Americans are drinking less alcohol as they get older, and many are switching from beer and hard liquor to wine, a new report says.

Researchers at Boston University School of Medicine studied 8,600 white adults in Framingham, MA, over 50 years. The participants, born between 1900 to 1959, joined the study when they were at least 28 years old and answered questions about their lifestyle and health, including their alcohol use for the past few decades

Researchers at the Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that people who stop drinking may develop depression.

Findings from the study appear online in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology. Scientists have long known that moderate drinking offered some health benefits, including protection against heart disease, certain types of stroke and some forms of cancer. But now they say that people that stop drinking, even moderate drinking, run the risk of developing depression and a reduced capacity of the brain to produce new neurons, a process called neurogenesis

- A new study found that stopping drinking alcohol can be detrimental to one's mental health.

According to the findings of the Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studies performed on mice who voluntarily drank alcohol for 28 days showed that when their alcohol consumption was stopped, it caused depression and a negative mood that set in 14 or more days after their systems were cleared of alcohol. This led scientist to believe that people who quit drinking, even moderate drinkers, will experience "negative mood states" days or weeks after the alcohol is out of their bodies

- A new law will go into effect on July 1 banning smoking tobacco indoors throughout the Netherlands. What this means for Amsterdam's historic coffee shops, where smoking tobacco laced with marijuana is more of the main draw, remains up for debate.

According to reports, coffee shop owners say the new ban should not effect them because 'coffee shops' are a place where people go to smoke. They say it is preposterous for the ban to extend to their shops, just as it would be for food to be banned from restaurants, or alcohol from a bar

Over the past two years, drunken driving arrests made by the Massachusetts State Police have risen by 70 percent. The numbers have steadily increased from 2,869 in 2005 to 3,860 in 2006 and up to 4,879 in 2007.

Col. Mark Delaney, head of the State Police, attributed the higher number of DUI arrests to the addition of sobriety checkpoints from 14 in 2005 to 82 in 2007 and extra efforts exerted by law enforcers