AHS Views

A blog I read recently talked about how parents feel helpless when it comes to their kids drinking or taking drugs. They feel they can’t control it at all. The author’s solution was to start having dinner together. And, believe it or not, actual studies have shown that kids in families who have dinner together are significantly less likely to abuse alcohol, take drugs, and wind up needing addiction help.

Why is having dinner together so effective? Because you are doing something as a family – hopefully, it’s something you all enjoy – and you can have fun, laugh, talk about your day, and so on.

Doing that opens the door to deeper conversations about the important things in life, and to real parenting. Unfortunately our hectic lives leave little time for parenting. Sure, there’s lots of talk and interaction in good homes, but it’s mostly rushed – on the way to one thing or another, trying to get your kids to get ready faster, dropping them off at school or social and extra-curricular activities, , and so on.

But there’s generally not much actual communication: Not much in the way of sit-down discussions where parents and kids are talking about things that matter. Where parents are finding out how their kids feel about certain things, what’s really going on in their lives, who they’re hanging out with, who and what they like and dislike and why, what their goals and aspirations are.

These talks should include discussions about things that can get kids into trouble – including alcohol and drugs – and what will help them succeed in life.

Talks about drugs should include their exposure to drugs – do they know kids who take drugs or drink, have they been offered drugs or alcohol, and so on – and how they feel about them and what they know about them.

Parents are responsible for learning about drugs and educating their kids – not lecturing them, but educating with facts. Facts about the perils of drugs and alcohol are easy to come by, and are dramatic enough to be pretty convincing and have an effect. Gradually teach them more and more, and occasionally, when you see news stories about something bad happening from alcohol or drugs – especially to someone the kids might admire like a sports figure or musician – let them know about it.

When do you start having these discussions? Really, it’s never too early. Kids are exposed to drugs and alcohol by the time they’re 9 or 10 years old. There are 13-year-old addicts. And don’t wait until there is trouble. Statistics show that kids are involved in drugs for about two years before parents find out about it.

The other important thing to remember is that the earlier kids get involved in drugs or alcohol, the greater the chances are that they’ll become addicts and eventually need a drug rehab program. So, as I said, it’s never really too soon to educate them. And the more they know, the more able they’ll be to make an informed decision about drugs when they’re exposed to them. And they will be – no matter what kind of home, school or environment they grow up in.

So, start with dinner. If you’re not already having dinner together, make it a household rule. And take it from there.

There was an odd story in a UK newspaper today about the need to include alcohol abuse education in sex education classes. Why would this be? Because a very high number of people have sexual encounters while drinking that they would never have had otherwise. And it’s one more reason why alcohol addiction help should be sought as soon as it is recognized that someone has a problem.

What do these sexual ‘encounters’ consist of?

• Having sex with someone that you never would have had sex with if you hadn’t been drinking
• Starting sex earlier in life than you would have otherwise
• Unprotected sex – which, of course, can lead to unwanted pregnancy and getting sexually transmitted diseases
• Sex with multiple partners
• Rape

Here are some actual statistics:

• Up to 70% of college students admit to having sex primarily because they were drinking or to having sex they wouldn’t have had were they not drinking.

• 90% of all campus rapes occur when one or the other party has been drinking

• At least 20% of college students abandons their normal safe sex practices when they drinking.

• One in twelve college males admit to having committed acts that meet the legal definition of rape.

• 55% of female students and 75% of male students involved in ‘acquaintance rape’ say they were drinking or on drugs at the time.

• 80% of college women with STDs, including genital herpes and AIDS, say they were drinking at the time they had sex with the infected person.

Drinking impairs judgment of any kind, so even those you think would not do anything ‘like that’, like your son or daughter, are more likely to do it while they’re drinking.

Of course, this information should be included in sex education, but if the person drinks, how much difference is it really going to make to know these statistics?

Not much, because they’re drinking, not thinking.

The best remedy is alcohol rehab. Then they’ll kill two birds with one stone.

It’s the day after Christmas. I’ll bet there are millions of people in the U.S. – and around the world – who wish they’d made sure that someone in their family had gotten addiction help before the holidays. Well, it’s not too late, and it’s never too early, to make it happen.

I remember many Christmases from my young years. Although the mornings were great – basically a happy family having breakfast, opening presents and so on – as the day wore on and the drinking started, the spirit was kind of ruined for some of us. Either someone in the household or someone who was visiting got nasty or way too melancholy – sometimes to the point of crying over everything they regret or how nice people were being to them and they didn’t deserve it – or there were fights, upsets, and so on.

This wasn’t just my family – it was also the families of many of my friends in our middle class neighborhood.

And then there was me when I was older. Showing up at my parent’s place stoned on one drug or another, or leaving early because I couldn’t stand going without drugs any longer.

Sometimes there were no drugs on Christmas day but, since my mother didn’t see me that often in those bad times, she wanted to talk about it. She was so happy to see me straight – but, at the same time, you could see the sadness behind her smile, she knew things were ‘normal’ just for the day.

It broke her heart. And worried her to no end.

Fortunately, I got off drugs shortly thereafter and that was followed by decades of a very good relationship. I never got into trouble after that, never gave her anything to worry about. It was my mother who first took the initiative to get me into drug rehab for the addiction help I needed. And once I got off drugs, I never went back. The treatment program was excellent, very successful, and deserves a lot of the credit for my never relapsing. And that’s why it’s important to choose the right drug rehab program.

But several years were wasted. Frankly, I was lucky to have lived through those drugs days. Many of my friends and acquaintances didn’t. And many of those who did were never able to re-establish their family and other relationship – they’d burned their bridges.

Do you want to save your kids? Your spouse? Your family? Your marriage? Your relationships?

Call Addiction Help Services – our experienced counselors have helped thousands of people from all walks of life and with all different types of alcohol and drug problems. They will help you find the right alcohol and drug addiction treatment program for your situation. And do it now, don’t delay as you probably have so many times in the past. Things aren’t going to change, except to get worse, unless something is done.

Do it now, and next year’s holidays will be what you really want them to be.

The biggest and most obvious problems that happen from drinking too much seem to be emotional and mental rather than physical – the person who’s drinking tends to go through a personality change, which can be very difficult to live with, and they take less responsibility for work, relationships, and so on. What’s happening with the person physically may not be that obvious, but it is more than enough reason to get alcohol addiction help.

What happens to your body? There are alcohol-related cancers, liver diseases, alcohol poisoning, heart disease and a general weakening of every organ and system in the body.

For women who are or might get pregnant, you also have to add the danger to the baby. The worst of those is fetal alcohol syndrome – which affects the baby mentally and physically in a really disastrous way. The symptoms include several different kinds of physical deformities (including having a smaller brain), slow growth while in the womb and after birth, vision and hearing problems, poor coordination, mental retardation, heart defects and various types of abnormal behavior.
Kids with fetal alcohol syndrome often have to be cared for for their entire lives, and their lives tend to be short.

The instances of alcohol-related diseases are becoming more of a problem around the world. Last year in England, for example, the number of cancers, liver diseases and poisoning increased by 10 percent over the prior year and more than 7,000 kids (under 18) were admitted to hospitals.

You can be sure that each of the people who had the diseases and/or were admitted to hospital are going to have a much shorter life than they expected.

If you’re being ‘nice’ about somebody’s drinking habits – think again. There’s nothing nice about letting them kill themselves. Get them into alcohol rehab.

You would think that schools would be a relatively safe place when it comes to drugs and alcohol. At the very least, you would expect that if you can educate and protect your kids from other kids who drink and take drugs, and sell them, you wouldn’t have much to worry about. And if you can stop them from drinking and taking drugs early in life, there’s a far less chance you’ll have to find alcohol or drug addiction help for them when they get older.

But, unfortunately, protecting your kids from other kids who drink and take drugs is not the only problem – even teachers sometimes give student alcohol and drugs.

Almost every week in the news you see teachers involved with selling drugs to students.

This week it was a special education teacher (of all things) who was also a softball coach. A woman.

According to the report: “This was all after hours, off school property. It was with the presence of this teacher on a couple of occasions and then also at another third location where the teacher was actually given the money and brought alcohol and then also was there while alcohol was being consumed by these minor students,” said Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill.

One of the parents found text messages between their daughter and the teacher and reported it to the authorities. After investigation, the teacher was charged with five different offenses. She has now resigned and is awaiting trial – out on $5,000 bail.

Another report was about a teacher addicted to heroin. Another woman, and only 25 years old. She and a partner stole 22 computers from Pittsburgh’s Creative and Performing Arts high school to buy drugs.

She wasn’t caught until she and the same partner, an ex-boyfriend, tried to rob a bank. She then confessed to the computer thefts as well as some thefts of personal items from neighbor’s homes.

We used to be able to look up to teachers. They were the go-to people when there was any trouble. And they could be depended upon to set a good example to our kids. Now we know that they might need drug rehab as badly as some of their students – or worse.

Some teachers in universities and colleges even condone the use of prescription drugs – so called ‘study drugs’ like Adderall and Ritalin.

So when you’re educating your kids about drugs, don’t just paint the picture of drug dealers and drug users being unsavory characters that hang out in dark alleys.

Drug abusers come in all shapes and sizes, and from every walk of life.

Why do parents worry when their kids are drinking? For the most part, it’s either because their kids change when they drink and become somewhat obnoxious, or because they’re afraid they’re going to drink and drive or get into a brawl. All very good reasons for finding out how to get them the addiction help they need – and there’s no doubt that anyone drinking like that, regardless of the consequences, needs alcohol rehab.

But those reasons are not the only things you have to worry about.

A study in Australia (and there’s no reason to believe the situation in America isn’t either as bad or worse) showed that one in five deaths by injury involved alcohol.

Someone drowns – there’s a one in five chance alcohol was involved.
Someone gets poisoned – again, one in five chance alcohol was involved.

Have an accident with tools, a fall that causes an injury that either kills someone on the spot or later, caught in a fire – at least one in five of all of these involve alcohol. In some case, it’s more. For example, alcohol is involved in one in three burns or fires.

It’s quite amazing when you think about it that it’s legal to drink alcohol. It is so destructive.

If someone in your family needs alcohol rehab, get them help now before the situation gets worse.

We all know that alcohol abuse can cause a number of problems both physically and in life, but we don’t usually associate it directly with breast cancer. According to a new study, alcohol abuse and breast cancer are linked – even when you are a relatively light drinker. To protect themselves, women who can’t stop drinking should consider getting alcohol addiction help.

It’s not new news that alcohol increases the risk of breast cancer, but the study showed that it takes very little to increase the possibility of getting breast cancer.

This long-term study followed 100,000 nurses aged 18 and 40 to correlate their drinking habits with the development of breast cancer. They found that having two or less drinks a week doesn’t increase the risk, but drinking more does.

Women who are concerned about this risk can simply stop drinking – or, at least, cut their drinks down to two a week. That will put the risk back down to normal.

Some women, when they try cutting down, are going to find that they are a lot more dependent on alcohol than they thought. That’s one of the problems with alcohol – you sometimes don’t know how dependent you are until you try to stop.

If you find yourself in that position, the best thing to do is get into a good alcohol rehab program.

Breast cancer is now rampant – one in eight women get it, and some experts expect this number to increase. Quitting or cutting down on drinking is no guarantee, but at least we know it is one more risk factor we can control.

Statistics show that kids whose parents really educate them on the dangers of alcohol are 50 percent less likely to drink. A new program in two Seattle high schools is showing that education in schools can have the same effect – their alcohol education program reduced the number of kids who drink by 50 percent. This is important for several reasons – it stops kids, and families, from suffering the consequences of alcohol abuse, and it also greatly reduces the chances that kids will turn into adult alcoholics who need alcohol rehab.

What do we mean by ‘education’? It’s not just ordering kids not to drink or take drugs, and it’s not broad generalities about how they’re bad for you. It’s giving them information about what alcohol is, what is does to the body, how it effects the mind, how it makes a person even less able to control their environment and their thoughts, and less able to address whatever problems they have that are making them want to drink.

It also means giving them statistics on the consequences – driving while under the influence, the increase in other types of accidents and injuries, information on how it effects kids in school regarding their grades, their ability to show up for classes where they can get the education they need to have a good future, and so on.

In other words, they need the full picture. Just like adults, reasonable kids use information to make their decisions. Not all kids will do that, and not all adults will do that, but it decreases the chances of them drinking or taking drugs by 50 percent – so we know that at least ½ of them ‘get it.’

The program in the Seattle schools got everyone involved – the kids, the parents, the teachers, and the police.

If you educate your kids, and get your kids’ schools to initiate a similar education program to back you up, it will really help. Your kids will be safer, and you’ll have one less thing to worry about.

Sometimes education isn’t enough. If someone in your family won’t stop drinking, get them into an alcohol addiction help program so they won’t ruin their lives, or yours.

Kids who drink a little or take drugs are much more likely to use them as much or even more when they go to university or college. Alcohol, and some drugs, are so acceptable in colleges that they are encouraged by the culture to step things up. As they do so, they’re even more likely to become heavy drinkers and alcoholics when they get out of school and a significant percentage of them will need professional alcohol or drug addiction help to quit.

Fortunately, many universities and colleges are now offering alcohol and drug education. University of Western Washington is one of the latest to step up to the plate and offer these services for all students, including those who have just arrived.

They will also soon be putting up ‘informative’ posters around their campus and on student doors and will have advisers going to classrooms to talk to the new students.
They’re basing this on a study done about 10 years ago – the actions done included putting door-knockers on dorms and ads in a campus newspaper. It reduced alcoholism by 20 percent over the three years that the campaign ran.

It’s too bad that school resources, which are often short to begin with, have to be spent on this kind of deterrent – parents are paying for their kids to go to college for an education that will set them up to do well in their life careers, not to get them to stop drinking or not get caught up in the drinking culture in their school.

But, really, it’s going to come down to the parents. Parents have to be aware that they have to handle the problem well before university comes around.

The younger kids start to drink, the higher the chances they’ll continue.

If you can keep them from drinking while in their early and mid-teens, the chances of them remaining sober are 50% greater than if they drank or took drugs at that age.

If you can keep them from drinking in high school, there’s less chance they will fall prey to the alcohol culture when they get into college.

And, if they can avoid getting into the alcohol or drug culture in college, they’re less likely to drink when they leave.

But it’s really vital that parents start this at a very young age. Kids are exposed to drinking and drugs at a very young age; they need to be prepared. They need to already understand the dangers of what they would be getting into if they drank or took drugs BEFORE they are offered them.

There are many resources available to help parents educate their kids – just look online for alcohol or drug education and the info will be there.

And if you can’t keep them from drinking or taking drugs, you must get them into a good drug or alcohol rehab program as soon as possible – one that will give them that education, and get down to the bottom of why they’re taking drugs or drinking in the first place, and help them with those issues so they can stop – regardless of their environment.

Of course, one of the best ways to learn is by example. If parents don’t use alcohol or drugs as solutions to problems or to ‘have a good time’, the kids are more likely to follow in their footsteps.

This applies to prescription drugs as well as street drugs. Prescription drug addiction is now just as common as with other drugs.

Bottom line: If you look for non-drug solutions to enhance your own physical and emotional well-being, and teach your kids to do the same, you’re off to a very good start.

Alcohol and drugs ruin lives. They are now so common and available that teaching your kids about them is a vital step in raising them.

Many parents face the dilemma of trying to bring up their kids so they don’t drink alcohol. Or, at least, don’t abuse it. If someone does have an alcohol problem, they can get alcohol addiction help through an alcohol rehab program. But prevention is far easier than the cure: Once a person gets to the point of getting treatment, they have often done a lot of damage to their body, their family, and themselves. And sometimes it’s irreversible.

Educating kids on the dangers of alcohol is a common prevention method, but here are a few relatively new statistics that could be pretty convincing.

• One out of every five alcoholics who attempt to stop drinking without medical intervention end up dying as a result of alcohol withdrawal delirium. So, in fact, it’s not just will power or the mental and emotional dependence on alcohol that keeps people from quitting. The symptoms they experience are so severe they feel they just have to have another drink or they’re going to die. And, in one out of every five cases, they’re right. That really gives you a clue as to how bad drinking can be.
• 68% of people who go to hospital emergency rooms have an alcohol or drug problem. Just to give you more of an idea of how many people that represents – there are nearly 124 million ER visits every year, so that means over 84 million people with drug or alcohol problems are in ERs. I’ve heard a lot of people complain about not wanting to go to a hospital emergency room because they don’t want to wait for hours in a room with a bunch of ‘drunks’ or ‘druggies.’ Does your son or daughter want to be one of them?
• They should also know that most of these people in ERs aren’t hardcore, long-term alcoholics. The millions of accidents and injuries that occur while drinking often happen to people who are not really alcoholics at all.
• 20% of suicide victims in the US are alcoholics. You might be tempted to say that’s logical because if they weren’t really depressed or otherwise kind of messed up, they wouldn’t be alcoholics in the first place. Well, to a degree, that’s true. But people often start drinking for much more mundane reasons than wanting to kill themselves. They start because their friends think it’s cool, or because everyone around them drinks and they want to feel like they’re part of the crowd. And, by the way, this isn’t always because of ‘peer pressure’ – sometimes it’s just a matter of having people to talk to and hang out with. If all the people around you who you might want to hang out with are drinkers, it’s hard to talk to them unless you’re drinking too. Even just being a ‘little high’, not drunk, can be a vastly different world than being ‘sober.’
• Whatever the reason the person started drinking, alcohol can make you depressed – the longer you drink, the worse it gets. Also, the chances of alcohol causing problems in your life are very high – someone’s orderly life can turn into a mess once they start drinking. They lose family, jobs, friends, money, relationships, etc.
• At this point, you can be sure that they have wanted to quit for along time – they’ve seen the slide in their life. But, because alcohol is so addictive both mentally and physically, they have not been able to quit. So they slide down even further – their self-esteem is destroyed as they see their lives go down the drain and can’t do anything about it. Is it really surprising that under those circumstances someone would kill themselves?

Let your kids know about these things. Get them to really look at how bad it can get. That should help them realize that drinking has consequences that they really don’t want.

And in case they think they’re immune to all that, point out to them that there’s not much chance that anyone thought they’d become one of those statistics when they started drinking. No matter how they feel now, or who they think they are and  how they would react or respond to things, alcohol will change them.