With lines like "should we just hope that teens are too broke for this weak coke," Charles M. Blow holds a mirror to society's face, week in and week out. He's dope. [Times]

Thankfully scientists, finished with curing widespread disease and prolonging life, have turned to important studies. Two new endeavors prove two shocking facts: snorting coke makes people annoying, and drunk people like to fuck.

The Post had a fun time this morning with two Fashion Institute students who giggled about being arrested for dealing coke. Now the school assures everyone: there are no drugs on campus any more:

You cokeheads just don't listen to reason. So the government tried metaphors. Remember when they cracked an egg, representing your brain, into a sizzling frying pan, representing drugs, to indicate that drugs will "fry" your brain? Years after that, it turns out that people are still doing drugs! Now the UK government has hit on a brilliant message: If you do coke, you are killing this innocent dog. The clever use of a grisly puppy murder makes this, honestly, the best anti-drug campaign we've seen in quite a while. Tell poor scruffy Pablo you needed that bump—or tell his dead body:

Boy George, the fey and once fancy-free 80's pop idol, has been found guilty of false imprisonment in the UK. The situation was peculiar: he handcuffed a 29-year-old HIV-positive Norwegian rent boy named Audun Carlsen to a wall at his London flat, supposedly because Carlsen fucked up George's computer while trying to steal illicit photos. Audun claimed it was revenge because he had refused to sleep with George on their first date, which they arranged through hookup site Gaydar.com.

Nearly 200 people died in the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, but amid economic chaos and a presidential transition, the story is bound to soon fall off the front pages of American newspapers. How to keep readers interested? By helping them somehow relate to a despicable band of terrorists born in a foreign land and fervently devoted to an unfamiliar religion. Preferably in a way that simultaneously makes the perpetrators seem even more crazed an awful. Enter wild allegations of cocaine and LSD use, via the British press!

Yuppie cokeheads, stop snorting massive rails for the sake of the endangered tree frogs! That's the new anti-drug message coming out of the UK. And it just might work! You might not stop for the sake of your money, your police record, or your septum, but would you give up blow if you knew that every eight ball cost ten square meters of precious rainforest habitat, you Whole Foods junkie? It's true, according to the vice president of Colombia!

Everyone in the Australian ad industry is a drunk cokehead! Well, not quite everyone. But according to new survey, "Asked if they knew of work associates who had an alcohol problem, only 7 per cent of those working in media agencies were able to answer 'no.'" Thirty-six percent of the Aussie ad industry said either "yes" or "possibly" when asked if they drink too much. And a fifth said they've used drugs at work. This raises four very important sociological questions:

Well, this election is fast turning into an opposition-research-fueled shitstorm. On Meet The Press Sunday, Democratic strategist Paul Begala casually mentioned that John McCain sat on the board of the U.S. Council For World Freedom. And the Associated Press this morning elaborated on exactly what that entails. "The U.S. Council for World Freedom was part of an international organization linked to former Nazi collaborators and ultra-right-wing death squads in Central America.," AP said. Very interesting! But the rest of the article doesn't give any details on these Nazis or the role of this group, called the World Anti-Communist League, in launching a "Cocaine Coup" that turned Bolivia into a drug trafficking hub and hotbed of brutal torture. Luckily a former AP and Newsweek reporter named Roberty Parry wrote an oddly fun book called Lost History , which can provide further illumination:

The Smoking Gun has documents concerning a cocaine dealer who added a $25 gas delivery surcharge to his orders. It's a perfect story: high oil prices have increased the cost of everything from trucked-in food to daily commutes to real estate. (Though they're not quite as high as they were.) There was even a flurry of lightly reported stories about how it's caused gaggles of girls to become strippers. Now, coke prices are increasing:

Over the last five years, cocaine production in Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru has increased 18%. We blame you. [WP]

While we expect actress Helen Mirren to be both bodacious and bawdy, nothing could have prepared us for the candid interview she recently gave to the British version of GQ, where the Oscar winner opened up at length about her shoplifting problem, her love of cocaine, and her multiple date rapes. The latter revelations are causing the most controversy, because though Mirren says she was assaulted "a couple of times," her attitude toward the touchy issue is royally complicated. Says People:

· We spotted this juicy little nugget of gossip just moments before last night's episode of Chelsea Lately aired on E! last night. One of the show's staffers maintains a Tumblr called C'est L.A. Vie, in which she often details the mundane things that happen on the show. Yesterday, all that changed when she alleged that someone who was wired with a hot mic was caught doing coke on set. Our handy video clip runs down the list of all the on-camera guests last night's episode; leave your guesses (and investigative rationale) in the comments! [C'est L.A. Vie]
· Our hearts just broke a little — scratch that, a LOT — when we read this anecdote about Life Goes On star Corky and his racist streak. This was a Wikipedia hoax; Corky doesn't see color. [Byron Crawford]
· Chuck Klosterman's latest Esquire column features a lengthy diatribe on Jennifer Love Hewitt's left femur ("Love Hewitt’s left thighbone strikes me as unusually long, and I feel like it lacks the convincing self-assurance of her right femur"), which he grades a B+. [Esquire]
· Ignore Lindsay Lohan's nipples for a second and, instead, focus on her mouth. Is she wearing braces? Grillz? Is she chewing tin foil? [Egotastic]
· And we know the day is almost over, but here are 88 ways you can enjoy 8/8/08. Our fave? "Call up Eddie Furlong and ask why there are 8 of him to a mile. Then, find out how he’s doing. Let us know." Guaranteed to be the best list until the 99 ways you can enjoy 9/9/09 comes out next year! [Best Week Ever]

When you're a big time Miami crime rapper who took your name from a legendary cocaine dealer, and somebody "accuses" you of once being a prison guard, why not just admit it? Then you could have a nice laugh about how far you've come. Instead, Rick Ross denied it, and got The Smoking Gun on his case, which just keeps on releasing more evidence of his C.O. career, and now people like us are providing links to his Certificate of Appreciation "in recognition of your service as a Perfect Attendance Employee assisting the Department of Corrections." Hustlin' baby. After the jump, the now-famous photo of the big coke don at his graduation ceremony as a corrections officer, which he tried to attribute to "online hackers" or something:

Shed a patriotic tear, fellow Americans: we are the most drugged-out nation in the world. A new study (of 17 nations) shows that more than 16% of Americans have done coke, and more than 42% of us have smoked weed, absolutely blowing away second place finisher New Zealand and the rest of the civilized world. Suck our woolie blunt smoke, Kiwis! Fetch our crack pipe, Netherlands lightweights! All it takes is one look at this handy chart to see... did you lock the front door? Did you hear something? Click to enlarge. Dude, awesome.

Might as well go for a music star crime news two-fer this afternoon: Atlanta rap star Young Jeezy has been implicated in a major cocaine-dealing trial. A witness testifying in a case against members of Black Mafia Family—a massive Atlanta drug gang that moved hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of coke across the country—said that Jeezy bought several kilos of coke from BMF. Well, duh. Jeezy's nickname is "Snowman":

When word broke yesterday that Oscar winner Tatum "My Career Peaked Before I Had Pubes" O'Neal was pinched by the NYPD for buying crack off a vagrant, we found her initial explanation that she was simply doing research for a role just a bit far-fetched. After all, color us jaded, but we found it out of the realm of believability that late night trips through alleyways in search of crack rock would help her prep for her role as a mother in the sure-to-be-classic made-for-TV movie Fab Five: The Texas Cheerleading Scandal. So we were less than surprised to find no mention of this blatant falsehood when we saw the cover story in this morning's NY Post. We were, however, surprised to find a scad of other statements in the piece that sounded even less believable than her original "it was research" claim. After the jump, please play along as we help to decide which of her lies is the most egregious.

HarperCollins hopes the whiff of scandal will push sales of Tatum O'Neal's memoir higher, based on the line (OK I'll stop now) the publisher is selling in a new press release touting the three-year-old book. The oh-so-tasteful bit of flackery leads with the "BREAKING NEWS" of O'Neal's arrest Sunday night for attempting to buy cocaine near her Lower East Side apartment, and concludes with a not-entirely-freshened-up bio: "... this talented, spirited young woman has endured and triumphed over everything from childhood neglect and spousal abuse and heroin addiction, only to suffer a recent heartbreaking relapse from hard won sobriety... Tatum's life story is the ultimate victory-in-the-end tale." Tatum's life can be a victory in the end, especially if you buy her paperback, which via the magic of royalties will literally provide the fallen actress with microseconds of legal services, drug rehab or cocaine ecstasy. Full press release after the jump.

If you're famous, and you want to do cocaine (or smoke crack), our best advice is: don't do it, because you're a role model. Ha ha. But seriously, hopeless crackhead celebrities; if you're going to do it at least don't be an idiot. Coke is hardly even frowned upon in Hollywood, but getting busted while acting like a maniac can seriously impair your image and earning ability in middle America. So learn from your more unfortunate peers' mistakes; after the jump, five cases of cocaine-fuelled idiocy, and how not to reproduce them.