Um, no, federal regulators have decided: The nation’s skies no longer will be a sort of bad airborne set for a pop psychology version of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Instead, owners of so-called emotional support animals must keep their menagerie off commercial flights. The federal Transportation Department has issued new rules halting….
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Even as the pandemic hits grim phase, we have much to be thankful for
With the pandemic tearing through the United States and overwhelming U.S. health care system, we pause from the grim news to tally some of the nation’s blessings in this time. We can be thankful for the courage, fortitude, dedication, and skill of an army of health workers of all kinds. They have put themselves….
Continue ReadingD.C. voters join a growing push to reconsider use of hallucinogenic drugs
Voters in the nation’s capital joined with peers across the country to nudge forward a further reconsideration of mind-affecting substances popularized in the Sixties but made illicit thereafter. Support ran strong for a District of Columbia ballot initiative directing local law enforcement to make among its lowest priorities the prosecution of those who use or….
Continue ReadingLoneliness and fear taking big toll on locked down elderly, sick, and injured
For the old, sick, and injured who are institutionalized, the Covid-19 pandemic and the efforts to halt the spread of the disease into care facilities has created debilitating side-effects: isolation, loneliness, silence, fear, and worries of abandonment. Facility lockdowns, combined with the relentless governmental bungling of the coronavirus response, are taking a terrible toll that….
Continue ReadingOpioid abuse and overdoses surge anew, worsened by Covid-19 pandemic
With the novel coronavirus crushing the economy and helping to fuel joblessness, individuals’ isolation, and increasing hopelessness and despair among the already troubled, the opioid drug abuse and overdose crisis again is worsening — and fast. As the Washington Post reported of what had been one of the nation’s leading public health nightmares before the….
Continue ReadingWith half of a terrible ’20 now done, can federal torpor on pandemic change?
The nation shudders into the second half of 2020, months deep into an unchecked Covid-19 pandemic that has infected 2.8 million Americans and killed roughly 130,000 of us. America has become the coronavirus’s outbreak epicenter, its would-be travelers shunned by leading nations around the world as too risky to allow without quarantines or outright bans…..
Continue ReadingTough choices loom for all of us as states ease public-health restrictions
Do I, or don’t I? Do we, or don’t we? As the stringent public health measures designed to bend the curve with the Covid-19 pandemic begin to lift or ease — including in Maryland and Virginia — hundreds of millions of Americans will make difficult individual decisions about their lives and livelihoods. Fears are high….
Continue ReadingGuns, pot, booze, and ‘benzos’: Big concerns in the pandemic’s home stays
As Americans have hunkered down to safeguard themselves from Covid-19 infection, too many people also have stocked their homes with potentially harmful items — and the nation soon may be reckoning with the health consequences. Will consumers come to regret that officials, locality by locality, deemed “essential” and chose to keep open marijuana shops, gun….
Continue ReadingYes, you may suffer heart disease, even in the most fitness-fanatical state of the union
Sure, it can be fun to watch two East Coasters take a long, sharp pin and pop the fantasy bubble that Westerners, especially Coloradans, like to float around in. Mountain state residents may like to tell themselves how the people on the Front Range skew young, educated, and active. How blue skies and open spaces….
Continue ReadingSpiking death rate a harsh reminder of alcohol’s risks, especially for women
Tipple much, much less in 2020. That might be a life-saving bit of advice for too many Americans to follow, especially because of new data on a worrisome spike in alcohol-related deaths. As NBC News reported, based on published research by federal researchers: “The yearly total of alcohol-related deaths for people ages 16 and over….
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