“I expect to smoke a lot less crack in 2014 than I did in 2013, but I’d be setting myself up for failure if I made abstinence a goal.” Slate’s Shane Schleger on fifteen years of smoking crack.

+ A call to arms on a Vermont heroin epidemic.

+ Newsweek: “What they are doing, consuming drugs, sometimes it doesn’t harm them as much, but those drugs carry many consequences. Maybe along the way they leave behind innocent deaths, maybe incarcerations. The road is full of injustice for, maybe, a brief moment of fun.” Private Morales doesn’t want to die for your sins.