Monthly Archive

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.