One of the last Carnivals of All Substances

Ya' gotta' love it. I took these pictures (well, not the strawberries*) in the stairwell of a Winston Towers condo building in Miami Beach, median age resident 62, maybe higher. Yet there's a revolution going on. Can you imagine the condo association meetings? Someone plastered those signs from the 24th floor on down to the lobby.

This was going to be, and probably is the last carnival of all substances. Most of the submissions are either selling something like Hoodia Gordoni, botox, HGH, a new sleeping aid, or vitamins. Or they extol the benefits of herbs, organics, and alternative life styles.
Frankly, we were reaching here for recovery stories, the kind that make a person stop and think.

And I'm just not getting any of those. I did a little reach out to my buddies at the 12-Step blogs, asking for some help, but only got a couple of nibbles.

So it's time to move on for now. There's still Obsession! a blog carnival due to post at the end of January for those of you with obsessive thoughts, compulsions, or children.

One last time, let's go in the order received.

Tracee Sioux is still ranting against smoking. We're putting you on the board, Tracee.

And Erin, at What Winners Do, one of my favorite recovery bloggers, asks the proverbial question, is a jones for a substance an addiction or a mental disorder of those weak of will? We therapydocs usually hold by two diagnoses, dependency and abuse, but You might like to read this.

There's something about tea drinkers, Southern tea drinkers specifically, that makes me just want to brew up a pot and mix it with tons of sugar and sip it through a slice of lemon. Read about that side of the Mason Dixon line in A Public Diet.

Dr. Hal chimes in thinking he can rewire your urges to smoke and drink (everything's got to be rewired, you know, since Tim Allen of Home Improvement got us all started.)

Blue Skelton Productions warns us not to watch the movie Smiley Face about a pothead. She shows the trailer and it really does make pot smoking look very sad, indeed. So maybe that's a good thing. Surely it's cringe, but some people like cringe.

Stop Drinking Advice.Org tells us to meditate AND use CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) to stop drinking. I'll tell you right now, though. You don't meditate AND do CBT at the same time. That's for sure. They do not mix.

Wellness Junction tells us NOT to go into McDonalds if it's the Big Mac attack that drives your compulsion for Pure Junk. She's got something in the post about an "accountability partner" that sounds interesting.

Karen at the Bilerico Project, an LGBT awareness/rights blog informs us that meth, MSM (men who have sex with men) and HIV all vary together in a study of Californians. That's a scary thought. I'm having my research methods class take a critical look at this.

Carol Bentley who writes copy can't lie about the products she recommends. Well, she can, but it doesn't usually come out authentic. She's serious about a particular chocolate that's supposed to be good for you. I just report the news, folks, I don't do the research, so take it with a grain of salt. Or would you say, a glass of milk.

Rita's path to fitness is exercise. Just move, she says. Like I said earlier, this is not a fitness blog per se, so I shouldn't have considered this post for today's carnival, but exercise does raise endorphin levels, so I gave it a little lee-way.

HOWEVER. This is it. The Carnival of All Substances is hereby on on hiatus. Too many off-topic submissions, too little patience on my part.

*But just out of curiosity, do you think that strawberries really can cure cancer?

therapydoc