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Dear Dan: I have a mentally disabled cousin who I haven’t figured out how to help. He’s lived for more than 40 years in the same nursing home in a small, conservative town. His mental age is about 8, there are other mental-illness issues, and he has some physical ...

Last week Colorado became the first U.S. state to adopt a set of rules that allows marijuana to be regulated like alcohol for adults. Legislators, task force members and all involved are to be congratulated for doing it in accordance with Amendment 64’s spirit and ...

We love it that local mothers came out of the woodwork on May 13, the day after Mother’s Day, to give our all-female county commissioners an earful about fracking...

ARIES MARCH 21-APRIL 19: The Tarahumara Indians of northwestern Mexico are renowned for their ability to run long distances. The best runners can cover 200 miles in two days. The paths they travel are not paved or smooth, either, but rather the rough canyon trails ...

Dear Dan: I’m a 24-year-old straight, married female. I have been religiously reading your column in the Portland Mercury since I was 16. Thank you for explaining things that my parents wouldn’t and for helping me clear the hurdles of adolescence...

HB 1325, which determines driving impairment through a blood-level THC test, was passed by the Colorado legislature on May 7. The bill says anyone caught driving with more than five nanograms of THC per milliliter of blood is considered impaired, with the caveat that...

It was another one of those moments that scare the heck out of taxpayers. You know the kind, like the city can’t find $9,000 to put in a groundwater monitoring well below the Valmont dike dam to protect public health, but they can happily keep finding millions of ...

ARIES MARCH 21-APRIL 19: Are you afraid that you lack a crucial skill or aptitude? Do you have a goal that you’re worried might be impossible to achieve because of this inadequacy? If so, now is a good time to make plans to fill in the gap. If you formulate such an ...

Dear Dan: I am a 23-year-old straight male. My ex-girlfriend and I started dating in high school, when we were both 17, and continued dating until I broke up with her the summer after our freshman year in college because things felt too serious. We continued to have ...

The elephant in the room of all attempts by states to regulate marijuana is the current federal prohibition, which began in earnest under President Richard Nixon. Federal laws that make smoking marijuana a crime and a Justice Department dragging its feet under ...

ARIES MARCH 21-APRIL 19: How we react to the sound of the wind gives clues to our temperament, said philosopher Theodor W. Adorno. The unhappy person thinks of “the fragility of his house and suffers from shallow sleep and violent dreams.” But for the happy person, ...

Dear Readers: Last week was made of problems. The bombing of the Boston Marathon, the explosion that leveled a small town in Texas, the rising tide of antigay violence in France, the North Koreans being North Korean. And when I sat down to write this week’s column — ...