AHS Views

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.

Until now, the new designer drug, Meow Meow (mephedrone) was not considered addictive. It was just one of the many club drugs that people take when they’re out ‘having fun’. But according to a new study, that’s definitely not the case. In fact, more than one third of the people who use Meow Meow should be seeking addiction help.

According to the study, which was conducted by doing a survey on 100 people to use Meow Meow, more than one third of every ten people who take the drug have the symptoms of addiction. What are those symptoms?

• they can’t cut back or stop using it
• they withdrawal symptoms when they try
• they take more of the drug than they intended to
• spend a lot of time taking the drug or recovering from it
• they give up other activities and neglect parts of their life because of it
• they keep taking the drug despite any related health problems they may experience or are likely to experience
• they need to take larger and larger doses to get the same high

On top of being addictive, nearly one in four people said they have a strong urge to take Meow Meow and the urge doesn’t really go away. Many also said that their family or friends said they were worried about them taking the drug, but they still continued to take it.

That’s a lot different than having fun.

Meow Meow is just one of the many ‘designer drugs’ out there. It’s important for friends, parents and other family members to watch out for new drugs. There are some pretty nasty people out there – they figure out how to get around the law by manufacturing or dealing really dangerous chemicals. People find out the drug is not illegal and get the impression that they must be okay. But, they’re not. They’re just new, and the law hasn’t caught up with them yet.

Getting into a drug rehab program can help those taking Meow Meow, and the sooner the better.

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.