AHS Views

Why did Wall Street need bail-outs? Would you trust an industry or profession in which 90% of the workers either used cocaine or accepted it? Well, that’s exactly what the Drug Enforcement Agency found in an undercover drug operation in Wall Street. Maybe if more of these guys got the addiction help they need, things in the country would be saner, more ethical and just.

According to a report in the New York Post, “Many of the drug buyers were Wall Street traders, brokers and bankers who liked to spend their nights getting high after the market spent the day going low,” the Post said. They also reported that T.G.I. Friday, a restaurant in New York’s Financial District, was shut down by police after they discovered that the restaurant was linked to cocaine deals.

Another report in The Wall Street Journal said that drug testing revealed cocaine in 7 percent of tests. This is less than it was a few years ago, but employees and counselors on Wall Street said usage hasn’t decreased at all – it’s just that the testing is now announced before it happens. Which, of course, gives anyone the opportunity to stop taking the drugs soon enough to know that they’re not in their system at the time of the test.

In fact, a hiring manager at a major New York bank told a Reuters reporter that “Our drug test is not so much a test of whether you actually take drugs as it is an intelligence test to see if you can figure out how long it takes to get traces of the drug out of your system.”

The director of a local drug rehab facility said they’re ‘crammed’ with Wall Street coke addicts. Several other counselors, in other facilities, said that the Wall Street guys feel they’re entitled to the drugs since they work in a high stress industry. Another counselor said that not much gets done about the drug problem – that as long as someone shows up to work and does their job, they’d have to catch on fire for anyone to decide to do something about it.

Like it or not, the U.S. is pretty much run by Wall Street, along with a handful of multi-billion dollar industries like big pharma – which also have financial gain as their motivation.

In the meantime, the ordinary guy on the street faces the consequences of the financial crises that are caused by the Wall Street drug addicts.

The Wall Street drug problem isn’t new, there have been investigations of one sort or another going on for over 20 years. A lot of people have been arrested, including 114 dealers in the Financial District.

I can well imagine that someone who works on Wall Street doesn’t disclose the fact that they’re on drugs to their family. They probably explain away their symptoms to their wives, husbands, kids, etc., as the consequences of having a stressful job.

Do you live with someone who works on Wall Street? If so, don’t ignore their erratic or unusual behavior. Dig deep, and get them into a drug rehab program. Despite what they think, taking drugs is not making the situation any better. And it will get worse and worse the longer they keep taking them.

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.

Meow meow – the chemical name is mephedrone – is one of the new so-called designer drugs. It’s very popular in Australia (where it originated), New Zealand, the UK and Europe. I’m surprised no one is making it in the U.S. It’s bound to happen soon. And plenty of people are going to need addiction help fast when it hits the streets.

What’s so dangerous about meow meow? A scientist in New Zealand analyzed the drug to see what effects it creates on the brain. He found out that it is similar to Ecstasy, but with a twist – it is also highly addictive.

Parents need to watch out for meow meow – which I’m sure will have other names soon. So, if you hear kids talking about kitties or some such thing, don’t brush it off as if they were animal lovers.

Mephedrone is one of the many designer drugs that have been created to circumvent the law. There’s nothing illegal about it yet; hopefully, it won’t take the law too long to catch up with it. In the UK, they already have legislation on the table to ban meow meow, along with other, similar drugs.

It’s hard to believe that there are people in the world who will go out of their way to create substances that are addictive, dangerous, can ruin people’s lives the lives of their families, can make people extremely ill and, in some cases, kill them.

But, they’re out there. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t have such a big drug problem in the U.S. This is not intended to scare anyone, but you do need to be constantly on the alert – just as you would with younger children, but for other dangers. And if there is any sign of a problem, don’t delay on getting your family members or friends into a good drug rehab.

I heard a radio spot yesterday on public radio. An interview with Tony Bennett, who recently made an album with a number of other singers, including Amy Winehouse. He discussed her untimely death, and said that of all the singers he runs into and works with, Amy really had a gift. But despite her many attempts at rehab, she never got the real addiction help she needed.

Alcohol and drugs are common among musicians, actors, artists, and so on.

They can lead a pretty turbulent life.

Many artists have a very strong purpose to do what they do. It’s not just a job, it’s their life. They often can’t imagine doing anything else, and they’ll work any kind of job they need to try to pay the bills while they pursue their career, hoping they’ll eventually be able to make a living with their art.

In the meantime, and when they actually do become known, they are often surrounded by people who do not have their best interests at heart. Artists tend to attract those kinds of people – people who criticize and control. Parasites looking to feed off the artist’s efforts and talent, wanting their own 15 minutes of fame, wanting to feel more important, wanting the artist to somehow be dependent on them – whatever.

They also get put down. Sure, there are adoring fans, even when you’re a ‘nobody’. But there’s the other side of the coin. Waking up each morning to bad reviews, the press, the stories and gossip about you, your life, every mistake you’ve ever made – both artistically and personally – and lies.

The combination of people in your immediate environment who, friendly though they may appear, act in ways that could do you in, and strangers who criticize you, along with your own attempts to live up to your own expectations can be a lot of pressure.

Was this what Amy experienced? It is likely.

One of the most important elements of a successful drug rehab program is locating and getting those destructive elements/people in your environment either out of your life or under control. Just eliminating that one factor helps immeasurably. It’s almost impossible to make progress when you have someone, or ones, constantly dragging you down.

And, sometimes, the people who drag you down are those closest to you. In the case of Amy Winehouse, I think it’s fair to say that her husband was one of the major problems, although I’m sure there were others.

If you have musicians and artists in your family, one of the most important things you can do for them is help them stay free of people who drag them down, no matter how good they claim their intentions to be.

One of the consequences of taking drugs and using alcohol is having to take your chances with the justice system. Unfortunately, it’s not always just. Being caught smoking marijuana and going to court-ordered drug rehab is a good thing – compared to other possibilities – but things aren’t always that simple. And the things that CAN happen within the justice system are good enough reasons to get addiction help before the law catches up with you.

For example, there’s the three-strikes law in California: Sure, there have been a few people who deserved life in prison and got it. But that same law, followed to the letter, also resulted in a shoplifter named Leandro Andrade getting 50 years to life in prison for hiding videos in his pants as he was leaving K-mart.

Here’s another stunning example: A 41 year old man wanted to commit suicide. He took a can of beer and 31 of his mother’s painkillers to a park. While at the park, a police officer arrested him for drinking in the park and, when the officer saw he also had 17 painkillers, he was arrested for drug trafficking. In court, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Not only is he not getting help for whatever made him want to kill himself, he’s now one of the thousands of people in Florida in prison for prescription drug trafficking.

These types of cases may not be in the majority, but they do represent how crazy things can get when laws don’t allow room to think – room to actually judge what’s right, what’s wrong, and what’s punishment is fair when you consider the details of each individual case.

Doing something that could put you at the mercy of the justice system is just plain stupid. You never really know what’s going to happen, but whatever it is, you probably wouldn’t consider that last drink or high worth it. And it may completely ruin your life, and that of your family.

Got drugs? Get into a good drug rehab program now.

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.

A 24-year-old guy died in England recently after having intentionally ‘overdosed’ on a ‘party drug’ to which he was ‘addicted.’ Why are all those words in quotes? Because there was actually no ‘party drug’, and no ‘overdose.’ What he actually did was take gamma butyrolactone (GBL) – a solvent used as paint stripper and to remove things like superglue. It is also used as a ‘recreational intoxicant.’ He’d been addicted to it for years. His mother said he could not get addiction help because the doctors he saw didn’t know enough about it. He eventually left a suicide note, and then took so much of it that it killed him.

He started using this chemical to get high when he went to university. By his third year, he was so ‘crippled’ by the addiction that he left school and went home.

His mom could do little to help him. At first, she was not aware that he was taking this chemical, or any drugs. He was suffering from anxiety, paranoia and was sometimes manic and psychotic. His mom took him to a doctor and the doctor prescribed antidepressants. Unbelievable – not that the guy was depressed, who wouldn’t be under those circumstances – but that a doctor would give someone such a dangerous drug with so many disastrous side effects (including wanting to kill yourself) without, apparently, even checking into his physical health, whether he was taking drugs, and so on.

According to the story, his brother and sister tried to take care of him while he was trying to stop taking GBL. With no help from doctors or drug rehab specialists.

Obviously, a regular family doctor isn’t going to have much information on something like this. You would need a specialist in drug rehab – they’ve seen just about everything. And he would have had to go into a residential drug addiction treatment program to get help.

It is amazing that people will take something like this to get high. It is so obviously poison. How could anyone use something that dissolves superglue as a recreational drug. But hundreds of thousands of kids use these chemicals.

Parents need to be aware of this possibility. The tendency, of course, would be to completely discount it – most parents wouldn’t even consider it as something their kid might do because it is really so crazy. Who would think their kid would do it?

But, they do.

One of the signs of substance abuse is change in behavior. If that happens to your child, look at the possibility of drug abuse – including glue sniffing, sniffing or injecting things like GBL and other solvents, and so on.

Even if kids do manage to live through it, the damage to the brain from these chemicals can be so severe that it might be impossible to reverse.

Stay in touch with your kids – get to know them, be aware of whether or not they are going through changes and dig in to find out what’s going on. If there’s any hint of drugs of any sort, contact a good drug rehab program immediately.

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.

I recently read a news item about a ‘head shop’ in Duluth, Minnesota. Head shops carry drug paraphernalia – incense, pipes, certain music, posters, and so on. The head shop in this story – called ‘Last Place on Earth’ – also carries ‘drugs’. In fact, they are not yet classified as drugs; the substances are dangerous chemicals that mimic the effects of methamphetamine, cocaine, LSD, etc. They are being called ‘designer drugs.’ Unfortunately, they are not yet illegal – although they will be very soon. The people who make them, sell them, and simply possess them will then be breaking the law. And it’s a good thing. These chemicals are causing very serious physical and mental conditions, and the people using them are in serious need of addiction help.

The news item about the head shop began: “On many mornings, it looks like it’s the hottest business in downtown Duluth. Dozens of customers line up in front of the Last Place on Earth head shop on Superior Street to buy designer drugs, including herbal incense — sold as a legal alternative to marijuana — with names such as No Name, Armageddon and DOA, and bath salts called Insurrection and Lunar Eclipse. Some of the fidgety customers look like they’re waiting to get into a soup kitchen. Others look like your next-door neighbor. The products they are seeking to buy are comprised of a class of chemicals perceived as legally mimicking cocaine, LSD and methamphetamine.”

Reports regarding the dangerous effects of these chemicals are mounting. The number of reports to the Poison Control Center went from 0 in 2009, to 302 in 2010, and to 2,237 in just the first six months 2011.

There have been 20 calls in the last month in the Duluth area alone. A police sergeant describes his experience with people using these chemicals/drugs: “My personal experience is that it looks like a really bad trip on meth to me. People hallucinate and have very erratic behavior. Paranoia. Very uncontrolled. They sometimes have violence toward themselves and toward others. Just very, very odd.”

A doctor at just one local hospital says he sees two to ten people a week coming into the ER for problems with these ‘designer drugs’. “People snort it, or mostly inject it, it seems, in the arm, or whatever vein they can access depending on whatever their drug history is. The last one I saw was somebody who had been using it and brought in by police. They had two (officers) to restrain him. He had high blood pressure, high pulse, screaming, really struggling with police that required him to be sedated and admitted to the hospital.”

He also said that the drugs can cause seizures, kidney failure and death, and that there have been many reports about people “being so psychotic and hallucinating that they cut themselves with knives.”

The owner of the store, whose name is Jim Carlson, said he expects to make $6 million this year off these chemicals. He makes no apologies; he told reporters that people have a right to do whatever they want for their ‘enjoyment.’

Right. Here I was thinking that going psychotic, cutting yourself and having seizures and kidney failure was a bad thing!

Mr. Carlson doesn’t use the chemicals himself, says he doesn’t like them. In fact, it appears he doesn’t use any drugs, just has one or two drinks a week.

The DEA is working on making these substances illegal; a temporary measure should be in place by mid-October and will last 12 to 18 months. The permanent law should be passed by then. The chemicals will be classified as “Schedule 1 substances, the most restrictive category, which is reserved for unsafe, highly abused substances with no currently accepted medical use in the U.S.”

Fortunately, we only have to wait until mid-October before people making or selling these chemicals can be prosecuted. As with other drugs, they would also be able to be prosecuted for any harm that comes to someone they sell them to.

One parent, whose son was using these chemicals, said she ‘can’t do anything about it because they’re not illegal.’ Yes, there is something you can do – kids don’t have to be using illegal chemicals to go to a drug rehab program. Making substances illegal illegal won’t help that end of things – the people using them will just find other drugs or chemicals if they can’t get these anymore. What they need is drug rehab.

But when the law does come into affect, I do hope that parents and other family members and friends of the people who have been harmed by these chemicals will take full advantage of their ability to prosecute the manufacturers and pushers.

Drug dealers and methamphetamine users have now found a new way to make meth – one that evades detection by authorities and reduces the cost of meth, making it even more available. Another good reason to get anyone who is already using meth, or is using drugs at all (which makes them more prone to using meth), into an addiction help program as soon as possible.

Meth is one of the worst drugs around. It is highly addictive, causes rapid deterioration of the body and mind, and is associated with a lot of crime. People on meth are a mess, they are definitely not themselves. Physically, the toll meth takes is so dramatic that a parent would be hard-pressed to recognize their son or daughter after only a year of use. Mentally, they are scattered, anxious and, as they use more and more, focused on one thing – the drug.

Some of the damage can be irreversible. Again, drug rehab is the answer. And it can’t be one of those programs that basically just helps you dry out and then sends you to meetings. The chances of that working with a meth addict are virtually nil. They need the real thing – residential treatment that helps get the meth out of the body, focuses on restoring the person’s health, finds and addresses the reasons they’re doing drugs and ensures they have a good handle on the environment they’ll be going into when they leave the program.

Busting meth labs is one of the ways authorities try to control meth. In fact, the number of meth labs located and closed down is an important statistic. The labs in themselves are extremely dangerous places, they exude poisonous fumes and can quite easily blow up..

The fumes have a very distinct and unpleasant smell, making them fairly easy to locate – as long as someone nearby notices and reports it.

Now the makers of meth have found a way to get around the smelly lab problem. They have a new process known as “Shake and Bake.” This method allows the drug to be made in smaller doses and without ‘cooking’ it. All you need is a soda bottle, some household chemicals and cold pills from the drug store, and it requires fewer cold pills than the cook method.

Not that it can’t still blow up. In fact, there’s an even greater chance of explosion and that explosion would be even more damaging since, as one journalist put it, “they’re holding the bomb in their hand.”

It can be made virtually anywhere, at any time.

Some areas of the country are seeing a rise in meth addicts because of it, and that rise is being anticipated across the country as more and more people start using this method.

If you hear someone in your household talking about Shake and Bake – one of your kids, or their friends – they might not be talking about chicken. Take heed, and get them addiction help right away. If they didn’t need it, they wouldn’t even be talking about it.