“Addiction” on The Daily Caller

A mother-of-five has been diagnosed with a rare disorder called Pica after seeking medical help for her addiction… to eating sofas. (more)

A potential ban on menthol cigarettes has sparked a debate within the African American community over whether a government ban should be welcomed for health reasons or considered a condescending demonstration of paternalism. (more)

“The junk merchant doesn’t sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to the product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.”  (more)

City University students will have to take a hike if they want a nicotine fix. (more)

Here’s a word of advice to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulators deciding this week whether or not to ban menthol cigarettes: Cool it. If the FDA sows this wind, I fear we will reap the whirlwind. (more)

Go soft on drugs and we’ll enter a new era where the lamb will lie down with the lion, according to optimists. Crime will drop. The sun will shine. It all looks so compassionate-y and student-y. In the United Kingdom and Australia, though, some influential commentators are more skeptical. (more)

Let’s all thank Surgeon General Regina Benjamin for demonstrating beyond all doubt last week that “nannyism” is more dangerous than smoking. (more)

WASHINGTON — More U.S. teens may be smoking marijuana than cigarettes but fewer are binge-drinking, federal health officials said Tuesday. (more)

Even brief exposure to tobacco smoke causes immediate harm to the body, damaging cells and inflaming tissue in ways that can lead to serious illness and death, according to the U.S. Surgeon General’s new report on tobacco, the first such report in four years. (more)

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) — A smokeless tobacco company has agreed to pay $5 million to the family of a man who died of mouth cancer in what the family’s attorney and an expert called the first wrongful death settlement from chewing tobacco. (more)

The holidays are a time for eating: pies at Thanksgiving, chocolates for Advent and overflowing gift baskets of cookies and candies through the New Year. If you’re having trouble saying no to the bounty of fat and sugar, give yourself a break: your willpower may be no match for brain pathways that make overeating — much like drug-taking — feel so good. (more)

Recently, it was announced by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that the Food and Drug Administration, which now regulates tobacco, will require all cigarette packages to carry scary warning labels depicting the evils of tobacco use, complete with gruesome photos of a cancerous lung, a man smoking a cigarette through a tracheotomy tube, and a corpse. (more)

When she hung out her shingle as a sex addiction therapist in 1997, Alexandra Katehakis had only a handful of colleagues. (more)

Experts say they have found a “tipsy” gene that explains why some people feel alcohol’s effects quicker than others. (more)

An American charity that pays drug addicts to get sterilized has expanded its operation into Great Britain, and while it has so far paid only one British man to undergo the procedure, it has triggered a storm of criticism. (more)

Katherine Heigl is in trouble with the P.C. police. A week after telling David Letterman how she managed to quit smoking by switching to e-cigarettes, the “Life as We Know It” actress is drawing not praise but condemnation from moralistic public health types. (more)

Meet Eljuan Heath. (more)

WORCESTER, Mass. – It was not as big a draw as the playground or the hot dog truck, but the drug collection program at a busy downtown park here on Saturday still netted a few hundred bottles of prescription pills as part of a broader one-day effort to clean out the nation’s medicine cabinets. (more)

One of the most contentious issues in the vast literature about alcohol consumption has been the consistent finding that those who don’t drink actually tend to die sooner than those who do. The standard Alcoholics Anonymous explanation for this finding is that many of those who show up as abstainers in such research are actually former hard-core drunks who had already incurred health problems associated with drinking. (more)

A federal judge is allowing a negligence lawsuit to proceed against the publisher of the online virtual-world game Lineage II, amid allegations that a Hawaii man became so addicted he is “unable to function independently in usual daily activities such as getting up, getting dressed, bathing or communicating with family and friends.” (more)