AHS Views

I read a news article today that attributed the slowing sales growth of drug companies to the fact that their patents are running out and they’re not coming up with any new drugs to fill the void. Geez, don’t you think it could have something to do with the fact that many of the drugs they make, and spend billions of dollars marketing - sometimes illegally, always aggressively - are killing people and sending them for addiction help?

While the information about patents is true, I can’t help but think that there’s an element of karma in there somewhere. Maybe if they focused on developing drugs that don’t cause more dangerous side effects than the condition they were intended to treat they’d have better luck getting drugs approved.

Maybe if some of their biggest sellers weren’t getting such a bad rap that doctors don’t even want to prescribe them anymore - OxyContin is a good example, more people are showing up for addiction help in treatment centers than for several street drugs combined - their sales wouldn’t be in trouble.

There’s more than one way to skin a cat. And the country would be a lot healthier if the drug companies re-oriented themselves to solving health problems rather than creating them.

Every day I see articles telling parents to discuss drugs with their children if they want them to stay drug-free. Statistics show that kids whose parents talk to them about drugs are 50% less like to take them. But often parents don’t know what to say and, because of that, don’t talk to them about the subject at all.

Really, all that’s really necessary is to educate your kids. Do a little research and find out about drugs yourself - that’s the first step. Do an Internet search for information on methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine, MDMA, and marijuana to start with, and then find out about prescription drugs. There are many prescription drugs to watch out for - any tranquilizers, sedatives, sleeping pills, antidepressants, painkillers, ADD and ADHD drugs like Ritalin and Adderall (they’re similar to methamphetamine and cocaine) are very common.

Find out how they work and their side effects. You can also read stories and articles about drug addicts, or former drug addicts, and find out how drugs have affected their lives.

Once you know a little about it yourself, talk to your kids.

If you start when they’re really young - they may be offered drugs in the schoolyard or by a friend by the time they’re 8 or 10 - they’ll know that drugs are very dangerous and they’ll refuse to take them. Or, at least, there’s a 50% chance they’ll refuse. Not a guarantee - but better than the chances if they don’t know what they’re getting into.

Start by bringing it up in conversations when the opportunity presents itself - during a TV show, a commercial about drugs, when seeing someone on the street who is homeless and might be on drugs, and so on. Or take the time to teach them about their body and how it works, and fit it in there. 

If your kids are a little older, it would be a good idea to have a sitdown for the express purpose of teaching them about drugs.

Some parents think their kids will never get on drugs so they don’t take the time to do this education. But kids from all walks of life, even great kids who seem close to perfect, try them all the time. No one is immune.

Many parents don’t find out their kids are taking drugs until they’re already at the point of needing addiction help. Opening up the subject through education early on will help prevent that and, if they do experiment, they’re also more likely to be willing to talk about it so you can nip it in the bud.

I recently had occasion to meet one of the major marketing people for perhaps the best-known energy drink. More caffeine than about 10 cups of coffee in one little can. She confessed to having been wired on this stuff - but said she’s now down to about 6 cans a day. I don’t know the stats on her drink specifically but, for some of them, that’s the equivalent of about 64 cans of coke. A day. What are the possibilities of this leading to taking drugs?

Caffeine is addictive, although it doesn’t produce anywhere near the serious side effects of drugs when you try to get off it, but I wonder how many people who drink energy drinks in these amounts wind up getting into drugs. When you’ve had that much false energy pumped into your body, you’ve got to feel drained and lifeless when you stop drinking it - which opens the door to saying yes to a little ’pick-me-up’ offered by a friend. A pick-me-up that might include methamphetamine, cocaine, or one of the many meth-type prescription drugs that help keep you awake.

According to some research, energy drinks might well be gateway drugs. Roland Griffiths, one of the authors of a Johns Hopkins Medical Institution study on caffeine intoxication, said there is evidence that energy drinks are gateway drugs. He suggested that the drinks should have FDA warning labels - not about the gateway drug end of things, but about the possibility of caffeine intoxication.

One of the commenters laughed at this - said if the FDA was going to put warnings on energy drinks they should also put warnings on Coca Cola, pointing out that the name came from COKE - i.e. cocaine. But it hasn’t contained cocaine since 1929, so no need for the FDA to do that. I hope the commenter isn’t disappointed to find that out.

Personally, I would see a kid drinking a lot of energy drinks as a warning sign. Either there’s something physically wrong with the person - so they need energy desperately - or they’re wired. Or they’re just stupid. In which case, I’d definitely be worried since there’s a much better chance of them saying yes to an offer of a little pill that will create the same effect. Maybe someone will give them a Ritalin or Adderall. Especially if it’s a college kid trying to stay awake or using ’study drugs’ (speed) to focus.

When a person does one thing that’s harmful to their body, they’re more likely to do another. And it could get them in a lot of trouble. Including the eventually need for addiction help.

My advice? Check into it. 

I receive emails from a group of people who support non-drug solutions for mental and emotional problems. They’ve recently gotten into the subject of drug addiction and have suggested that psychiatry can help this problem. I beg to differ - and I’ll tell you why.

During the years that psychiatry rose to power as the ‘expert’ in the field of mental health, although that reputation is very tarnished at this point, more and more conditions, previously thought of as just part of life, have been classified as mental diseases or disorders.

Some of these alleged disorders include kids not being able to do math as well as their classmates, feeling sad when your spouse of 50 years passes away (yes, we’re actually supposed to believe there’s something strange about that), to smoking cigarettes. (As one blogger pointed out prior to Obama swearing in “Does that mean we have a deranged President Elect who should seek treatment?”).

It’s pretty obvious to me that this practice of turning everything into a mental illness is merely a ploy to get money (and to do anything they can to salvage what’s left of this dying discipline.)

If these conditions are ‘officially’ disorders, insurance companies will pay for treatment. Which opens the door to millions more patients (and many more millions of dollars) who wouldn’t be able to afford it otherwise. In fact, these ‘patients’ probably wouldn’t even have sought treatment because they didn’t think anything was wrong with them until psychiatry ‘made it so’. And they were probably right.

The docs also make money researching and promoting bogus disorders.

This really puts their diagnostic skills, not to mention their integrity, into question.

Do you want your friends or family members in the hands of someone who thinks that being distraught about the loss of someone you’ve raised children with and loved and depended upon for 50 years is mental illness? I know I don’t.

The next point is that much of the treatment they offer is drugs. Why? Number one, they don’t have a great reputation for curing anyone and, two, they can see someone for 10 or 15 minutes to prescribe or renew a prescription for a drug and make more money than if they’d spent 45 minutes actually talking with the person and helping resolve the problems they’re having in life that cause him to feel less than wonderful.

Addiction help is intensive. It takes many, many hours - generally about three months - of working with the individual, getting down to the bottom of why they’re taking drugs, helping them sort those things out so they really can overcome them, teaching them the skills they need in life, finding out who’s influencing them, if anyone, and helping them overcome that influence, and working out a plan they can stick to that will help them stay drug free.

And drugging them is a big mistake. A person can’t even think clearly on drugs - not to mention all the other dangerous side effects, like antidepressants that make you want to kill yourself. How is that person going to figure out their lives and get better if they’re drugged?

If psychiatry was so adept at enabling people to figure out and change their lives, why does so much of their treatment come down to giving the person drugs?

No, your best bet for addiction help services is experienced rehab professionals who really know the ropes and have a good success rate. Call us, we can help you find something that works.

The purpose of this blog is to help people with drug problems, not to denigrate any profession. But to fail to make people aware of what doesn’t work could prevent them from getting real help. Hence, this post.

I read a news item about Baron Geisler, an actor in the Phillipines, who’s going to get addiction help for alcohol. The story says he lost an acting job because he showed up on the set with a few drinks under his belt. It also said he has a history of drunken brawls but, since his mother sent him to alcohol rehab, he’s ‘no longer like that’. He ’slipped’ because his girlfriend left him. He said ‘never meant to hurt anyone or show any disrespect’.

But out of the blue (in his statement about the recent incident) he also denies his involvement in the shooting of a co-worker he’d recently nearly come to blows with - provoked when Baron insulted the other guy’s girlfriend - and he’s up on sexual harrassment charges filed by his roommate’s daughter.

So, in fact, he is still ‘like that.’

He says he’s just ‘very emotional.’  Sounds innocent enough, but it’s obvious that he’s causing his own problems. And until he stops doing that, it’s going to be virtually impossible for him to stay sober.

If he wants a girlfriend who will not get him ‘very emotional’ by leaving him, he’s going to have to stop doing things that result in sexual harrassment charges from other women, refrain from insulting people to the point of them wanting to beat him up,  and get himself into a position where he doesn’t have to deny his involvement in a shooting.

Maybe then his girlfriends will stay with him and he won’t therefore feel compelled to drink.

A facility that offers full addiction help services would have to help him handle those aspects of his personality.  That’s real rehabilitation.  If you’re looking for a facility that will do that, give us a call.

A doctor in West Virginia recently had her license suspended for treating too many drug addicts with Suboxone. She was limited to 100 patients by law, and she was treating 200. They warned her, but she didn’t get rid of those patients quickly enough and, when we was next investigated, was still treating 170, so her license was suspended.

What was she supposed to do? Tell 100 of the addicts she was treating that she could no longer help them and they’d have to go back on heroin or OxyContin? She was probably the only addiction help they were getting.

Ridiculous situation. West Virginia has one of the biggest opiate problems in the U.S. thanks to Purdue Pharma who targeted that area more than many others to get OxyContin out there.

The area has a high percentage of people living in poverty, and also has a lot of miners who are in pain from on-the-job injuries and illnesses like black lung that go with the mining territory.

It stands to reason that people in that condition are going to have a higher potential for drug addiction than others.

And not many of them are getting addiction help - there’s nowhere near enough help available to service them.

The doctor who was suspended, Lagrimas Sadorra, was, I am sure, the only hope most of those patients had.

Suboxone doesn’t make you high - people who are taking it, even though it may not be in ideal conditions, really want to clean up. And they’re being denied help.

It’s amazing that nothing would have happened to that doctor had she been giving 200 patients OxyContin - but she prescribed a drug that can truly help people, and she’s in trouble.

Do the drug companies control everything?

If you’re looking for addiction help services, give us a call.