AHS Views

If you think drugs aren’t such a bad thing – maybe you took them when you were a kid, and you turned out fine – be aware of the fact that your kids, your friends, your husband, wife, brother, sister, could turn out like the pictures from the faces of meth project. They’re real. And some are so far gone, they’ll never look like they did before. Getting drug addiction help could have prevented it.

Other than the obvious, the one thing that strikes me about these pictures is that no one in their before shot looked happy.

One way or another, most people take drugs to make them happy. As you can see from the ‘after’ shots, the drugs didn’t work.

Perhaps if they get some good addiction help services they can also get down to the bottom of what was making them so unhappy before in the first place. Would have been a good idea to do that instead of taking drugs.

Have you heard of addiction vaccines? I really don’t get the point. They’re for people who are already on drugs and are really motivated to get off them. The vaccines are said to prevent the person from being affected by the drug (they take it and they don’t get high.) The rationale being that if they don’t get high, they won’t want to continue taking the drug. This seems redundant to me. What’s wrong with drug rehab and other forms of addiction help? There are plenty of them out there that work – especially if the person is really motivated, which is a requirement for the vaccine to work.

Experts say that the vaccine itself won’t be enough to handle anyone’s addiction. They’ll still need counselling to help them handle the reasons they want the drugs. Otherwise, they could really just switch to another drug. One for which they have not received a vaccine and does get them high. It really doesn’t matter what drug they take in the end – they want to escape reality, and you can do that with any number of drugs.

Right now there are successful drug addiction help services available. They help the person through withdrawal, rehabilitate them physically through proper nutrition, exercise, and so on, get down to the bottom of the problems they’re having that make them want to take drugs, and work out what it’s going to take for them to resist them in the future.

That’s successful drug rehab. That’s addiction help services that work. If more people would avail themselves of programs that use that kind of line up rather than quick fixes, they could handle their drug problem. We don’t need a vaccine. We don’t need millions of dollars to be spent on more reseearch. We need more people going into programs that offer successful addiction help. 

“This is the age of medication”, said Dr. Steven Jaffe. “I have a thousand parents who say, ‘I didn’t know how much my child was into.” That’s right. They’re really into medication – the kind they find in their own homes, steal from the family medicine cabinet and share with their friends. And the number of teens doing this is far beyond what any parent would probably think. There are millions of them – and some are going to wind up with a prescription drug addiction problem that requires professional addiction help.

In other words, your kids could basically be drug addicts right now. And you don’t even know about it.

In a recent article about prescription drug addiction and abuse, 17-year- old Kat Peterson says she took Percocet, Valium, Xanax and anything else she could get her hands on. She also said at first she didn’t think they were dangerous because “why would the doctor prescribe them if they were dangerous?”

And, she added, “I didn’t even care about the danger of it; that had no effect on me.”

That’s what teens and young adults are thinking. And that’s what they’re doing. Educate them, get involved in their lives, and if you find out they’re already taking prescription drugs, get them addiction help services before it’s too late. Professional addiction help can get them off drugs, but they need it fast. The death toll is rising.  

Oklahoma has it bad. Drug and alcohol addiction in Oklahoma contributes to 85 percent of homicides, 80 percent of prison incarcerations and 75 percent of divorce, and costs the state about $5.8 billion a year – which is enough to get about 10% of the entire population of Oklahoma through a long-term residential drug rehab program that will give them the addiction help they need.

Spending that money on addiction help would seem to be the best approach. You’d get 300,000 people off alcohol or drugs – that’s 10% of the entire state population. Instead, they spend about $1.4 billion dollars in direct costs – defined as trying to prevent addiction, locking up people who commit crimes because of addiction, and treating addicts. How much is spent getting addicts addiction help wasn’t specified but it’s obviously not anywhere enough.

The other $4.4 billion is “indirect” costs such as “financial losses from premature deaths, imprisonment and school dropouts.”

If the money was spent getting addiction help serivces for those who need it, very few of those other expenses would be necessary. And you pretty much would have handled at least those with serious addiction problems with one year’s budget. Then money can go into prevention so Oklahoma doesn’t get into that much trouble again.

Is spending money on effective addiction help services just too simple or something? What am I missing?

Saturn Noriega, writer, CEO andformer Chicago politican, wrote an article recently in which he referred to “America’s fastest growing problem – an insatiable hunger for illegal drugs. ” The article praises drug testing in schools as a way to ‘help protect the innocent and straighten out the guilty’ before they wind up in jail or in need of addiction help.

Spot on, with one exception – while millions of Americans are still using illegal drugs, the real love affair seems to be with prescrption drugs. The school drug testing programs rarely include prescription drugs so no one knows the person is taking them until they get to the point where they need addiction help, a trip to the ER, or the undertaker.

The fact that prescription drugs aren’t tested for in schools is probably a big selling point for someone who wants to get high but doesn’t want to get caught. That, and the fact that you can just get them out of your parents (or a friend’s) medicine cabinet, and they don’t have a tell-tale odor like marijuana, meth and some other drugs, make them ideal.

And that’s why we have a prescription drug addiction and abuse epidemic and why more and more people are seeking addiction help for those drugs,  not the kind you get ‘on the street.’

Well, that’s not really why – the real reason is whatever is behind a person preferring a drugged state instead of reality. But that’s another story.

Until school drug testing includes prescription drugs, the number of kids taking drugs and needing addiction help services will continue. And, by the way, read Noriega’s very concise and insightful article into the drug scene.

For years I’ve put music on when I’m exercising, cleaning the house, or doing anything that I can do better with a little rhythm behind it. And the louder the music, the more I’m motivated. And the faster the beat, the faster I move. Researchers have now discovered that housework and exercise aren’t the only things that speed up with loud, fast music. In fact, it may be one of the reasons why so many people need addiction help.

The study was done in bars. They had already discovered that fast music makes people drink faster, now they know that loud music makes people drink faster, too.

The guys doing the research also suggested that maybe people drink more when the music is loud is because they can’t talk - you can’t hear each other. So, what are they going to do instead? They’re in a bar.  Speed the music up, turn up the volume, and the drinks go down the shoot faster, and they order more. If they go to bars frequently, it’s not going to take too long to turn into an alcoholic who needs addiction help.

Club owners make their money off alcohol – some charge admission, but that’s usually the price of about one or two drinks. Some include one or two drinks with the admission price – enough to get someone started.

The researchers suggested that bar owners turn down the music – not likely. Perhaps if the person got some addiction help services, they’d be less tempted to go with the flow.

The state of New York has banned smoking in alcohol and drug addiction recovery centers.  I’m not sure that’s a great idea. While it’s true that people who smoke are more likely to take drugs and drink than others, and while it’s true that it’s better not to smoke, getting off drugs is hard enough in itself. In fact, the prospect of having to quit drugs and smoking at the same time might be enough to deter someone from getting the addiction help they need.

The commissioner of the New York City Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services says “we’re changing the culture to promote an overall recovery plan that involves health and wellness for the optimal chance of recovery.” That sounds like a good idea but that’s like expecting someone to completely change everything in their life all at the same time. Which is pretty hard to do.

I’d like to hear from addicts and former addicts about this. Smokers, or ex-smokers, specifically. Do you think this is workable? Do you think it will make it even harder to quit drugs? Do you think people will not get the addiction help services they need because of it?

What motivates a person to take drugs? In the case of Amy Jones, you probably never would have expected it. A college soccer player, Amy gave up her life of running, weightlifting and practicing soccer, turned into an alcoholic and drug addict and had been convicted of three felony drug charges by the time she was 19. What drove Amy in that direction we don’t know, but at 20, she’s now getting addiction help.

Doug Pyke had tingling in his legs. Tests finally revealed that he had cancer and the doctors said he had a year to live. He, too, became a drug addict and a dealer. And he, too, is now getting the addiction help he needs. He’s also doing chemotherapy, and it seems to be working. He may have a new lease on life in more ways than one.

Both Amy and Doug were  helped through drug court. It’s not the best way to handle a drug addiction – it’s better to address it before the person gets into criminal activity – but they’re lucky they made it through their ordeals alive and had the opportunty to get help at all. 

I don’t know Amy or Doug’s families, but I would guess their drug addictions came as a surprise. And that’s usually the case. If you need help for someone you care about, contact Addiction Help Services. 

Ever since Russia opened up to the rest of the world, the country has had a drug problem. Russia has been corrupt in several ways for a long time, but drugs was not one of them. Now they have a heroin addiction problem. Some drug ‘specialists’ in Russia are advocating methadone treatment, but most consider it almost a killing offense to even suggest it. Generally, methadone treatment is not considered addiction help, it’s trading addiction to one opiate for another.

Perhaps the relative absence of Big Pharma in Russia – that is, compared to the U.S., where Big Pharma has shaped the country into a nation of drug takers and legal drug dealing is the country’s most profitable industry – allows the Russian officials to see methadone treatment for what it really is. Here’s a quote from a recent story in the NY Times: “Methadone opponents in Russia say the therapy entraps patients in lifelong addiction; others accuse Western countries of pushing the treatment on Russia for commercial gain. There are also fears that methadone could seep into the black market, given the high level of corruption at many Russian clinics. ”

There are plenty of methadone treatment dissenters in the U.S., but, culturally, we are so used to drugs being the solution for just about everything that it’s easily accepted. As is prescription drug addiction of other kinds. Russia is looking at the cold, hard facts. Successful drug addiction help services mean getting the person off drugs, not onto another one.

One of the consequences of drug addiction – and it doesn’t matter whether your problem is heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, prescription drugs, and so on - is getting hooked up with an unsavory crowd. Here’s the story of a 20-year-old man who committed two burglaries to pay off a drug debt. It wasn’t much money – about $2,500 – but this guy is now going to be in prison for three years. Will he get the addiction help he needs while he’s in there?

This story is not only a lesson in drugs leading to crime, it’s also a lesson on drugs that we some people think of as harmless leading to drugs that are anything but – he started at 11 years old with marijuana, and went from therre to ecstasy, speed, cocaine and heroin. At the time he was arrested he was on a prescription drug. Addiction would obviously describe his problem – and it apparently doesn’t matter which drug he’s taking.

Drug addiction treatment is available in many prisons. Let’s hope he gets it, otherwise he’ll need  addiction help services when he gets out – or he’s likely to end up back in prison again, at best.