Drug Addiction

Singer Whitney Houston appears to have suffered a heart episode before accidentally drowning in the bathtub of a Beverly Hills hotel suite, according to coroner's officials who listed cocaine use as a contributing factor. The autopsy results were released Thursday after weeks of intense speculation over how the 48-year-old pop star died. The case marks another high-profile Hollywood death connected to drug use, coming less than three years after Michael Jackson died suddenly at his Holmby Hills mansion.

Hundreds of parents, teenagers and other concerned residents packed Simi Valley council chambers to demand city officials address a spate of drug overdose deaths. In the front row Monday night sat the parents of children who died of overdoses last month. Susan Klimusko and Melissa Siebers, whose son and daughter, respectively, were buried within a week of each other, wept as they listened and waited a turn at the microphone. A few rows behind, also waiting to speak, was the mother of an overdose victim buried a few plots from Austin Klimusko.

Once heralded as the greatest British actor of his generation, Nicol Williamson was also a legend for stormy onstage behavior that included calling off a performance of "Hamlet" mid-speech because he was too tired to go on. "I'll pay for the seats," he later recalled telling the audience in 1969, "but I won't shortchange you by not giving my best. " And then he walked off. He made his name as the faltering attorney in playwright John Osborne's "Inadmissible Evidence" in the mid-1960s in London, rode the role to a Tony Award nomination on Broadway and re-created the part in the 1968 film.

The girl, dazed, disheveled and appearing no older than 12, realized very quickly that she had chosen the wrong time to cross the train tracks running through a favela in Rio de Janeiro. She refused to give her name or any information to the bulky Brazilian social workers and heavily armed police officers who suspected that she was addicted to crack cocaine and living on the street. "I'm not going with you. I'm not going anywhere. I'm just going to my mom's," she said.

The Rev. David Wilkerson, an evangelical pastor who founded the Teen Challenge ministry and wrote the best-selling book "The Cross and the Switchblade," died Wednesday in a car accident in East Texas. He was 79. Wilkerson's car smashed head-on into a tractor-trailer rig after veering into oncoming traffic on U.S. 175 west of Cuney, southeast of Dallas, said Texas Department of Public Safety spokeswoman Tela Mange. Wilkerson was not wearing a seat belt, according to investigators.

Recovery Road A Novel Blake Nelson Scholastic: 320 pp., $17.99, ages 13 and up We All Fall Down A Memoir Nic Sheff Little, Brown: 348 pp., $17.99, ages 15 and up We live in a society filled with temptation, where drugs and alcohol are illegal for minors but still easy to obtain. They're so readily available, in fact, that 11 million American youths need treatment for substance abuse, according to the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. Yet few teen addicts get the help they need.

Drug addictions plague about 22.5 million Americans, according to recent statistics. But promising scientific research may one day begin to whittle away at that number, say scientists writing in a special issue of the journal Neuron published Wednesday. The issue is devoted to addiction and details many of the latest theories about substance abuse prevention and treatment. Included in the journal (online access is free for this issue) are papers on opioid prescriptions for chronic pain and the risks involved; how drugs might be used for cognitive enhancement and how obesity is linked to other addictions.

With his debut feature, 1999's "Crane World," a gritty slice-of-life about a day laborer in Buenos Aires, Pablo Trapero first demonstrated his facility for transcending the conventions of genre. With his latest, "Carancho," which played at last year's Cannes Film Festival and opened in Los Angeles on Friday, he's again looking to infuse genre storytelling with a beating human heart. In this case, the director says, his film, which charts the relationship between a down-on-his-luck lawyer and an emergency room doctor, began life in his mind as an unlikely love story.

The first pick of the 1999 draft was a high school outfielder from North Carolina. The Texas Rangers used their top pick that year on a junior college pitcher from Bakersfield. For Josh Hamilton and Colby Lewis, for so many years, the World Series was the least of their concerns. Hamilton struggled to overcome drug addiction. Lewis journeyed to Japan to save his career. After more than a decade of detours, October glory is theirs. We have a Series after all. The Rangers recorded the first Series victory in franchise history, a 4-2 victory over the San Francisco Giants in which Hamilton hit a home run and Lewis carried a shutout into the seventh inning.

A former San Fernando physician convicted of improperly prescribing powerful painkillers to drug addicts and undercover drug agents was sentenced Thursday to 25 years in prison and ordered to pay a $1-million fine. The sentence was justified by the scope of Masoud Bamdad's "pill mill," the seriousness of his illicit prescribing and his apparent lack of remorse, U.S. District Court Judge George Wu told the court. Wu cited the prosecution's report that for three years running — including 2008, the year of his arrest —Bamdad ranked among the state's highest prescribers of oxycodone, a powerful narcotic popularly known as "synthetic heroin."