Addictions

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.

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...

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.

The undercover sheriff's deputy pretending to be a patient in pain presented a Glendora physician with an X-ray to accompany her tale of an injured back and neck. The only problem was the X-ray revealed a "tail" of a different kind - one belonging to a dog. Though the X-ray for a German shepherd had the dog's name, Recon, and the name of an animal hospital printed on it, the doctor wrote the deputy a prescription for a powerful narcotic painkiller and a muscle relaxant, law enforcement officials said.

In the record book of unintended consequences, this one's sure to be a groan-worthy entry: A frightening rise in addiction to the drug OxyContin prompts a reformulation that makes the prescription pain medication harder to abuse. So addicts switch to heroin instead. Clearly, not the hoped-for effect. But according to a letter published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, it's a switch that appears to be happening across the country -- especially in rural and suburban communities, where OxyContin abuse and addiction had gained a firm foothold.

Should drug addiction be considered a disease, or will thinking about addiction in this way only further enable drug users by convincing them that they're powerless? Gil Kerlikowske, the director of the National Drug Control Policy and President Obama's top drug policy advisor, believes so, saying that addiction should be treated as a public health issue . Kerlikowske addressed the issue from the Betty Ford Center in Palm Springs on Monday, calling for more accessible rehabilitation and recovery programs.