“Thank you Canada. I finally, after a very long journey, have a place to call home,” says Dang Son Vinh in Vietnamese with a tentative smile, as if it may all be but a dream. A dream come true: Dang has been in Canada for 28 days. It took him 20 years to get here. [...]
USA Swimming is right-on. The governing body of the American swim team suspended Michael Phelps after damning photos surfaced. The U.S. Olympic gold medal star was smoking from a bong, which all the world seems to know is a marijuana pipe. Reaction from his sponsors and the public have been mixed. And some international columnists [...]
Carrie Fisher: Princess Leia from Star Wars; daughter of America’s original sweethearts Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher; former Mrs. Paul Simon; alcoholic; drug addict; manic-depressive; bipolar; author of Postcards form the Edge and four other books including the recently released Wishful Drinking. She also performs Wishful Drinking in a one-woman travelling stage show.
When Dr. Scott M. Davis was 31 years old he lost half of himself. His twin brother, Jonathan, died of AIDS. Dr. Davis was so grief stricken he could not grieve. Instead he numbed himself with sedatives which were at the ready. He started having the chronic pains that his brother suffered in his illness. [...]
I feel a dangerous movement afoot. Art imitates life. Life imitates art. Tom Wolfe is a best selling American author and journalist who has penned at least a dozen books including The Bonfire of the Vanities, The Right Stuff and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The last two fall into the category of New Journalism [...]
Nic Sheff is a brilliant, wildly creative, courageous, well-read, charismatic and very cool young man. At the end of my last blog entry I wondered if Sheff, author of Tweak, Growing Up On Methamphetamines was still sober. I found out he did relapse "just on pills and marijuana," which definitely is not cool, but he [...]
A number of years ago I attended a valuable and practical support group for parents of troubled teens. It was called Parents Together and you had to be accepted into the British Columbia run program. That is, you had to have real problems with your adolescents. I felt like Groucho Marx: “I don’t care to [...]
Hallelujah, the spoken word is not dead. Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, has launched a new and improved book section in print. The Globe has also launched a new website that talks about books, books that are printed on paper and bound and usually held in the hands and read in various places [...]
Six years ago Stetson was a high functioning Vancouver businessman and father with a daily cocaine habit, regularly scoring on Vancouver’s skid row in the Downtown Eastside. “Many professionals get an easy hit, blocks from their downtown offices, while funnelling thousands of dollars into Main and Hastings and fuelling the drug economy,” he says. The [...]
Six years ago Stetson was a very high functioning Vancouver businessman and father with a daily cocaine habit. Today he is recovering from his addiction. Stetson, a pseudonym, is among the one percent of professionals in Canada who become addicted to street drugs. Related: Affluent addicts fuel street drug trade When he was growing up [...]
Vancouver in the news Vancouver in the blogs