By David Palmer I have been reflecting on President Barack Obama’s weak and tardy response to the turmoil and atrocities in the middle east. It took me back 70 years when another liberal president, Franklyn D. Roosevelt, confronted the atrocities of the German Third Reich and the imperial Japanese army without equivocation. Both had committed acts which equaled or surpassed the horrors, including beheadings, of ISIS and other Muslim terrorist groups. After the Japanese attack on Pearl … [Read more...]

By David Palmer It is ironic that here in the land of the free, America, three million citizens are in prison. That’s roughly one in a hundred at a total cost of about $39 billion a year. The emotional cost is immeasurable. If we are to make any headway in reducing prison populations, we will first have to do better addressing mental illness and drug abuse and secondly focus more on rehabilitation with prison inmates and less on punishment. When you think about it, being in prison and losing … [Read more...]

By David Palmer Eighty percent of substance abuse problems like alcohol, pot, and prescription drugs are complicated by mental health problems such as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorders, and the like. In these “co-occurring” cases, both the addiction and mental health problems must be treated. We don’t know all the details of Robin Williams’ suicide on Monday, but we do know that he was a drug addict and suffered from depression. We also know that he had been in treatment several times … [Read more...]

In the “The Hungry Heart” By David Palmer “The Hungry Heart” produced by Kingdom County Productions is a 90 minute documentary film about how one community, St Albans, VT, is dealing with the devastation of opioid pain pill abuse—hydrocodone, percocet and Oxicontin, for example--among teenagers and young adults. St. Albans is a community of about 7,000 with limited resources, but it did have a kind and caring pediatrician, Dr. Fred Holmes, 72, whose small clinic, “Mousetrap Pediatrics” … [Read more...]