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http://www.pathwaytoprevention.org/ Teen drug addiction has a devastating effect on youth, families and communities. Teens drop out of school, the workforce or life itself. Change the course of teen drug addiction.
Members of our military returning from combat operations have high rates of substance abuse. They often exhibit a co-occurring triad of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), traumatic brain injury (TBI), and pain, which complicates the problems with substance abuse and leading ultimately, to addiction. Read more in Returning-Veterans-With-Addictions (PDF) For related links, see also Prescription Drugs and Our Military and Veterans Bear Brunt of Weak Treatment Options.
As U.S drug policy continues to rely on a counterproductive drug war, resistance to moving towards decriminalizing addiction, persists. Of course, the losers are young addicts that can and should be rehabilitated. many are on the road to become criminalized addicts, if not already there. Some have a hustle; others fill our jails. Make no mistake, many are our children and relatives.
Public and private treatment institutions remain effectively, insignificant in dealing with the populations that need their services. The realty is that it takes money to recover and isolation from the outside world for a typical addict. Treatment professionals agree that a long period of abstinence is necessary for the restoration of naturally occurring dopamine and receptor functioning. Without this transformation and internment, an addict exists in an emotional black hole. The loss of 7 million Americans to addiction each year is very significant. An alcohol and drug dependent America is dragging us down. With exception to the Veterans Administration and federally funded programs, our insurance and healthcare policies are ineffective. They do not deal with co-existing mental disorders or proper treatment. Typical insurance and health care policies consistently demonstrate rejection of proper substance use disorder (SUD) treatment. Except for sparse and difficult public funding, insurance companies rarely pay for basic replacement drug therapy which is relatively cheap.
We live in a world that hates addictive behavior, yet silently condones the biggest drug dependent and alcoholic population on earth. People like Governor Scott of Florida ditch prescription databases over privacy and business rights. How does that even fit? Our government claims to want to eradicate demand and source, yet have at least enabled or created a situation in which more pharmaceutical opiates are available than ever and our budget to fight the drug war in Mexico is as counterproductive as our U.S. job eating trade deficit. Instead we jail addicts. Addicts who are not violent, should be screened and sequestered in an environment geared to treatment. Dollars spent to accomplish this can come from otherwise, redundant incarceration. Addicts are human beings that need to be rehabilitated. Jails and prisons are good at warehousing and worsening criminal behavior. With an exception to federal prisons, what is missing, is the willful intent to screen and rehabilitate.
If you watched the 2010 world series, you may have noticed Texas Rangers Phenom Josh Hamilton who led his team to the big October showdown in the baseball world. He has a batting average of .352 and hit 32 home-runs in 2010. What makes this a bigger story is Josh’s journey from drug addiction to baseball stardom. The blog “Man of Depravity” published Josh Hamilton’s story in a short bio and video you should view called Heroin to Home Runs; The Story of Josh Hamilton. Hamilton pulled no punches in laying it down to a higher power the same way he pulls no punches when he crushes a baseball. He puts out a message to all other addicts; recovery is a possibility. Every day is an another opportunity to stay sober. One day at a time. Josh has been sober since 2005 and knows intimately that successful sobriety requires daily vigilance as he follows his path of freedom from addiction. Link by Big Rod
Addiction now defined as chronic brain disorder – Health – Addictions – msnbc.com. This is what we at a grassroots and professional level have been talking about. Addiction needs a medical classification so we can simply deal with it at the right scale. In a nation governed by a voting population, majority rules and the majority votes for legislators that say in many ways; let the addicts rot. Can we afford to keep looking at a medical condition in this manner? Even if 10% of the population deals directly with the impact of addiction, that’s 30 million people; addicts and their immediate family. We argue, that when you calculate prison, emergency rooms, homelessness, deaths, lost productivity the costs start to look something like a cabinet level budget. We spend hundreds of billion of dollars annually on the disease by not dealing with it; so why not accept it and deal with it humanely. It is chronic problem that doesn’t go away on its own. Msnbc link by Tom G.
Substance Abuse Treatment in the federal prison system works for the 210,000 inmates it houses. Where treatment is missing is in state prisons and local jails. Those facilities contain roughly 91% of all inmates. If we look at the Bureau of Federal Prisons we see a model that could be used in all prisons. Of the estimated 2.3 million inmates currently incarcerated in U.S. prisons, 1.9 million could benefit from alcohol and drug treatment, which could ultimately save taxpayers millions of dollars, according to a new report. Currently only 11% of inmates who need treatment are receiving it during their incarceration. Approximately 85% of current inmates could benefit from treatment, according to The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University. The CASA report, “Behind Bars II: Substance Abuse and America’s Prison Population,” shows that 1.5 million of the estimated 2.3 million prison inmates meet the DSM IV medical criteria for substance abuse or addiction.
Former NBA player recounts struggle with drug addiction – CNN.com. Chris Herren, a basketball legend from Fall River, Massachusetts, realized his dreams by playing for the Celtics in the NBA, only to lose it all to addiction before rising again with a new dream. Chris wrote Basket Ball Junkie which is his memoir of his struggle with heroin and other drugs. You can read an excerpt here. The reminds me of a piece we did a while ago call the Fighter and also of the great Texas Ranger’s baseball slugger, Josh Hamiliton. The message here, is that addiction impacts more than skid row junkies and miraculous comebacks happen everyday. Recovery is more that a possibility. Link by Bill
Dr. Sanjay Gupta: The truth about prescription medication addiction CNN.com Blogs. Every 19 minutes someone dies because of misuse of prescription medications. Sometimes it is because they take too much. Many times it is because they forget or ignore the warning their doctor gave about combining the medications with alcohol. And tens of thousands of people die every year as a result. Click on the link above to view the article
Singer Whitney Houston apparently drowned in her bath after ingesting a cocktail of prescription sedatives. The Crime Report is a great website that collects resources concerning topics associated with criminal justice; in this case, prescription drug abuse. The website archives a range of topics including wrong doing centered around the world of drugs. Such a tragic loss!
As Christmas is upon us, dadonfire.net viewership is up. So isn’t the struggle for addicts, alcoholics and their families to get through the holidays. People who have seen the worst and best of themselves and their loved ones, still care to make a difference in the world of addiction and recovery. They share what they see here and elsewhere. There are those who want to see a loved one survive. There are those who want to know their own freedom from addiction. There are those who want the world to be free. That freedom is possible.
Keep sharing and logging on to dadonfire.net. Spread the word. The point is to move consciousness in America from one of prejudice towards addiction and alcoholism to that of understanding. Addiction is a deadly disease that needs a real solution. Some people who log on to this blog have lost a loved one to drugs or alcohol in body or spirit. Somehow, they are able to keep putting out a positive message that may move another person away from what they have witnessed. Recovery is possible. Never give up. Have a merry Christmas and a free and happy new year in 2012!
Life-Saving Drug Out of Reach – NYTimes.com. “Overdose now kills more people in the United States than car accidents, making it the leading cause of injury-related mortality according to the latest statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The number of deaths — 37,485 in 2009 — could be cut dramatically if Naloxone were available over-the-counter and placed in every first aid kit.” View the rest of Maia Szalavitz’s story on the use of Naloxone, by click on the image or title of this article.
“The likelihood for addicts to get effective treatment improved greatly last month, when the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) released it’s public policy statement on the definition of addiction. Boldly stating that addiction is a “primary, chronic disease”, ASAM has established the role of neurobiology in the development and maintenance of all addictive behaviors” Barry Lessin. Read the rest of Barry’s article by click on title: Addiction Really is a Disease
CASAColumbia.org: News Room: New CASA Report Finds Adolescent Substance Use at Epidemic Levels.
The study looks at how American culture increases the risk that teens will use addictive substances and how the messages sent by adults, and glamorized by the tobacco and alcohol industries and the media, normalize substance use and undermine the health and futures of our teens.
Probably one of t
he best videos; America’s Disastrous Drug War, produced by Walter Cronkite was removed from all you-tube archives. Go Figure! One Cronkite video that survived is called Harm Reduction. BUT!!!, Many informative videos on the drug war are still out there and readily available to illustrate maybe, the costliest problem America faces. Here are a few notable video producers and interviews on the subject: Neil Franklin, Frontline, Robert Capecchi , a 12 minute clip from a great 2007 series from Kevin Booth’s, The American Drug War. Check out the rest of Kevin’s series on TagTélé and you-tube.
Here is someone who looks deep into the neuroscience of addiction, shedding some light in areas you might not have thought about. David J. Linden is an American professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and the author of The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God. [1] The book The Accidental Mind is an attempt to explain the human brain to intelligent lay reader. CLICK HERE FOR THE NPR INTERVIEW WITH LINDEN If your interested in David’s latest book, The Compass of Pleasure, you can go to his blog and learn more.
M. Scott Peck said in his book, The Road Less Traveled, that “Life is difficult.” If you have an addict in your family, you know what that means. After years of hard work and raising your children: BANG! At some painful point, you
came to realize your kid is a drug addict! Here’s the kick: By the time you discover your youngster is using, he or she has actually been using for an average of 2 years. So, you took action, but it was too late for prevention. Knowing the difficulty and high cost, parents often took the easy road; accepting a half hearted contrition and going on. Before you know it; some of you are living with a hard core addict. Now you intimately know, difficult is an understatement.
Addiction causes an addict to react within the context of chemical chaos in their brains. It is a disease. Addiction changes brain chemistry. It is a medical condition that receives trivial attention from health care providers; leaving addicts and their families in ruin. We now know now that treatment and recovery is a process and not an event, yet it is treated by the treatment industry like a one time event, where families are led to invest everything they have in a short attempt to end the madness; yet what is the outcome? 5% success, 10%?, 20%?…
It is time that addiction receives mainstream designation as a legitimate medical condition that goes even further than limited parity laws require. It’s time that the burden be lifted off the shoulders of 20 million American families to play doctor to something most are powerless to. Obama’s ONDCP knows this, so why is it not public policy. This is what we need to demand of our lawmakers.
Gabor Maté, is an influential physician who knows what it means to think outside the box. His efforts have provided leadership in harm reduction and uncovering the mystery of addiction. Harm reduction is controversial. It is a theory of practice in dealing with addiction that is hard to swallow for mainstream America, but in some circles, it is viewed as necessary. Gabor makes sense out of it. he has committed his practice to working in the trenches with the worst the world of addiction has to offer, primarily in Vancouver. He does it in a way that only the context of raw addictive behavior gives it unmistakeable clarity. In 2009, Maté published In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, a book that describes his realty of working in a Vancouver skid row addiction clinic. The Fifth Estate is a Canadian CBC news show that did a focused film series on Maté, his colleagues and several drug addicted patients. It included an episode about Maté’s clinic called Staying Alive.
Rewiring the brain against addiction is an idea that holds the key to the answer. Having known suffering drug addicts, its safe to say that “just quitting” is not an answer. The Depression that goes along with addiction, often predicating the need for drugs to begin with is a key area of study. Dual Demons! as it called, continually feeds into the reality of repeated relapse. Addiction is a disease that requires the equivalent focus in dollars and effort of the drug war itself. Once we get big Insurance and big Pharma to play the game of real recovery we can start poking holes in the sails of drug trade. De-criminalizing addiction would cripple illegal drug trade. Imagine a world of compassion, recovery and freedom from addiction. Links by M. Slivinski.
Should taxpayers support wet houses? In AA literature, it has been said that there are those who seem to be constitutionally unable to get sober. A wet house is basically a place that allows drunks and addicts to enjoy a modicum of shelter and to drink, usually outside the premises. Typically, shelters require residents to remain sober or they are disqualified. What appears to be the ultimate in enabling is to some a less costly way of dealing with drunks. The argument being ER, jail, and crime are the alternative and cost more than sheltering a drunk or addict. Advocates of wet houses call it harm reduction. Whether America comes to terms with its chronic population of drunks and addicts is yet to be seen. Addiction doesn’t seem to be waning and it is in fact costing all of us too much money and grief.
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