At Least I'm Not Nurse Jackie

There are days I am not the woman I would like to be and when I am very lucky, they coincide with a new episode of “Nurse Jackie.”

Here are a few of the things Jackie, a pill-popping addict played by Edie Falco on Showtime, has done lately: Lied to her 12-step sponsor that she stopped taking drugs. Lied to her cop boyfriend that she stopped taking drugs. Had sex in a bathroom with a drug dealer to score free drugs. Stole the ID of a doctor she works with to write prescriptions for drugs. Borrowed a snazzy leather jacket belonging to the drug dealer’s girlfriend without the girlfriend’s knowledge.

That, to me, was hitting bottom: It would be like putting on the wife’s bathrobe, if you were fooling around with a married man. It is something the Other Woman is not permitted to do, even if you are naked and the house is on fire. You stay in there and die.

I, too, have days where I behave badly: Dodging a call from an old friend planning to renew her marriage vows. Telling another friend how self-congratulatory and obnoxious marriage renewal ceremonies are. Covertly checking my email while a friend talks about the imminent death of her dog.

When they’re done, I can settle back with Showtime and I think, “But, at least I’m not as bad as Jackie.” I have these delicious waves of moral superiority like you cannot believe. It may be better than sex.

But there is one thing about the show that confuses me. Despite all her drug habit, Jackie is such a great nurse, I keep thinking, so what’s wrong with drugs? It’s having to sneak around that makes Jackie do bad things like lying, having sex with drug dealers, and stealing other people’s IDs.

True, I am usually in the dark about what drugs Jackie is taking and their side effects. It would be helpful if there were a crawl on the bottom of the screen: Nurse Jackie is now taking three 10-milligram tablets of OxyContin. This substance has been proven to enhance one’s ability to balance on a counter in a club bathroom while having sex.

It should be noted, however, that Jackie confines her bad behavior to herself and her family — her patients are spared. She destroys her marriage, messes up her two young daughters and ruins romantic relationships. And she does this with a complete lack of guilt, a state I have sought to achieve my whole life, much as a Buddhist monk seeks bliss.

I think that is why the show is such a hit. With “Nurse Jackie” you do not have a heroine who is smarter, nicer and more emotionally evolved than you, but whose behavior makes you feel so much better about yourself. I could steal a cab out from under the nose of a guy on crutches and still go back to my mantra: “At least I’m not Nurse Jackie.”

You sure didn’t find this kind of behavior in the TV heroines of my youth. Lois Lane, while she hankered after an unattainable guy from another planet, remained perky and indefatigable — she didn’t do shots in the bathroom of The Daily Planet when Superman didn’t call. Mary Tyler Moore worried so much about doing the right thing she had anxiety attacks. Lucy might have a horrible day, say at a candy factory, and she never even smoked a joint — and she was married to a band leader.

I don’t find a lot of heroines that make me feel better by comparison now. Alicia, in “‘The Good Wife,” with her unswayable moral compass who always knows the right thing to tell her children? Peggy, the secretary turned chief copywriter on “Mad Men,” who while lately short-tempered with her staff, takes coming up with those stupid ads seriously? The Mother of Dragons in “Game of Thrones” who’s so impressively decisive?(Crucify them! Invade that! Put those heads on a spike in that corner of the living room! No, not there, that’s too close to the dragons’ scratching post!)

I can take three days deciding whether to buy a pair of shoes.

But Jackie? Where are we in her life? She makes it with the drug dealer, then, about two hours later, jumps into the boyfriend’s arms and tells him how happy she is to see him. She yells at her ex-husband’s new fiancée for taking her daughter shopping because she has no impulse control, then learns they were buying a gift for her. She attends her one year of sobriety party stoned.

And, she has yet to return that snazzy jacket she never should have touched in the first place.

Really, I can’t get enough.

Joyce Wadler is a humorist and writer in New York. Her books include “My Breast” and “Cured: My Ovarian Cancer Story.”

Follow Joyce Wadler on Facebook: facebook.com/joyce.wadler and on Twitter:@joyce_wadler.  Previous “I Was Misinformed” columns can be found here.

Another TED Talk from Ken Robinson

Don't miss this!



Share this with everyone you know.

Gun Violence is a Public Health Emergency

It took only eleven minutes to transform a quiet elementary school into the scene of one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history. On December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza entered Sandy Hook Elementary with a Bushmaster Model XM15-E2S semiautomatic rifle. He used the weapon to murder twenty school children and six adults. One state trooper warned the medical personnel who arrived at the school to formally declare the victims dead: “This will be the worst day of your life.”

The Sandy Hook shootings prompted an outpouring of national grief and outrage. Yet sadly, this tragedy—while especially shocking and visible—only represents the tip of the iceberg when it comes to deaths from gun violence. Every day in the United States, friends and family must make funeral preparations for an average of 86 peoplewho were intentionally or unintentionally killed with a firearm.

If measles or mumps killed 31,672 people a year, we would undoubtedly consider the situation to be a public health emergency. And indeed, gun violence shares many characteristics with other widespread safety threats that have been framed as public health issues.

In a Q&A published in a 2008 book, The Contested Boundaries of American Public Health, epidemiologist Mark Rosenberg recalls early efforts to frame gun violence as a public health issue in the 1980s. Finding that the burden of deaths from guns in the United States was similar to those of cars, he realized that gun violence was an area where public health could “make a big contribution and save lives by applying the same kind of science that had been applied to road traffic crashes.”

Indeed, like motor vehicle deaths, gun fatalities result from a consumer product that is integral to many Americans’ lives. Yet both cars and guns can be made safer with technology and engineering—air bags in cars and loading indicators for guns.

But efforts to frame gun violence as a public health challenge have met with considerable resistance, most notably from gun lobby groups, such as the NRA.

The NRA is a powerful force in American political life that attracts many supporters, not only with its ideological positions, but with its message of self-empowerment. And the organization has long and vociferously opposed the framing of gun violence as a public health issue, portraying research on the subject as biased and misguided. For instance, the NRA’s chief lobbyist, Chris Cox, told the New York Times that the CDC was guilty of publishing “political opinion masquerading as medical science.”

The NRA has worked to translate their objections into policies that circumscribe public health research on the effects of gun violence. In the mid-1990s, after a failed campaign to eliminate the CDC’s National Center For Injury Prevention, gun lobbyists helped persuade Congress to include language in its budget stating that “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”  (If the NRA is right about everything they preach, why are they so afraid of the data?)

Despite this limitation, the agency has since developed other mechanisms to study causes of violent deaths, notably the National Violence Reporting System. But to this day, the CDC’s funding level for research explicitly devoted to gun violence prevention remains at $0. And according to Dr. David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, due to fears of getting attacked by the NRA lobby, many foundations have avoided funding such research. (Do you think Bill and Melinda are afraid of the NRA?) “It’s one of the reasons that there’s been relatively little gun research compared to other research in public health,” Dr. Hemenway says.

More recently, the NRA succeeded in adding a provision into the Affordable Care Act to limit doctors’ ability to gather data about their patients’ gun use. The Washington Post dubbed this provision “a largely overlooked but significant challenge to a movement in American medicine to treat firearms as a matter of public health.”

Then, in 2011, Florida Governor Rick Scott signed into law a “docs vs glocks” bill, which banned physicians from asking their patients about gun ownership. In 2012, a federal judge permanently blocked this NRA-backed law because it violated the First Amendment rights of doctors. Nonetheless, such laws and provisions indicates the extent to which policymakers have attempted to limit medical and public health conversations and research on gun safety.

Despite this already remarkable influence in setting and limiting the terms of public health research, this year the NRA has wielded its power in an extraordinary new way by obstructing President Obama’s nomination of Dr. Vivek Murthy as U.S. Surgeon General. The organization opposed Dr. Murthy’s characterization of gun control as a health issue and his support of regulatory measures, such as mandatory safety training for gun owners.

But by blocking Dr. Murthy’s nomination, the NRA prompted prominent medical and public health voices to take a stand. In a remarkable op-ed, the New England Journal of Medicine stated that “the NRA is taking its single-issue political blackmail to a new level.” And in April 2014, Michael Bloomberg took a bold step into the ongoing debate, announcing that he would donate $50 million of his own money to counter the NRA.

The New York Times describes how Bloomberg intends to restructure current gun control advocacy efforts to more effectively counter the NRA. Part of the idea is to combine forces and model advocacy efforts on the success of other safety-related groups, notably Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The resulting new group, Everytown For Gun Safety, has already produced an ad that directly challenges claims made by the NRA.

Whether these new strategies and influx of money can promote effectively a public health perspective on gun violence and safety interventions remains an open question with high stakes. In fact, even after the Sandy Hook shootings of 2012, many states have been loosening their gun restrictions. Georgia, one of the most prominent and recent examples of this trend, recently passed into law a bill that allows licensed gun owners to carry their weapons in schools, churches, bars, and airports. The public is often unaware of the extent to which gun owners may legally carry and display their weapons in public spaces across the country.

What policy changes do gun safety advocates seek? A recent Massachusetts report identified 44 strategies to reduce gun violence that all committee members, including public health professionals and gun owners, endorsed. Of the range of possible strategies to reduce gun violence, strengthening the existing background check system has the most public support. In fact, although the NRA as an organization does not support universal background checks, a 2013 poll found support among 74 percent of NRA members. (The NRA doesn't even support their own members!)

This approach is also supported by public health research. As reported by Nora Caplan-Bricker in The New Republic, a 2014 study found that the murder rate in Missouri jumped 16 percent after the repeal of a state law that required anyone purchasing a handgun to obtain a permit indicating a background check had been passed.

Safe storage practices and more safely designed guns would also likely make an impact on reducing the number of unintentional gun deaths among young children. As Dr. Hemenway told WBUR’s All Things Considered, “We have childproof aspirin bottles; we should have childproof guns.”

Yet entrepreneurs seeking to market and sell “smart guns,” or weapons which can only be fired by authorized users, have encountered harassment and outrage from gun enthusiasts. This month, a Maryland gun dealer who had intended to sell the nation’s first smart gun backed down after enduring protests and death threats. And fewer than 20 states have enacted laws to hold adults criminally liable if they fail to safely store their gun, enabling children to access the weapon.

Former U.S. Surgeon General Julius Richmond and medical economist Rashi Fein have proposed three essential factors involved in addressing a societal problem: scientific data, a social strategy guiding the pursuit of public health goals, and political will. Public health researchers have sought to collect data on the effects of gun violence despite the obstacles, and gun safety advocates are currently seeking new strategies.

But ultimately, it seems that whether gun violence can be framed as public health problem will come down to political will. A public health frame for this fully loaded American issue can only be effective if it is built on a narrative of shared American values. These must include not only the second amendment, but also protecting our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

A New Epidemic is Targeting Good Kids

This story is playing itself out all over the country.  There is no community that isn't being effected by the heroin epidemic.  The difference in this epidemic from any other is that it is targeting the "good kids."  The "bad kids" are dealing, not using.

Heroin’s New Hometown

On Staten Island, Rising Tide of Heroin Takes Hold

By J. DAVID GOODMAN and MICHAEL WILSONMAY 4, 2014

The obituaries have a certain sameness to them: full of praise and regret for lives cut short, marked by telltale details and omissions. The deaths occurred at home, or at a friend’s house elsewhere on Staten Island. The mourned were often young and white, and although how they died was never mentioned, nearly everyone knew or suspected the cause.

A 23-year-old man, a cello student in high school and the son of an elevator company vice president died in March. A former high school hockey player who delivered newspapers died in 2013 at 22. Another 23-year-old man who was working construction died at home in July 2012. Family members and autopsy reports revealed that they died from heroin or combinations of drugs including heroin.

Staten Island, long a blue-collar bastion of police officers and other New York City workers, is confronting a heroin epidemic.

Thirty-six people died from heroin overdoses in 2012, the highest number in at least a decade, according to the most recent available city health department records; the death rate was higher than the city’s other four boroughs had seen in 10 years. The amount of heroin seized by the Police Department on Staten Island has jumped more than 300 percent from 2011 to 2013, and this year shows no sign of abating: Through April 13, officers seized roughly 1,700 glassine bags of heroin, up from about 1,200 bags over the same period in 2013. That number does not include the 347 bags seized on Wednesday in raids at an auto-repair shop and its owner’s home.

Drug treatment facilities and addiction programs teem with patients; informal support groups for addicts’ relatives have had to find larger meeting spaces. And last month, the city authorized nearly all Staten Island police and emergency medical workers to carry naloxone, a drug to counteract heroin overdoses.

“You’ve got kids falling apart. You’ve got families falling apart,” said William A. Fusco, the director of Dynamic Youth Community, a drug-treatment center in Brooklyn whose clients include many young Staten Islanders. “You’ve got people who have got no idea what to do, and they’re all saying the same thing: This was a good kid. This was a good kid.”

For decades, heroin was mostly found in the urban sections of the island’s north, where the ferry docks from Manhattan and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge touches down from Brooklyn. It afflicted the borough’s poorest areas, with sales concentrated in open-air markets at a few notorious housing developments like Stapleton and Park Hill.

But as in towns and cities from Vermont to Washington State, heroin’s new surge on Staten Island has ravaged primarily its working- and middle-class communities, especially in the borough’s south.

Numerous heroin addicts and dealers said in interviews that the drug was usually purchased in bulk elsewhere in New York City or in New Jersey, then resold on Staten Island. Law enforcement officials back that account, noting that they have not found any heroin mills in the borough, requiring the police to fight an army of small-time dealers.

“They hide in plain sight,” Detective Ray Wittick said on a recent Wednesday as he steered an unmarked police minivan through a Waldbaum’s grocery store parking lot in Princes Bay, where drug deals are not uncommon.

Some parents have taken to sending their children for treatment in Brooklyn, in part to avoid the glare of those who would recognize them at facilities on Staten Island.

Candace Crupi said she did not want to leave any mystery about her son’s death. The obituary in The Staten Island Advance in March said Johnathan Crupi, 21, had been overwhelmed by addiction. He died at home of a heroin overdose.

“I wanted people to know that I wasn’t ashamed of him,” she said. “People are so ashamed of addiction. There’s such a stigma, and it’s just not right.”

On the family’s kitchen table, among funeral bouquets of red and yellow roses, sat a photograph of Johnathan. It had been a formal occasion, the young man in a tuxedo, his hair closely cropped in a Caesar-style cut.

In a back bedroom, where his body was found on March 28, the smell of cigarettes still lingered 10 days later.

Since the obituary appeared in late March, Ms. Crupi, 60, said she had been approached by people she knew well, and those she only barely recalled, offering condolences and praising her bravery. At Johnathan’s funeral, hundreds showed up, including many strangers who described their families’ own struggles with heroin.

“People that I never knew were going through the same thing,” her husband, Barry Crupi, said. “It was so many people. So many people.”

Spread across an island more than twice the size of Manhattan, Staten Island’s 470,000 residents live in a collection of small communities often arranged around short main streets, the neighborhoods bearing the names of early residents — Tottenville for John Totten and his family — or for the industries once prevalent, like Graniteville for the quarries once active there.

Until 1964, when the Verrazano Bridge opened, Staten Island had no physical connection to the rest of New York City; older bridges led only to New Jersey. That long separation gave Staten Island its own sense of identity and culture, from the centrality of the Staten Island Mall to the wooded brush vulnerable to fires set by bored teenagers.

There is also a sense of continuity: Staten Island’s demographics have not greatly changed since the 1970 census. In contrast to the rest of the city, the borough’s white non-Hispanic residents outnumber minorities, accounting for about 64 percent of its residents, according to the 2010 census. Most homes are owner-occupied, and unemployment is below the city average.

“When I was growing up, you’d see people riding horses on Hylan Boulevard,” Detective Wittick, 45, said. “You felt like it was something out of a movie, you know. These little towns with the perfect life. You knew all your neighbors.”

That familiarity still exists, but now it carries a burden when drugs are involved.

For a time, a culture of recreational prescription pill abuse seemed like just the latest way for many on Staten Island to deal with weekend boredom. Pills could be found at the cafeteria in Tottenville High School, or at local bars where older men sold their medications, like Roxicodone, Vicodin or Percocet, for a healthy profit. A young barber on Amboy Road said some customers asked to pay for their haircuts in pills.

“You could make money off it,” said Andrea, a 21-year-old recovering addict from Great Kills. “It didn’t seem like there were any consequences.”

Or, in the words of a local rap song from 2012: “Pain killer paradise, Staten Island.”

Pills began showing up in drug seizures around the island, often traced to doctors whose offices were flooded by users seeking illegal prescriptions. One such physician, Dr. Felix Lanting, was 85 when he pleaded guilty to distributing oxycodone in 2012.

His arrest caused a momentary jump in prices, recovering addicts said, but he was just one source among many, including a Lickety Split ice cream truck where 30-milligram oxycodone pills were sold on the side.

An Inexpensive High

Gradually, dealers and users switched to heroin. Some opioid addicts found that their habits required 20 or 30 pills a day, an unsustainable proposition at as much as $30 each. Heroin, already available around New York City for about $5 to $10 for a single glassine, became a cheap alternative.

Brandon, 22, of the south shore town of Eltingville, remembered when the police arrested a group of young men in 2012 for selling pills around Tottenville. His supply dried up.

Then a fellow addict took him over the Goethals Bridge to an open-air heroin market in Newark. “It was so much easier, it’s $6 and it’s always there,” said Brandon, who is now in a 12-step recovery program. “I’ve done one pill since I got introduced to heroin.”

Another recovering addict, Nikki, 29, said she began each day with 15 or 20 Vicodin pills. “I would take them in one shot,” she said.

The daily hunt for money to buy more, usually raised by finding and selling scrap metal with her boyfriend at the time, finally became too much. One day in 2009, the boyfriend came home with something new — 50 little bags of heroin. “I told him, ‘Once we go this way, there’s no going back,’ ” she recalled in an interview. “This is the beginning of the end.”

She said she got hooked.

Four years later, Nikki said, she was clean but admitted that there were lapses. During a recent period of recovery, a friend of a friend asked her to deliver some heroin to a buyer. She agreed but was subsequently arrested. She is now out on bail, raised through pawnshop proceeds from her jewelry. She is also pregnant: The baby is due in July and, once born, will immediately require detoxification from the methadone that Nikki takes every day. She and her new boyfriend will remain on methadone for the foreseeable future, but Nikki said heroin and pills are behind her.

“I’m going to become a mother,” she said.

Most of the addicts interviewed for this article passed through the Dynamic treatment center in Brooklyn, a Y.M.C.A. on southern Staten Island or a Pills Anonymous group that has expanded to include heroin addicts; all requested that they be referred to by only their first names as they rebuild their lives.

Nearly all began by sniffing heroin, much as they had sniffed crushed pills. Soon many sought out the greater high that a needle provided. For Brandon, his first time shooting up was in January 2013, with a fellow addict in the bathroom stall of the Wendy’s on Richmond Hill Road. “I’m thinking, I could be dead in 30 seconds,” Brandon said of his mind-set at the time. He did it anyway.

Mike, 23, of Tottenville said he could find bundles of glassine bags in Newark for as little as $3 or $4 apiece. What he did not use, he sold on Staten Island for $10. Other recovering addicts described similar trips to East New York, Brooklyn, or Elizabeth, N.J. Any profits would go straight back into buying more heroin.

Although deaths from heroin are apparent here, evidence of the drug on the streets is less so. Sales take place by arrangement over the phone, a quick stop in a shopping center parking lot or in the house next door.

For instance, Angelo Gallo and his father, Ugo Gallo, pleaded guilty to selling heroin last year out of their two-story detached house on David Street in Eltingville. A city sanitation worker now rents the home, a few doors down from a police officer.

In the similarly sleepy bedroom community of Oakwood, police officers caught Frank Monte, 47, in the act of selling 300 glassine envelopes in a white plastic bag for $1,320 in cash.

Mr. Monte, who pleaded guilty to felony drug possession, denied any involvement in the sale, saying his previous time in prison for selling drugs had biased the officers. “When you go to jail on Staten Island, you’re labeled for life with these cops,” he said in a phone interview in March.

A few days after that conversation, he was arrested in a car near Clove Road and the Staten Island Expressway with 531 bags of heroin, according to the arrest report. He pleaded guilty, this time to a higher degree of felony possession.

Sabrina, a recovering addict, remembered telling her parents she was going out for ice cream only to go see a dealer by the public pool near her family’s Woodrow home. The dealer took her $100 and drove off.

Desperate for a hit and out of cash, she returned home and told her mother she had been robbed. Her mother questioned why she needed so much money for ice cream. Incensed, Sabrina began tearing apart the home. In the struggle, she shoved her mother, breaking her ankle. Soon after, Sabrina, 25, checked into rehab.

Difficult to Police

Unlike more established drug markets that predominate in other areas of the city, those running heroin here are mostly independent and deal in small quantities. Narcotics officers on Staten Island who have worked in other parts of New York say that dealers and buyers here tend to be even more suspicious of outsiders than elsewhere in the city.

That complicates catching dealers here, as the Police Department has had more difficulty conducting the sort of buy-and-bust operations that are the baseline of narcotics work in other boroughs. “There are those inherent challenges because of the closeness of Staten Island,” said Capt. Dominick D’Orazio, the commanding officer of the borough’s narcotics squad.

Most heroin gets to Staten Island by car and is delivered that way by the dealers who crisscross its neighborhoods, officials said.

“They’re not coming down with a kilo,” said Daniel M. Donovan Jr., the Staten Island district attorney. “They’re going uptown and getting an ounce and then breaking it out.”

Prosecutors and the police said they have noticed that violent drug gangs who have long operated on the north shore of the island — selling mostly crack and marijuana — are switching to selling heroin, where the profit is.

New York City authorities are moving to track the incoming, often prepackaged heroin. Investigators have had some success in turning small-time players to catch those coming onto the island with greater quantities. The goal is to follow the trail back to the major suppliers in the city, who are believed to be primarily in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx, where the police have discovered the city’s largest heroin mills.

That many middle-class Staten Island families send their kids to Brooklyn for treatment speaks to the pervasiveness of the problem and the shame it carries in an insular borough. “Families generally feel better when their child is out of the community,” said Karen J. Carlini, the associate director at Dynamic.

Last year, parents began gathering informally in the backyard of Alicia Reddy’s home in the Huguenot neighborhood. A registered nurse with experience in detox, Ms. Reddy, 44, had been fielding so many calls from parents about addiction, she said, that she decided to hold a monthly meeting to provide information.

“A big factor was that parents were ashamed,” she said.

As the problem worsened, the gatherings quickly outgrew her yard. They are now held at a nearby school, attached to Our Lady Star of the Sea, a Roman Catholic church on Amboy Road, two miles down from a tight cluster of businesses — a decorator, a barber shop, a bagel store — tied in recent years to illegal pill sales, guns or heroin.

Nearby, in the basement of the church rectory, a Pills Anonymous group meets. On a recent Tuesday night, 36 people gathered, describing feelings of helplessness, as well as the strength they found in one another. The program’s 12 steps, written out by hand, hung on a table at the front.

Brandon told his story of repeated episodes of treatment and relapse. In an interview after the meeting, he said that he has been clean for nearly a year, since June 16, 2013.

He counted at least 10 people who he knew had died from pill or heroin overdoses, including an acquaintance from high school he saw again while in treatment for heroin. The classmate died last month.

“There’s no reason that I’m different from Adam,” he said. “I should be dead too.”

Get Your Dance On, Congress!

This is a terrific video done by teenagers.  If you thought they don't care about what's happening in their country, think again!  And, Congress, some of these kids are already old enough to vote - and the rest will be soon.  Pay attention.

Victims of Domestic Abuse in Washington State Are Now Protected

Yesterday I attended a meeting of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in Tempe, Arizona.  I was impressed with the dedication and passion of the women that were there, and was surprised at how savvy these moms and grandmothers were with social media.  In fact, the meeting was almost entirely devoted to how we can be more effective with our use of social media.  I have hope that all the emails, all the Facebook Likes and Shares, and all the Tweets to our elected representatives (who are supposed to represent all of us, not just the NRA) will eventually constitute "an immovable force," and some reasonable, sensible, Second-Amendment non-violating laws can be passed.  The following article is encouraging because Washington state has enacted a new law that requires spouses under domestic abuse orders to surrender their guns.  If every state had such a law, the lives of the 9 women who are killed with guns every week could be saved.

From the New York Times Editorial Board April 27, 2014 

The National Rifle Association’s annual convention this weekend in Indianapolis is featuring the usual array of tens of thousands of gun customers and dealers marveling at the latest in deadly weapons adapted for civilian life from the battlefields of war. Outside the massive gathering, a contingent from a gun safety group, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, planned to raise awareness about the gun crisis.

This group has gotten some encouraging news in recent weeks — a new law in Washington State that will require spouses under domestic abuse orders to surrender their guns to authorities. This is no small matter. Intimate partner homicides account for nearly half the women killed each year, and more than half of these women are murdered with guns, according to federal statistics.

The surprising twist in the enactment of the Washington law was that the N.R.A. traditionally has fought hard against such legislation as a violation of Second Amendment freedom — but not this time. The law was signed by Gov. Jay Inslee last month after unanimous approval by the legislature once the gun lobby backed off from its standard tactic of political retaliation. “This is an election year, and no candidate wants to be portrayed as letting domestic abusers keep their guns,” said the Democratic sponsor, Representative Roger Goodman.

There is speculation that the gun lobby — if only because of the politics of the electoral season — wants to appear more sensitive to the views of women who, the opinion polls say, are strongly in favor of confiscating firearms from domestic abusers. One astonished lawmaker in Minnesota told The Huffington Post that an N.R.A. lobbyist sought only minor changes in a domestic violence gun bill that now has a chance of passage. “The N.R.A. has been really good to work with on this particular issue,” said Representative Dan Schoen, a Democrat. “It pains me to say, but they have been.”

The Moms Demand Action group is hoping other states where legislation is pending, including Louisiana, Wisconsin and Minnesota, will also seek to disqualify spousal abusers from gun possession.

Only a few states have workable gun surrender laws, and existing federal laws intended to disarm spousal abusers have proved largely unenforceable. Research on the problem by The Times identified patterns of violence in which the issuance of orders of protection seemed to set off gun attacks on women. It is therefore important that laws require that firearms be surrendered when the restraining order is issued — “at the most volatile time in an abusive relationship,” noted Mr. Goodman.

The Washington law was sold as an issue of domestic violence, he stressed, not gun control. He added language the gun lobby sought, specifying that a court had to judge a restrained spouse to be a “credible threat” before gun confiscation could be ordered. That allowed pro-gun senators to favor the obvious — the need to protect abused spouses from firearms.

Though Moms Demand Action carefully avoided any trace of irony in complimenting the gun lobby for not resisting, nobody believes that the N.R.A. has been fundamentally transformed. In state legislatures elsewhere, it has been busy pushing to loosen laws on the wielding of guns in public, as well as opposing universal background checks on gun buyers. The Washington law and the gun lobby’s acquiescence in this case hardly constitute a full cure for the nation’s gun scourge.

How Many Share Mr. Davey's Opinion?

I think what this reader is saying is that we do everything we can to stop a person from another country from coming here and killing people, but do nothing to stop Americans from killing each other.

To the Editor:

Re “Apparent Hate Crime Aimed at Jews Instead Strikes Christians Who Gave to Others” (news article, April 15):

Another senseless shooting; more needless deaths; another tragic episode made possible by the easy availability of deadly weapons.

Another reason to question why the Second Amendment exists. It is an outdated law that cannot be changed, that ties the hands of legislators and regulators whose first responsibility is to sustain an environment in which citizens can live free from fear of violence.

Every day there are stories concerned with national security; it’s peculiarly American to have a government so powerful in the national security arena, yet so powerless to help protect individual security.

ROBERT DAVEY
Bridgeport, Conn., April 15, 2014

And, if you want to read more about Michael Bloomberg's commitment to stopping the N.R.A., here is the link:  http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/04/17/can-bloomberg-take-on-the-nra

This is one comment that appeared in that discussion, and it's notable that here is someone from the UK who seems to know more about our history than most Americans:

gh

 manchester, uk 5 hours ago

The key to this whole debate is context. The second amendment was meant to apply to individuals, but states clearly that the reasoning behind this is so that well-regulated militias may exist. This is because at the time the constitution was written the US didn't have a large, peacetime standing army, so the only way to quickly raise a fighting force was if private citizens owned guns. This is clearly not a self-defense argument, nor is it a "tradition" argument, so frankly we should avoid it when discussing modern gun-control legislation, which is fundamentally about criminal activity, not national defense. There is no reason someone using a gun for self defense needs a 30 round magazine, and frankly, if he gets through more than a few rounds, he's not someone who should be trusted with a gun anyhow.

Here is another good point:

Northstar5

 Los Angeles 5 hours ago

Why don't our gutless politicians ever talk about the Ninth Amendment? That is the answer. The Ninth Amendment says that the aforementioned rights (the first 8 amendments) shall not be construed to deny or disparage other, un-enumerated rights the people may have.

The whole point of the Ninth Amendment is to create an 'out' in case one of the other Amendments conflicts with some obvious right that the people have but that has not been codified in the Constitution. The Founders had the foresight to understand that society changes and that some of the Amendments might end up conflicting with rights they had not yet thought would be an issue: like the right to go to school without fear that someone is going to open fire with an assault weapon and kill every child in sight. This was an unimaginable scenario to our Founders, and they were wise enough to know there were scenarios they could not imagine.

But no one ever talks about the Ninth Amendment. Most people don't even know what it says.

Acknowledgment of Heroin Epidemic

Police chiefs and other officials are meeting today in Washington, D.C. To discuss the growing heroin epidemic.  Included is a report on how police departments are responding, with data on the effectiveness of overdose antidotes that police are now carrying.  Coverage at usatoday.com

Look for mentions of how the new Affordable Care Act will help addicts get treatment.  Also look for indications that addiction should be seen as a medical issue, not a criminal justice issue.

Problems? Call Mrs. Hulk!

I have a friend who is convinced that the United States is heading down the road to ruin because of all the kids in daycare.  She thinks that if we returned to the "good old days" when Mom stayed home, Dad went to work all day, and the kids didn't watch TV or play video games, then all would be swell again.  Well, according to this recent study, more Moms are staying at home, so we will soon see if that fixes everything.  

http://nyti.ms/1hqcxrx

Let me know what YOU think -

The Drug Cartels Make as Much Money as Microsoft

I just love TED talks!  I have learned so much from them.  Here is one that will truly open your eyes to the problem of illegal drugs in the U.S. and how little our government is doing to stop the flow from Mexico.  Instead of locking up 18 year olds for using, why not attack this enemy just as we would any other business organization that was operating illegally in our country?

Antidote now available

The FDA has approved a device that automatically injects the right dose of an overdose antidote named naloxone.  16,000 people die every year of opioid-related overdoses, and the drug overdoses are now THE LEADING CAUSE OF INJURY DEATH IN THE UNITED STATES SURPASSING MOTOR VEHICLE CRASHES.

Only 17 and He Has Life Figured Out

Silas Shot Will? OMG, Sunday Will Never Be The Same

This is an OP-ED piece by Delia Ephron.  It makes me feel good that someone like Delia likes the same TV show I do, and that she deems it worth writing about.

Spoiler alert: If you are a fan of “The Good Wife” and haven’t watched the last episode, please read something else.

Will Gardner died last Sunday. I was so upset I couldn’t sleep, took half a Valium at 3 a.m., overslept, took the wrong subway the next morning and ended up in Herald Square.

Will Gardner, Alicia Florrick’s former lover and adversary on the CBS series “The Good Wife,” got gunned down when his client (played by Hunter Parrish who played elder son, Silas on “Weeds”) went berserk in a courtroom. Now fans know that what they have been waiting for will never happen. Will and Alicia will never have sex again. Will and Alicia had the best chemistry on television. They were hot. In spite of cable TV’s breaking sexual taboos, it’s still rare to find characters with chemistry. For the last two seasons, however, Will and Alicia had sex only in flashback. And then briefly.
That only made me want it for them more.

For those of you who haven’t encountered this show, now in its fifth season, Alicia is a lawyer, the wife of a politician who slept with prostitutes, the mother of two teenagers. She is smart, cool (as in collected), beautiful but not in an intimidating or depressing way. Her hair does not have extensions. She is a normal-size person. You don’t look at her and think she hasn’t had a carb since 2002 or spends three hours a day at Bikram yoga. She is not bipolar like Carrie Mathison. She is not a pill addict like Nurse Jackie.

Nevertheless she has done some really stupid things.

Most important, she gave up sex with Will Gardner because she’s a mother. I can’t explain it any better than that. Apparently to the creators of the show, this made sense, that motherhood was incompatible with wild sex. (Take it from me, sometimes it is when your children are under the age of 3, but Alicia's kids are teenagers.  Well, maybe having two teenagers might put you off sex, too.)  If memory serves, it was Season 3, and she even threw out her black lace underwear. This upset me in the way that I get upset by stupid moves on favorite TV shows, as if a close friend had stabbed me. Alicia never dated anyone else afterward and no one has ever tried to fix her up. Instead, after giving up sex and Will, she went back to Mr. Big. Truthfully I so resent her husband that I simply think of him as someone who belongs to another show. Occasionally she has sex with him. I’m sure I speak for many viewers when I say I wish she didn’t. (my comment: they have 0 chemistry).

Michelle and Robert King, the show’s creators, posted a note to fans, assuring us that Will Gardner may be dead, but Josh Charles, who plays him, “is very much alive and remains an integral part of our family.” Thank you. I may be obsessed with the show, but I do know the difference between a fictional character and a real person. Josh Charles wants to “move on to other creative endeavors,” they say. He wants to direct, for instance. Who doesn’t? I’m sure if my dog could speak, she would say she wants to direct.

Characters often die because actors want to move on. Personally I think it is extremely selfish of Josh Charles to move on. I don’t understand why he doesn’t care about me. About my lying propped up in bed every Sunday evening wanting to spend time with him, wishing that one day he and Alicia would get it on one more time. That she will finally get rid of her husband. That, as imperfect as they are, she and Will finally realize they belong together. Doesn’t he know that a great show isn’t just something you watch? There is ritual, expectations built up over years. Love.

Alicia, based on Silda Spitzer, the ex-wife of former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, represents all the wronged political spouses, including, of course, Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin. After these women were publicly humiliated, Huma could keep herself busy with a job at the State Department and Hillary went on to be a United States senator. Ms. Spitzer became a principal at NewWorld Capital Group, a firm that invests in environmental initiatives. Like Alicia, they had great jobs. But did they have great sex? Great sex with men who haven’t wronged them? That’s a fantasy I want to buy into. That’s why I kept watching “The Good Wife.”

When Matthew Crawley’s car crashed on “Downton Abbey,” I didn’t care. He and Lady Mary together were as dry as toast. (But Matthew was the only character I deemed worth watching, so now I don’t.)  When they killed off Nicholas Brody on “Homeland,” I was glad, because he and Carrie had zero chemistry. Besides, that show had jumped the shark. “The Good Wife” has never jumped the shark. Even killing Will didn’t jump the shark. It only dashed my dreams and broke my heart.

Delia Ephron is the author, most recently, of “Sister Mother Husband Dog (etc.),” a memoir.

But then I read that Josh Charles, in real life, had just married and wants to start a family, so he probably figured that when his kids are toddlers and he and his wife are exhausted, Will won't be up for "wild sex" either.  Oh, well.

Have You Been "Hustled?"

Here are the Oscar picks from the New York Times, and My Choices for some of them.  


Best Picture: ‘12 Years a Slave’

Contender: ‘Gravity’

For the first time in years, even the most seasoned awards watchers are sweating the best-picture race, an unusually tight contest that could end with either Alfonso Cuarón’s space epic, “Gravity,” or Steve McQueen’s period drama, “12 Years a Slave,” as the big winner. Fans of “Gravity” — and there are many — praise its cinematic vision; detractors (plenty of those, too) lampoon its script. “12 Years a Slave” has the weight of history on its side, and lauded performances by its cast, as well as the industry sense that it feels like a movie that the Oscars should reward. But the Academy has rejected hefty biopics before — recall “Lincoln” last year — and many actors, its largest voting bloc, also fell hard for“American Hustle,” the third pony in this race (and the one with the best hair). Will that film, and the six other contenders, each with fervent fans, divide the field? Though the Academy won’t release the tally, in the end the win could come down to an unglamorous, and perhaps unimpassioned, quirk of its complicated preferential balloting system, inching “12 Years a Slave” to a coronation.

My Choice: Her

Academy Awards have been given to films illuminating history, foreseeing the future, and revealing the present in all its human frailty and heroism.  But the film, "Her," is an inventive look at the future as if it is the present.  The idea is truly imaginative, and yet, you barely have to use your imagination to identify with the characters or the plot.  All the actors are amazing, but Scarlett Johannson deserves a nomination even thought we never see her on screen.  This film requires that we stretch our notions about what criteria we use to award prizes to those who bring films to us.  I would have liked to see more attention paid to this ground-breaking film by Spike Jonze and his collaborators.

Best Director: Alfonso Cuarón, ‘Gravity’

Contender: Steve McQueen, ‘12 Years a Slave’ 

My Choice: Spike Jonze

Wouldn't it be nice if Steve McQueen had been nominated for something that was not a "black" issue?  And what if the NY Times writer didn't even mention that McQueen would be the first black director to win?  That's when we will be able to say the Academy is color blind.  And, though I admire the skill it took to make "Gravity," I feel that the award for best director should go to someone who can pull performances out of actors that they, and we, had no idea they had in them.  Working with real-life humans is more difficult that any difficult technological effect.

After Alfonso Cuarón won the top honor from his peers in the Directors Guild of America, the Oscar is his to lose. But he won’t: His four-and-a-half-year odyssey to make “Gravity,” a feat of groundbreaking technical and visual storytelling, had many other filmmakers, even those skilled in effects work, asking, “How’d he do that?” Their votes of confidence, along with the support of other technically minded factions, will be more than enough to put him over the top.

Steve McQueen would make history, if the Academy rewarded him, as the first black director to win this prize. (Only two others, John Singleton and Lee Daniels, have even been nominated.) Mr. McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave” has its fans, but a best picture-best director split (with “12 Years a Slave” getting the big prize) is more likely. And the Academy could still make history if the Mexican-born Mr. Cuarón makes the trip to the stage.

Best Actor: Matthew McConaughey, “Dallas Buyers Club”

Contender: Leonardo DiCaprio, “The Wolf of Wall Street”

My Choice: Tom Hanks

I am a sucker for "based on a true story" movies, and Captain Phillips was riveting.  Tom Hanks is like Meryl Streep - can do anything anyone asks of him, but he showed me what that man thought, what he felt, his fear, his concern for his men and his ship, and his compassion for those Somali pirates.  I know that the actors in "Dallas Buyers Club" did a great job, but we don't give awards to people who are able to lose weight except on "The Biggest Loser."  I must admit that as of this writing I haven't seen "Dallas," but my daughter says it's amazing.  Still, I think it would be a toss-up.

Matthew McConaughey lost 40 pounds to play an AIDS patient in “Dallas Buyers Club,” but it was his career transformation, from rom-com pretty boy to versatile dramatic actor, that really stunned. In the last year he’s turned in one stellar performance after another — in the indie “Mud,” as the memorably vocalizing trader in “The Wolf of Wall Street” and, not incidentally, in the HBO series “True Detective.” Hollywood, the Academy — everyone, really — loves a showcase for reinvention. It’s his year, all right (all right, all right).

Leonardo DiCaprio has been working hard to charm Academy voters, too. “Wolf” divided viewers, but nearly everyone agreed that Mr. DiCaprio’s showy acting was a standout. Alas, there’s already a heartthrob-turned-thespian in the running this year.

Best Actress: Cate Blanchett, “Blue Jasmine”

Contender: Amy Adams, “American Hustle”

My Choice: Scarlett Johannsen

In "Her" Scarlett portrays a being that we have yet to meet - an iOS intelligence that is capable of responding to its owner in such a human way as to make us all believe "she" is really human.  I saw "Blue Jasmine," and, as usual, I found I couldn't relate to any of those characters.  I just can't imagine the people Woody Allen knows, because I have yet to meet another human who bears any resemblance to any of his characters.  I always thought that was one of the prime criteria for making judgments about the worth and value of any film - are the characters believable?  Well, not if you are Mr. Allen.  He gets away with stuff that no other director could.  So, how do you judge an Academy Award performance? Is it Oscar-worthy if the film has no other redeeming qualities?  How about an award for an actress who delivers an outstanding performance in a movie that is also nominated for Best Picture?  Hmmm?

In “Blue Jasmine,” Cate Blanchett offers a bravura portrait of a meltdown, in the form of a wealthy socialite brought low by her philandering husband’s financial fraud. Every close-up and throwaway line is a master class in acting, and she’s been the front-runner from the start, recent news concerning the film’s writer-director, Woody Allen, notwithstanding.

Sandra Bullock is the undisputable center of attention in “Gravity” — except for all those glorious shots of outer space — but she won her leading-lady Oscar only a few years ago. So her contender spot goes to the perennial nominee Amy Adams, as the multiaccented grifter with the plunging necklines in “American Hustle.” But Ms. Adams will probably have to wait for another year, or another David O. Russell film, to take home the golden guy.

Best Supporting Actor: Jared Leto, “Dallas Buyers Club”

Contender: Barkhad Abdi, “Captain Phillips”

My Choice:  Might have to go along with this one.  Barkhad was great, great, great, but since I haven't seen "Dallas" I can't compare.  

Jared Leto’s narrative is some combination of ingénue and turnaround-veteran. After a nearly six-year absence from the screen, he returned to play a transgender AIDS patient in “Dallas Buyers Club,” which required him to lose weight and tackle sensitive issues like homophobia. He did it deftly, judging by all the precursor awards he’s racked up.

Barkhad Abdi is a true newcomer, earning his role as a Somali pirate in “Captain Phillips” in an open casting call in Minneapolis. But though he held his own against Tom Hanks and delivered one of the last year’s few memorable movie lines (“I am the captain now”), his momentum will probably not match Mr. Leto’s.

Best Supporting Actress: Jennifer Lawrence, “American Hustle”

Contender: Lupita Nyong’o, “12 Years a Slave”

My Choice:  Lupita - Jen was amazing, as always, but she won last year and the Academy doesn't usually award the same contender two years running.

An extremely tight race. The Academy can’t resist an ingénue, perhaps even two years running. As the frantically emotional and frankly funny wife with the bouncing updo in “American Hustle,” Jennifer Lawrence — a previous season’s ingénue — received near-universal praise, but she just won an Oscar last year, for another David O. Russell movie.

Ms. Nyong’o, making her feature debut in “12 Years a Slave” straight out of drama school, fits this season’s bill perfectly. Her off-screen glamour is a testament to her skill in playing the traumatized slave Patsey, and it might be the only way voters get to reward the finely tuned performances in this Steve McQueen drama.

Will that be enough to beat the national darling JLaw? With “The Hunger Games” franchise, she was 2013’s box office champ; that could be prize enough. Or not — and she could make history as the first 23-year-old double-Oscar-winning blockbuster star.

Best Animated Feature: “Frozen”

Contender: “The Wind Rises

My Choice:  Super movie with an unexpected, but most welcome, ending.  Every family needs to see this movie.  But, please, there are enough You Tube videos of 4-year-olds squeaking out "Let It Go."

This is as sure a lock as there will be on Oscar night. The Disney musical “Frozen,” about the thawing love between two princess sisters, has been a global blockbuster (nearly $1 billion earned) whose momentum shows no signs of slowing. The soundtrack is a hit, too, as is its anthem, “Let It Go.” A few of the Academy’s artier members may vote for “The Wind Rises,” perhaps the last film from the Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki, but the onslaught will be for “Frozen.”

Follow Up on Do You Really Need a Mammogram

By MARIE MYUNG-OK LEEFEB. 14, 2014

I HAVE never had a mammogram. I’m almost 50 — nearly a decade into the age when the screening is recommended by the American Cancer Society. I’m college educated, adequately insured. And I am the bane of my health care providers. Once, my midwife went so far as to request that I never speak of my decision in any space where other patients might hear.

This week, I was vindicated. On Tuesday, a Canadian study, one of the largest ever done on mammograms, was published in the British Medical Journal. The study found that mammograms did not reduce breast cancerdeaths in women around my age compared to physical exams, and that one in five women screened was overdiagnosed, possibly leading to unnecessary surgery or radiation.

It seems astonishing, but it reinforced what smaller studies had told me, as someone with no family history of breast cancer: that getting a mammogram was unlikely to affect my chances of dying from the disease. What it would do is increase the probability of my mistakenly becoming a breast-cancer patient.

When I was in my late 30s, my midwife suggested I get a baseline mammogram, followed by annual screenings. I was ready to do it. I assumed my research into it would be mere due diligence.

This kind of research was a new habit of mine, born of necessity. When our son was 18 months old, he developed a devastating tumor on his spinal cord. We waited for the doctors to tell us what to do, but the diagnoses and suggestions were scattered — it’s cancer, it’s not cancer, it’s half cancerous, we need radiation, we don’t need radiation, it’s life-threatening, it’s benign. We opted for surgery, and it was deemed a success. Doctors waved us out of the hospital with balloons. But a few weeks later, we were urgently summoned back. The oncologists had decided that he needed another operation to make sure they had removed all of the tumor.

It made me realize that, despite the surety with which the medical professionals had presented things, it was all a best guess based on the available information. So I started doing my own research, to try to make the best decisions for our baby. I soon began to wonder why I didn’t study my own health care decisions as thoroughly as I did his.

So I started looking into mammograms. The more I found, the more I doubted. I was stunned by a 2001 Cochrane review — considered to be the gold standard for evidence-based studies — that concluded, “The currently available reliable evidence has not shown a survival benefit of mass screening for breast cancer.” Everywhere, I saw pink ribbons and the message that mammograms save lives. But no matter how many times I read the numbers, I wasn’t convinced that I should get one.

Over the years, my choice has spurred concern from health care practitioners as well as the person who is most worried about my health: my mother, who, in her 80s, is still a religious mammogrammer. She has described how nerve-racking the post-procedure waiting room is — you shiver in the cooled air until you’re sent home or get the ominous “The doctor needs to talk to you.” One day a few years ago, she was the one called to stay. They had found something “suspicious,” and she felt her world falling apart.

When my mother told me this, the first thing I thought of was the high rates of over- and misdiagnoses, and I told her so. But she still spent over a month in a panic — waiting for the follow-up, which then was somehow done incorrectly and had to be repeated one more time. Finally, multiple painful mammograms later, they concluded it had all been a mistake. And oddly, the false urgency has continued: She has been getting notices reminding her to make an appointment for another mammogram in six months because she is now “high-risk.”

Patients want reassurances. We feel we have to test, so we can find out if we’re sick. We rarely consider that the test itself might make us sick — perhaps through repeated exposure to radiation — or that there are health advantages for the nontester like me, who gains time, sheds stress and potentially dodges the harm of a false positive or unnecessary treatment.

This isn’t the answer for everyone. But as parents and patients, we have no choice but to try to become conversant in medicine, even if it makes some doctors bristle. Our medical experts are an invaluable resource, but in the end, it’s up to each of us how we want to proceed.

I now have a new primary care physician who still refers me to the mammography center, but when he hands me the slip, he smiles and says, “But I suspect you won’t do it,” and I get the feeling he respects my reasons. I wonder if, some day in the not too distant future, he’ll say, “This test actually seems to have more risks than rewards,” and stop handing out that slip at all.

Another excellent article found here: