Besides love and a nice BLT sandwich, drugs are the best (and worst) things you'll encounter in your life. So here's the week's big news on drugs: to inform, to lift, to liberate.
1. Shrooms treat, and Washington bureaucrats declared psychedelic mushrooms to be a "breakthrough" medicine. They did this after they noshed a few caps and stems with buddies down by the river. No, just kidding. The FDA gave "psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy" the label after several successful clinical trials, meaning shroom therapy is likely to become a legal treatment in a handful of years.
2. Opioid overdose deaths may have leveled off, dipping 3 percent since their peak in November. Still, 68,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in the last 12 months.
3. Money corrupts, as an American border patrol agent picked up 90 pounds of cocaine from smugglers during his late-night shift last month, the FBI says, drove around with the coke in his patrol car all night, then handed it off to another smuggler. He was paid with six pounds of drugs and $66,000. But he got caught.
4. LSD spins you, as a freshman on the Cornell track team took acid and ran through campus pantsless telling girls he wanted to rape them.
5. Power deranges, as Brazil elected a new president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has said drugs turn people gay and legalizing cannabis would “[benefit] traffickers, rapists and hostage takers." We used to say that both those things are not true, except that last weekend we smoked a joint and kidnapped our neighbor so we could go see a Broadway musical with him.
6. Heroin kills, as reality star Lyric McHenry died from a cocaine / heroin overdose. She was on the E! reality series EJNYC, about Magic Johnson's son. McHenry's body was found lying on a Bronx sidewalk.
7. Heroin blacks you out, as a New Hampshire driver overdosed and crashed into a pedestrian, pinning him against a tree.
8. Heroin wrecks families; an Ohio man killed his sister and then stole her TV for heroin. He was convicted last week. He asked for the death penalty for himself.
9. Opioids kill, as a Maryland county put up a scoreboard to count the opioid overdoses in the county — 55 deaths so far this year.
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