Heroin overdoses have skyrocketed. The ongoing heroin epidemic is spreading across the country. Drugs now kill more people than car accidents or shootings. It’s affecting America’s youth in disturbing numbers — from ASAM: Adolescents (12 to 17 years old) In 2014, 467,000…
Most people love a success story. With addiction, it’s always inspiring to hear that someone who had a problem with alcohol or some other drug, or a combination of drugs, stopped using drugs and turned around their life in dramatic fashion. The story of…
For simplicity I’ll use “Hispanic”, defined as: a Spanish-speaking person living in the US, especially one of Latin American descent. In the western parts of the country, there’s a concerted effort to provide treatment for Hispanics, but in the southeast and other parts of…
The combination of alcohol and opiates is complicating the already serious problems of alcoholism and opiate addiction. Using both creates a synergistic effect where the combination is greater than the sum of its parts — one drug increases the other’s effectiveness. But this increased effect is…
It’s difficult to find fundamental solutions when a problem is misunderstood as symptomatic of something else – the application of symptomatic solutions to perceived symptomatic problems leads in circles with no real resolution. Heroin, though it’s been around since at least 3400 BC, is…
I’ve written quite a bit about opioid addiction here. One of the main points I try to establish is that in order to effectively deal with this national epidemic, we must understand the problem and stop stigmatizing addiction. I’ve dealt with addiction in general since 1983…
Yes, I know that statistics are boring, but it helps once in a while to stop and look at the numbers. Statistics help put the problem of addiction in perspective. When you read about opioid addiction across the nation, you might wonder if it’s…
Families of alcoholic (or other types of chemical dependence) suffer greatly through the disease’s progression. Much has been written and talked about on the subject of alcoholism and the family. Anyone who knows anything about alcoholism knows that it tears families apart and often causes long term psychological…
This is a question many moderate to heavy drinkers ask themselves at some point. They might not express the concern to others but they’ll ask themselves. There are tests which are pretty accurate to gather signs and symptoms, to help answer the question –…
From the time I started working with alcoholics in the early 80s, I’ve heard that science is close to a cure, a pill that might cure alcoholism. None of us really believed that alcoholism would be cured by a simple pill — we intuitively knew that alcoholism…
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