I am a firm believer in ethics and honesty. Please do not plagiarize these articles for use in academic settings or elsewhere. All hold my copyright and I expect that copyright to be honored.

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SEPTEMBER 11, 2001: I wrote this article the night of the bombings. It is simply an expression of my hope that we can find some good out of the horrible events of that day. On the former layout of this site, this article led off the index page.

SEPTEMBER 11, 2004: It is now three years later and here I share some thoughts on the WTC memorials and supporting our troops.

BENEFITS AND DETRIMENTS OF THE SAT: Most of my work has been with adolescent substance abusers, but I have also worked with gifted children. Like them and most other people who have attended 4-year colleges, I focused the better part of a year working towards my three attempts to add just a few more points to a test that, to be honest, is quite unclear as to what it measures. Success would mean a hope at a great life, failure might mean homelessness--at least in my anxiety-riddled mind. I got into a good school that nobody has ever heard of, and I work alongside many who didn't. And in the end, I don't think the SAT made that much a difference in my life.

DAVE--A FRIEND LOST TO HEROIN ADDICTION: Many addictions counselors come from a past of addiction themselves. They straighten their lives out, then decide to use their first-hand experience as a tool to help others. However, addictions counseling is a stressful field, and it is not altogether uncommon for a counselor in recovery to relapse. Dave was my closest friend in college, a 41-year old former heroin addict who was also training to be a counselor, but who found the pressures of college and life to be too great, with fatal results.

JUICED: WILD TIMES, RAMPANT 'ROIDS, SMASH HITS, AND HOW BASEBALL GOT BIG: A review of Jose Canseco's 2005 book on baseball and steroid use, originally published in my baseball column, Caffeinated Confines.

OPIOID TREATMENT OPTIONS: They've opened a methadone clinic in my neighborhood, and many are panicking. I'm not. I used to live three blocks from one and had homeless addicts staying in my back yard without my permission. I had every reason to panic. But is all the panic due to unreasonable policies surrounding methadone treatment? I believe so, and here look into that, as well as to ways we can and cannot treat heroin addiction in response to these policies.

SOCIAL WORK AS A CAREER: This is an examination into some of the perils and pitfalls that one looks forward to when one becomes a counselor or social worker. Burnout, budget cuts, job insecurity, and low pay are only part of the fun. Seriously, it is not all gloom and doom, but it does take a certain type of person to want to do it, and here I look into what type of person that is, using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. I, by the way, fit the counselor profile perfectly--INFP, with extreme scores on all subsets.

STIMULANTS AND SCHIZOPHRENIA: I was once told by someone who ran a mental institution that most of her patients had some history of amphetamine abuse. Most schizophrenics I have come across in my life are heavy smokers and coffee drinkers, and they usually pick up the strongest cigarettes and drink the strongest coffee. In schizophrenia, the mind seems to be on constant overdrive and the medication used to control it is aimed at slowing down the whole process. So why, then, would it seem that people who need to have their minds slowed and calmed down turn to substances that are designed to speed things back up and thus worsen their symptoms?

TERROR IN OUR SCHOOLS: I know, the title is a bit melodramatic, sounding like an Eyewitness News Expose. This is the first school violence paper I wrote, and the forerunner to the Columbine Project.

TREATMENTS OF SCHIZOPHRENIA: What really bothers me about this paper is that the very effective treatments are out there, but that few who need them can currently use them because they cannot afford them.

VALIDITY OF CODEPENDENCE: In 1987, Melody Beattie wrote Codependent No More, and five years later, Jann Mitchell followed it up with the wonderful parody Codependent for Sure! Codependency was doomed as pop psychology almost from the beginning, and this paper was an attempt to see if there really is anything to this "disease" that it seems everyone who has ever known an alcoholic seems to suffer from. The short answer: Yes there is, and it is nowhere near as common as it is portrayed to be.