AHS Views

In the town of Fort Frances, Ontario, just across the border from Minnesota, there are about 60 people on methadone maintenance. Last year there were seven. The town has a population of a little over 8,000. According to a local pharmacist, more and more Fort Frances residents who have trouble ending their addiction to heroin, OxyContin and other opioids are turning to methadone rather than getting the addiction help they need.

The pharmacist doesn’t see methadone maintenance as an addiction or as something that requires addiction help. But just because you get your drugs from a doctor instead of on the street, just because you don’t have to share needles, doesn’t mean you’re not addicted. It simply means you’ve found a way to satisfy your addiction that is more convenient and more acceptable. But you still need addiction help. In fact, methadone is highly addictive.

The pharmacist also thinks that someone on methadone maintenance doesn’t experience the “obsession that comes while moving from one high to the next,” and that it’s easier to get off methadone than the original drugs.

He’s wrong on both counts: Getting off methadone can be even harder than heroin or OxyContin and, even though the methadone user may not experience the same ‘high’ as with those other drugs, they still through the outrageous withdrawal symptoms that manifest in the obsession he’s referring to if their dose is delayed.

This pharmacist, I am sure, is encouraging people to go onto methadone maintenance instead of getting the addiction help they need. He sees it as a real solution. It is a solution to something - but not drug addiction.

I’m sure he’s probably well meaning, but he is, after all, a pharmacist and, obviously, believes drugs have much to offer. True in many situations. But one thing you can’t get out of drugs is a solution to drug addiction. For that, you need real addiction help services. If you need addiction help, give us a call. We’ll help you really get off drugs.

More about what happens with drugs in college. Susan Smith (not her real name) grew up in a normal, loving, educated family. She was a girl scout, mom lead a troup. A great life. Then she went to college - she was going to be a social worker - which is where she started drinking, smoking marijuana, and using cocaine.  After a year and a half she got some addiction help but, although she stopped using cocaine, continue alcohol and marijuana. I would definitely say the addiction help she got was inadequate. If it had been thorough, she wouldn’t have continued with alcohol and marijuana.

Obviously, her college education didn’t quite turn out to be what she’d hoped. She now a cosmetologist, 48 years old, and is once again getting addiction help to stop using cocaine - she’s been on it again for the last six years.  Her habit cost her $200 - $300 a day.

This story has a relatively good ending, so far. She’s still alive, and she’s getting the addiction help services she needs. But, her life, I’m sure, was far different than she had planned. 

Natalie Ciappa, an 18-year-old high school student who overdosed and nearly died on Memorial Day weekend, promised her parents (and probably herself) she was going to stop using heroin. But less than a month later, she was dead. The drug problem had been going on for over a year but she had refused addiction help.

It’s hard to know how long it would have taken for someone to figure out she was dead - when her mother awoke the next morning and Natalie wasn’t home, she went to the location of the party Natalie was attending and found her there dead on a sofa. Still with other people there. They hadn’t even noticed she was dead.

Natalie’s mother and father had been coping with her drug problem for over a year. They had tried everything, but hadn’t gotten her to rehab. She’d overdosed and wound up in the hospital less than a month before she died and her parents had thought she’d stopped.

The chances of stopping heroin because of an overdose are slim without drug addiction help. The drug has such a hold on you - and the same is true of many other drugs - that it really doesn’t matter that your life, or anyone else’s, is threatened.

Natalie was a top student and an excellent singer - with an excellent future. The last person you would expect to be a drug addict. The same as your kids. Don’t mess with it - get them addiction help services, no matter what you have to do. It’s really the only way to overcome drug addiction.

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?