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. 

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?

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.

In some cases an intervention is the only way a person will get the addiction help they need. We now have the TV series called Intervention. But is that what it’s really like?

Stay tuned for intervention stories that are the real thing.

We’d like to hear from people about their experiences with intervention for alcohol or drug addiction. What had you tried before the intervention? How did you find and choose the interventionist that worked with you? Did the person with the drug or alcohol addiction problem resent you involving someone else? What did the interventionist do?

And did the person get the addiction help services they needed?

Make sure you listen to Larry G’s Prescription Drug Addiction radio show this Sunday. We’ll be hearing from pharmacists (Larry G’s profession for 30 years) with their take on the prescription drug epidemic and what can be done about it. Maybe this show will motivate people to get the addiction help they need, and preventing addiction for others.

It’s good to see medical professionals getting involved in educating people about the dangers of prescription drugs. However, even they have to be educated - especially physicians. Many doctors depend on the drug companies to tell them all about drugs, what they’re for, what they can do, and how they can help their patients. Unfortunately, that’s about all they tell them - and that’s large part of the problem.

If someone you care about might have a problem with prescription drug addiction, get them the drug addiction help services they need today. And tune into Larry G on WGUL 860 AM on Sunday night, July 20 - 9:05 p.m. Eastern, streamed live on the Internet at www.860wgul.com.

Some people wonder why they don’t get the reaction they expect when they try to get someone they care about to stop taking drugs. Well, it’s just not that easy. Take this  recent news story about a drug problem in Long Island, for example. These parents did everything they could to get their 18-year-old daughter the drug addiction help she needed - but, now, she’s dead.

In the news story, Barbara Keller, the executive director of the Suffolk Coalition to Prevent Alcohol and Drug Dependencies, said that parents hesitate to seek professional help for themselves and their families. “If you know your loved one; you know when something is not right,” she said. “Trust your instincts.”

A drug addict will do everything they can to convince you there’s no problem. They’ll hide it from you, deny it, lie to you, convince you they can stop whenever they want - they’ll even take your money, or sell your TV. Really, they’ll say or do anything. They’re in the grip of something much more powerful than someone who has not been in their position can understand. And they need addiction help.

If you think there’s a problem, there probably is. Follow Ms. Keller’s advice. Trust your instincts, and call Addiction Help Services if you don’t know where to go from there.

I realized something today - people don’t understand addiction well enough to know when someone they know is addicted to drugs or alcohol. Here’s an interesting article about recognizing drug addiction that might shed some light on it. The article defines drug addiction as “the compulsive and continued use of a drug, or the loss of control over its use, despite adverse consequences produced by the drug.” So, when you see that, you know it’s time to get the person some addiction help.

Usually, the person will tell you that their drug use is under their control. That they can stop anytime they want.  You can tell them that it’s upsetting you a lot and it makes you unhappy. Under those circumstances, if the person is a family member, spouse, or someone with whom you have some interdependency - in other words, someone who considers they have some responsbility for your happiness - then they will stop.

If they don’t stop, they’re addicted. Really, it’s as simple as that. And it doesn’t matter if the problem is with street drugs, alcohol, or even prescription drug addiction - if they see it’s having negative consequences and they don’t stop, it’s because they can’t.

You need to talk to them about getting some kind of drug addiction help - a drug detox, drug rehab, whatever. If they refuse, if they insist they don’t have a problem, get some help. Call an interventionist. Addiction Help Services offers intervention services and can also help find a good drug detox, drug rehab and any other help you need.

Amy Winehouse is apparently going back into rehab. She was admitted to a facility in January where she stayed for only two weeks, and she now admits that she may need more help. She’s right - and this move was predictable. The number of people who could be helped with a drug or alcohol problem in two weeks could probably be counted on one hand - especially in the kind of severe situation Amy was in. It’s simply not enough time to get the drug addiction help you need. Staying off drugs for two weeks may help the person dry out, but the chances of them staying that way are virtually nil.

When a person stops drinking or taking drugs for a couple of weeks it’s a big change for them, they might feel invincible or like that’s all they need. But that’s not the case. They’re going to leave the facility and go right back into the problems that caused their alcohol or drug abuse in the first place.

With everything that’s known about drug rehab and what it really takes to get addiction help these days, it surprises me that anyone - doctor, rehab counselor, or drug addict - could possibly think two weeks is going to be enough.

If you know someone with an alcohol or drug addiction problem, do them, and yourself, a favor: don’t even bother with short-term rehab like that. Get them the alcohol or addiction help services they really need in the first place.  

Meth and meth addiction is Oregon’s number one crime problem according to candidate John Kroger. John Kroger is running for Attorney General for the State of Oregon and if elected he will help get more people into drug treatment. “Évery year meth costs us hundreds of millions of dollars in prison and law enforcement costs, health care expenditures, and lost workforce productivity.” He wants to see people get the addiction help they need.

Mr. Kroger understands that treatment can save tax payers plenty of money, “for every dollar we invest in treatment, we will save nearly six dollars by bringing down the crime and incarceration rates.”

His plan to send more people to drug treatment makes more sense then sending people to prison. Currently Oregon ranks 45th in the nation for addiction help overall and 49th for treatment in young adults ages 18 to 25. He will need to find a successful treatment program to help the meth users in Oregon, and he will need more treatment centers.

The number of small meth labs in Oregon has decreased since 2005 when the Governor put laws in place to limit the supplies that methamphetamine manufacturers needed to produce this deadly drug. But like other parts of the country, large drug trading organizations filled that hole by importing drugs from Mexico. Mr. Kroger wants to take on the drug cartel head on. We hope he is successful, we see the devastation meth and other drugs bring to society everyday.

If his plan works, Mr. Kroger will cut the supply and force more people into treatment instead of sentencing the addicts to long stints of incarceration which, in the long run, doesn’t usually result in them getting the addiction help they need. Instead, they often wind up back on drugs, and back in prison.

Addiction Help Services can help you, a family member or friend if you are having trouble with meth or any drug if you live in Oregon.