Veterans back on patrol, this time to protect marijuana
Julie Turkewitz, The New York Times
It’s nighttime at the Herbal Cure, a south Denver marijuana shop and grow house tucked into a parking lot beside the highway. Inside is a marijuana bounty: thousands of dollars’ worth of cannabis plants, boxes of marijuana-infused chocolate, jars of $360-an-ounce weed with names like Frankenberry, Lemon Skunk and Purple Cheddar. Chris Bowyer, a lanky combat veteran turned cannabis security guard, is outside. He has a .40-caliber pistol on his hip and a few extra magazines stored away, and he is talking about his work on the battlefield. Not the one in Iraq — the one in Colorado, where criminals seeking to breach marijuana businesses face veterans trying to stop them.
Drug testing misses synthetic cannabinoids
Celia Vimont, Join Together
Several local governments have started to include synthetic cannabinoids in their criminal justice drug monitoring programs in an effort to deter their use, after it became clear many people were using the drugs because they knew tests wouldn’t detect them, according to the Director of the University of Maryland’s Center for Substance Abuse Research.
When the addict is a doctor
Steven Ross Johnson, Modern Healthcare
The first time Dr. Peter Grinspoon experimented with Vicodin was with a fellow medical student at Harvard. “It said, 'Careful: Causes extreme euphoria,' ” Grinspoon said. “And once we read that we were sort of destined to try it.” Then, as a primary-care physician based in Boston, Grinspoon tried to replicate the euphoria the drug indeed delivered, at first, during nine years of regular drug use. He ultimately resorted to writing prescriptions under a false name to feed his habit. It all came to a head in February 2005 when law enforcement agents came to his office and arrested him for fraudulently obtaining a controlled substance.
