Addictions

The addiction drama "Smashed" is a variation on "Days of Wine and Roses" that's both down and dirty and boisterously energetic. It's also one of those showily unassuming movies, using a working-class setting (Highland Park, an unfamiliar and welcome screen location) and busy handheld camerawork to insist on its authenticity. At its center is a young Angeleno couple, played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Aaron Paul, who are united in drinking and divided by her recovery. "Smashed" opens strong, smack in the middle of a hangover, and in a couple of headlong sequences, Winstead's Kate hits bottom.

Morphine and cocaine both lead to addiction in part because of how they affect key reward areas in the brain. But a new study shows that they do this in very different ways -- knowledge that may eventually make treatments for addicts more specific and successful, but that also may complicate matters for people who take multiple drugs at once. Cocaine and morphine both have profound effects on the flow of dopamine -- a neurotransmitter scientists have consistently implicated in our sensations of reward in the brain.

THINK YOU'RE A FOOD ADDICT? Ummm, you might want to take this quiz . [ABC News] THE TALE OF PETER RABBIT STEW... A rare collection of Beatrix Potter possessions is up for auction Thursday , including a 161-year-old recipe book with entries possibly penned by the children's author herself. [Daily Mail] WHISKY TO THE RESCUE Scientists in Scotland believe that waste products from whisky distilleries can be converted into biofuel for automobiles. [CBS News]

A call for change is afoot in the difficult and often heartbreaking world of addiction treatment. For decades, 12-step programs and a medication-free approach have dominated the recovery industry. But now doctors and scientists and the leader of the National Institute on Drug Abuse are pushing for broad recognition of addiction as a disease and more medical approaches to therapy. In the last couple of years, a top addiction society officially declared addiction a "brain disorder.

TORONTO -- Is sex addiction real? It's the question that, in the wake of scandals involving Tiger Woods, Eliot Spitzer and others, drove Stuart Blumberg to co-write and direct "Thanks for Sharing," which debuted Saturday night to a raucous crowd at the Toronto International Film Festival. Starring Mark Ruffalo, Tim Robbins and "Book of Mormon's" Josh Gad as three men in various states of recovery from sex addiction, the film is the comedic version of last year's challenging "Shame," focusing more on the communal aspect of 12-step programs, rather than the behavior that leads people into those rooms in the first place.

NEW YORK - Sherlock Holmes has really been through the wringer lately. In two feature films, Guy Ritchie turned the pipe-smoking detective into a 19th century British butt-kicker who's as likely to corner criminals with his fists as with his brain. An increasingly popular BBC show restores some of the meditative qualities of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's original but brings Holmes to modern-day London. Now a new broadcast series, "Elementary," offers perhaps the most fanciful interpretation: Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller)

The red-haired man who stepped onto the Olvera Street bandstand looked vaguely familiar, but it was his words that got my attention. John Whitaker, a 52-year-old Santa Clarita resident, was addressing a rally to raise awareness of cartel violence in Mexico, and he started off by apologizing to the Mexican mothers he'd just heard speak about losing children in the drug wars. Whitaker, a recovering addict, said he now realized that his drug use had no doubt had consequences south of the border, where cartel violence has cost thousands of lives.

Dr. James W. West stood on the cutting edge of medicine in the middle of the 20th century and recognized "it sounded bizarre to remove an organ from a dead person and expect it to work. " He was part of a team of surgeons who helped change that perception when they performed an early transplant, using a kidney from a cadaver, in 1950 at a Chicago-area hospital. The successful operation galvanized public interest and is credited with influencing surgeons around the world to attempt organ transplants.

Beyond the economic and political ramifications of globalization, consider its effect on movie stories: the cross-cultural slice-and-dice, á la "Babel," that too often passes for meaning and resonance. In"360,"the new border-hopping feature from"City of God"director Fernando Mereilles, the faux profundity runs deep, infecting nearly every exchange in each vignette, whether the setting is Berlin, Bratislava or Paris. Mereilles avoids touristy shots of his multiple locations, yet any sense of realism is undone by contrivance.

Macaulay Culkin is no heroin addict, according to his rep, no matter how loud a tabloid headline screams that rumor. A report that Culkin is addicted to heroin and more "is not only categorically without merit, but it is also impossibly and ridiculously fictitious," his publicist told various outlets Wednesday, reacting to a National Enquirer cover story that loudly predicts the"Home Alone" actor's death within six months.  "We beseech the...