It's always a shame to hear of someone choosing to end their life. There are always options. If you or someone you know may be considering taking such actions, please check out:

http://nostigma.org/

There is no shame in asking for help.

--It'd be cool if the mods wanted to add this link to the post.

This is the wild thrashing of a self-healing system which has failed to do so.

Courts and legislatures in "free" countries are designed to moderate each other. What we have here is a citizen improperly (or at the absolute least, unorthodoxly) using a law to achieve an end for which it was not intended.

Drug laws (and gun laws similarly), drive drug trade underground. Were drug trade legal, the government could put huge tariffs on product, regulate quantity, quality, and institute record keeping regulations... not to mention requiring dealers be licensed and supervised. THEN, when something like this happens (which ODs do all the time), a complaint would be filed with the proper boards, an investigation done, and an insurance payout made.

...because Canada (and the U.S.) is unable to stamp out drug use entirely (and chooses not to regulate [the bejesus out of] it), this situation, as strange as it may seem, is the best recourse this young woman felt she had. Interestingly, the courts thus far have supported her in this.

So I think the biggest thing we can take from this is the valid concern of a broken system both recognizing and doing nothing to fix it's brokenness.

Bottom line (finally), nothing has made cigarettes harder to get in the United States than high taxes and over-regulation, all made possible by the fact that they're legal, if barely. Draw your own conclusions.

Just to be contrary, though I agree I can't think of anything positive to say about meth (never tried it, like living too much), in the U.S. long haul truck drivers pretty much live off of caffeine and ephedrine (the meth precursor). You could almost say the nation runs on it.

I had this thought the other day (a combination of updating my Resume and reading this post): What have I learned from video games?

Online Certificate Courses in an afternoon? Online colleges? Brainbench.com? How well do I have to do at SimCity to get a certificate in introductory city planning? How well do I have to do at Myst to get a certificate in rudimentary logic and problem solving?

There is a very real ability for games to teach us things, and ironically we've yet to learn that.

There are exceptions... combat sims for the military, consumer products for youngsters, and even dull dull poorly designed SAT and life skills training games for young adults (for godsakes someone make THAT a consumer entertainment product), but we've yet to realize the full potential here. Hell, Dance Dance Revolution just barely teaches us how to dance and Guitar Hero doesn't teach us to play guitar. How funny is that?

SimCity already has the following, someone should revamp it as an adult education tool (without sucking the fun out of it).

Also, put the damn plane crash back in; removing neither undoes nor causes 9/11. I helped put together lists of casualties during Katrina and it was really tough, but whether or not my video games come with flooding has no bearing on that whatsoever. Actually, change the stats so that plane crashes more realistically and we can all learn how NOT to urban plan near airports.

All Last Starfighter references are obligatory.

Alright, to start with, it's my feeling that whether or not something is art has no relationship whatsoever to whether or not it is legal. Basically, what my Aesthetics class in college taught me, is that there is no one definition of art, but that art is best defined as actions and things which "tend" to have certain common qualities. That's another discussion, but that's the basics.

Art is frequently a transformation from the literal to the metaphorical (vivid colors in a painting expressing intangible real life emotions) or in other cases, a transformation from the metaphorical to the literal (consider all of those models and paintings of pigs with wings, they're literal interpretations of "When Pigs Fly"). In this case, the artists chose to take a commercial which was clearly not meant to be taken literally (unless the real world went all dystopia while I was asleep last night) and made it literal by literally living in the mall. The use of the space was artistic AND the observations and the expressions of that data gained from use of the space were also art, in my opinion. Anyway, I love it, now to find myself a mall and some cinderblocks...

This is just what the world needs, no really, a practical (if artistic, oh, I'm going to irk my fellow Philosophy Majors with that one) use for all those old floppy disks. They ought to have a word for this, like afro-cycling or something, since it reminds me of the sort of strange repurposing of old goods that I so frequently see done in developing nations. ...but really, a floppy disk is made of several metal parts, 2 kinds of plastic, paper, glue... you can't just melt it down to recycle it, so better a music album than a landfill. If readers like this, I wager they'll enjoy OneBitMusic.com - no affiliation.