I will have been sober for exactly 32 years this week. It’s a joyful anniversary, one that I’m sharing only to inspire others who may need to quit drinking but don’t think they can. more

“I just didn’t expect to see that coming from Oceanside,” Nicole Swerdloff, a 2014 Oceanside High School graduate, said about the piece of fabric that has been the subject of social media conversations over the past few weeks. more

This Christmas, will a new Smith & Wesson be under your tree? more

The drug addicts’ brain scans that Dr. Stephen Dewey takes appear in psychedelic shades of red, yellow, green and blue, each indicating a level of brain activity — or inactivity. Red means excited. Blue is dormant. Dewey is the laboratory director for behavioral and molecular neuro-imaging at the North Shore-LIJ Feinstein Institute for Medical Research. In that capacity, he’s put hundreds of addicts’ brains to the test — the positron emission tomography test, that is — seeking to understand precisely what happens to the mind when a pot smoker lights up or a heroin junkie shoots up. And, he has found, it isn’t pretty. more

One of Long Island’s largest nonprofit substance-abuse treatment agencies received three grants this winter that officials said will help them teach young people about the dire consequences of … more