addiction

Redeeming Evan
By Gabriella Jones
December 1, 2015 - 10:55am
Homeless in Syracuse, Evan battles drugs, gun violence, fellow addicts and the cold streets in hopes of recovering from heroin addiction.

Evan, at age two, began reaching for the gymnastics rings. He wanted to follow in his sibling's footsteps.

Soon, his talent became obvious and he was deemed the better of the two. Good wasn't a word someone would use to describe his talent, it was his calling.

By age 12, he needed knee surgery. After that, there were pain killers.

Even with a damaged knee, his coach kept pushing him — leading to more pain killers, not only for the pain, but for a psychological use.

Syracuse-area man looks to move past heroin addiction
By Mary Anderson
October 6, 2015 - 6:30pm
A Central New York man recounts his struggle with heroin addiction and staying sober.

On a crisp January night, *Brent trudged through the snow, carrying his flat-screen TV to trade for cash. Hours later, he stood in his bare apartment, alone, with his newly purchased heroin needles.  

After a marathon of doping through the night, Brent decided that he could not continue down this path and called the Syracuse Behavioral Healthcare for detoxification services. Since the morning of Jan. 25, 2015, Brent has been clean. 

Why we smoke?
By Matthew Levin
April 16, 2009 - 3:23pm
Today's college students were raised on anti-tobacco campaigns and smoking bans, yet many still get hooked on cigarettes.

In the 1980s, experts finally started to confirm what had been suspected for the last two decades: Smoking is bad for your health.

The result: Kids growing up in the '90s were inundated with anti-smoking campaigns - from the Truth commercials to bans on smoking in many public places. The days of Joe Camel and the Marlboro Man were long gone. Studies still list smoking as the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, resulting in 435,000 deaths a year (18.1 percent).