AHS Views

I was reading an article today on the number of used needles dropped on the streets by drug addicts in Edinburgh – it’s 800, every day. I can’t find these statistics for American cities but you can be sure they’re comparable. Edinburgh has a population of less than 1/2 million. In the U.S. we have 34 cities that size, and many much larger. And people who use needles represent only a fraction of the people needing addiction help.

Comparable U.S. statistics, taking into account the populations of cities of 500,000 or above, would add up to roughly 32,000 needles dropped on the street every day – about 11 million a year. That’s 11 million needles that could well be picked up and used by other addicts, 11 million outlets for HIV, AIDS or hepatitis.

When you consider that’s only a fraction of the damage caused by alcohol and drug addiction in the U.S., you start to get a feel for the magnitude of the problem.

You also start to get a feel for the lifestyle your kids, spouse, other family members and friends are being exposed to when they drink and take drugs if they don’t get addiction help services early in the game.

Ironically, the newspaper that reported this story offers a free glass of wine to everyone who reads the newspaper. Check out the banner ad above the story. How inappropriate can you get?

Illinois has come up with some innovative ways to fund drug courts. They’re adding $5 onto each traffic ticket and $10 onto each felony conviction. Especially since so many traffic accidents are caused by people who are drinking or taking drugs while driving and so many felony convictions now involved drug-related crime. But drug court isn’t the right place to get addiction help. By that time, that person you care about has already crossed the line into some kind of criminal activity. They have already hurt someone, and sometimes it’s a member of their own family, may even have killed someone, or they’ve stolen or damaged someone else’s property.

Addiction help really isn’t hard to come by. One of the reasons it gets to the point of criminality is because no one takes the bull by the horns to do something about it.

It’s amazing to consider that in one short block of just about any city or town there are several households dealing with alcohol or drug addiction every day, who don’t try to get addiction help and, more than nine times out of ten don’t even admit they have a problem.

If you are living in one of those households, do something to get the person the addiction help services they need. The earlier alcohol and drug addiction and abuse problems are caught, the higher the chances of successful rehab and recovery. But, it’s never too late. Make the decision to do something about it, and then do it. Finding the addiction help services you or a loved one needs will change your life, and it may save theirs.

September is National Alcohol and Drug Addiction Recovery month but according to a recent survey from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, less than 2% of Americans who need addiction help are even attempting to get it.

While it’s true we need to help those who do get addiction help to recover, there has to be an all out effort to educate people on what alcohol and drug addiction or abuse actually are if we want to put anymore than a tiny dent in the problem.

Many people think they don’t have a problem. Who’s going to tell them they do? Their family members have probably been telling them, they’ve probably even realized it themselves – although they won’t admit it and continually deny it to others. Nevertheless, until they get addiction help, nothing’s going to change.

If you have someone in your life who needs addiction help services - whether the problem is drugs, alcohol, or even prescription drugs – make September the month you’re going to do something about it.

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.