Category: From Addiction Recovery Bulletin

Addiction Recovery Bulletin

BOOZY ESSAY – 

April 15, 2021 – I got bored of so much drinking. One night, I looked down into my half-empty stem glass and sighed, like, “You again?” It became as monotonous as remote learning, and it wasn’t rewarding anymore. After the first few sips, I found myself chasing a feeling that had abandoned me, like trying to feel the heat of the sun after it had set. The second and third glasses just made that wonderful sunny feeling, and all feelings, more elusive. The evening slid by in a haze of sauvignon blanc and streaming TV. In the morning, I would think, “I’m worn out, maybe I’ll take a night off,” but by the late afternoon, the message was, “Almost time for my drink.”

The negative effects of my drinking were so subtle, it took years to believe they were really there: impatience with my daughter’s bedtime avoidance (reorganizing her t-shirt drawer at 9:30 p.m.); drowsiness (dozing off in her bed while she reorganized); anxiety in the middle of the night (pandemic!); and disappointment with myself the next morning. (“You don’t even want to be drinking anymore.”) The process of deciding to stop was a long argument with myself that I lost over and over again.

A person isn’t labeled an alcoholic anymore — she has an “alcohol use disorder.” It’s the substance that’s the problem, not the substance user. But maybe my problem wouldn’t be a problem for you. I do not have the problem my father had, with his weakness for scotch in the afternoons. He came from the generation of drinkers that thought if it wasn’t hard liquor, it didn’t even count. Wine and beer were what they drank after they quit real booze.

more@WBUR

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

WATCH – HARM REDUCTION ARGUMENT – 

April 15, 2021 – Five years after B.C. declared the overdose and illicit drug crisis a public health emergency, a panel of community advocates discuss how far Canada has come in its fight against illicit drugs and how much still needs to be done.

more@CBC

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

NAKED SOUL – 

April 12, 2021 – Lena Dunham is ready for mental health to not be considered a secret anymore. The multitalented star revealed on The Drew Barrymore Show that she at first was resistant to seek treatment given the stigma surrounding addiction. “We are in a culture that sees illness as weakness,” Dunham explained. “We are in a culture that sees sick women as hysterical women and we are in a business that doesn’t look kindly at illness because people are working at such a pace with so much money involved that for people to be in any way unable to show up or potentially a liability and so I wanted to bring it out into the open.” Dunham suffers from endometriosis, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and autoimmune arthritis; her medical ailments led to various prescriptions, resulting in her pill addiction, per Entertainment Tonight Canada. “I just remember being so terrified of the idea of disappointing people that really for me, at first, I was like ‘If I can take these drugs and they make me more like myself, isn’t that a better thing?’” Dunham questioned. “And then suddenly I realized I was becoming less and less like myself and suddenly it was like sobriety wasn’t a choice for me.” 

On April 10, 2021, Dunham took to Instagram to celebrate three years of sobriety. “If you are caught in a cycle of pain and shame around addiction, you are so far from alone,” Dunham captioned. “Thank you for the love you’ve shown me in the last 3 years as I’ve crawled further away from the center of the storm- but in the process I’ve realized it’s continually storming (that’s alright) AND the sun is shining too. It always was.” 

more@NickiSwift

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

A LEGEND IN OUR MIDST – 

April 13, 2021 – When Oleg passed, he left me his autobiography to complete. As I interviewed top Soviet actors and directors, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Walter Hill, Roger Donaldson, as well as friends and colleagues across three continents, I decided his story was worth a film. … Oleg Vidov was born with an angel on his shoulder in a now-dead totalitarian country that did not tolerate the concept of individual freedom or rule of law. Travel outside the USSR was a privilege denied to all but a small number of the cultural elite but because his mother was a well-respected specialist in the field of literacy, he spent his early childhood in exotic Mongolia and in bombed-out Leipzig, a city in Soviet-controlled East Germany. There he learned piano, which he would play for the rest of his life, to speak German, and to be precise. During his three childhood years in the Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, on the Chinese border, he discovered cinema watching the pre-war films produced by the USSR and the American trophy films like Tarzan and Grapes of Wrath that the Soviet troops pilfered from Joseph Goebel’s archives in Potsdam. He entered the workforce at the age of 14 when his mother became too ill to work…

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

LOCK DEM UP? – 

April 16, 2021 – “I want to make my arguments to him, as many other advocates will,” Schumer said. “But at some point we’re going to move forward, period.”

Schumer is likely worried, at least in part, about a primary challenge from the left in the future — something Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has openly discussed.

But there’s a bigger issue here for Biden. Increasingly, the president is out of step with not just his party but the country and perhaps even most Republicans on marijuana legalization.

Marijuana legalization is extremely popular. Gallup and the Pew Research Center, two of the country’s leading polling organizations, have consistently found at least two-thirds of Americans back legalization. Support is so high that, at this point, a majority of Republicans — who are generally more skeptical of drug policy reforms — may support it. Pew found 55 percent of Republicans back legalization. Gallup found a slim majority of Republicans supported it in 2017, 2018, and 2019. That reversed in 2020, but the difference between support and opposition among Republicans was still within the sampling margin of error. And, at any rate, a solid minority of 48 percent were behind it.

more@Vox

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

LISTEN – SLIMS OUT – BLUNTS IN – 

April 8, 2021 – Michael Wilson at United Food and Commercial Workers Local 400 says prohibiting worker misclassification and union busting actually fits in nicely with the purpose of the new industry. 

“This is an industry that was specifically designed to combat some of the problems and failures that were caused by the War on Drugs,” explains Wilson. “And specifically the impact on certain communities, especially Black communities and brown communities.” 

The issue of what kind of worker protections exist for the newly-created marijuana industry is likely to be one of the key debates in the next General Assembly session in 2022. 

more@WVTF

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

STUCK IN THE WEEDS – 

April 17, 2021 – It’s important to note that smoking marijuana doesn’t come without risks, particularly if you do it every day. Here is what could possibly happen, so you can be aware of the risks…”Make no mistake about it, smoking marijuana daily carries with it very real potential for addiction. The National Institute on Drug Abuse estimates that between 9% and 30% of those who use regularly will develop marijuana use disorder,” says Dr. Mary Gay. “I have observed significant negative effects on clients who habitually use marijuana including reduced academic performance, job loss, legal consequences, depression, anxiety, and in several cases, psychotic symptoms requiring hospitalization.” … “Compared with placebo, marijuana cigarettes cause increases in heart rate, systolic and diastolic blood pressures, and forearm blood flow via increased sympathetic nervous system activity,” says Dr. Kim Langdon. “In addition, marijuana has been associated with triggering heart attacks in young male patients. Smoking marijuana has been shown to increase the risk of MI onset by a factor of 4.8 for the 60 minutes after marijuana consumption, and to increase the annual risk of MI in the daily cannabis user from 1.5% to 3% per year.”

more@EatThis

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

JUSTICE DEFERRED IS JUSTICE DENIED – 

April 16, 2021 – When George Floyd’s girlfriend Courteney Ross took the stand for the prosecution, she described the couple’s struggle with drugs as part of the nation’s deadly opioid epidemic.  “It’s a classic story of how many people get addicted to opioids,” Ross testified. “We both suffered from chronic pain. We both had prescriptions.”  During the opioid crisis, millions of Americans became addicted to prescription painkillers, then turned to street opioids including fentanyl. 

“We tried really hard to break that addiction many times,” Ross said.  Her account broadly matches the way scientists, addiction care specialists and many law enforcement experts now think about addiction: as a chronic illness.  It’s dangerous and challenging for the person with substance use disorder, but is most often treatable with proper health care.  

Yet during Derek Chauvin’s trial, his defense has worked to frame the addiction of George Floyd, a Black man, as something criminal, dangerous and frightening.  “This is what’s called a speedball, a mixture of an opiate and a stimulant,” said Chauvin’s attorney Eric Nelson, referring to a pill found at the scene where George Floyd was killed.  Taylor has written extensively about racial bias in the treatment of people with addiction.   

He notes most people who use drugs face stigma. But studies show people of color with addiction are often viewed far more negatively than whites — as dangerous criminals rather than sympathetic patients.  Taylor says this framing is racist, and he believes it has been used deliberately by Chauvin’s defense team to sway the jury.  “The idea that the presence of drugs in George Floyd’s system should somehow be weaponized against him to justify someone killing him is incredibly painful,” he said.

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

THREE WEEKS LATER IT HAPPENED AGAIN – 

April 14, 2021 – “Nobody wants their child’s life defined in one moment of a bad decision,” Ms. Whyte said. “My daughter was more than one night, more than an overdose. She was defined by 23 years of greatness to my family.”

While we planned David’s funeral, Christmas lights began to blink awake throughout the neighborhood, and new reporting in The Times that week cast light on the nature of the crisis that killed him. McKinsey & Company, the prestigious consulting firm that helped Purdue Pharma “turbocharge” opiate sales, had proposed awarding Purdue’s distributors with a rebate for every OxyContin overdose, as a way to maintain sales. Earlier reports revealed that McKinsey had strategized how “to counter the emotional messages from mothers with teenagers that overdosed.”

The heinous documents confirmed that so much about this crisis was manufactured. There is no amount of money the odious Sackler family can throw around to counter the emotion here. Especially because these days, things are worse than ever, since heroin has been largely edged out by the far more lethal fentanyl. It’s difficult to even find a block in North Philadelphia that sells just heroin anymore; even cocaine is being cut with fentanyl.

The drug has closed the door to many hoping for a path back to their lives. David presciently said of fentanyl, before the drug turned up on his own autopsy report, “It’s much harder to get off of, because it’s so much stronger, and much easier to overdose on, too.”

more@NYTimes

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

MAY HIS MEMORY BE A BLESSING – 

April 13, 2021 – so he found himself “possessed by the darker side,” bound to a cycle of drug dependence and insufficient rehab. Fame changed his life, but not in many of the ways that mattered … 

“Slippin’” is a stunning centerpiece in DMX’s catalog, a liberating sermon where he got to purge his long-standing demons. Thirty seconds into the video, he’s shown in the back of an ambulance on a stretcher as paramedics try to revive him. Nearly 23 years later, he laid in a hospital bed on life support for a week as fans hoped for a miracle—though it was already a miracle that he survived for as long as he did. He died at 50 after an apparent overdose and a heart attack, following a long battle with drug addiction. Many prayed for him, but it wasn’t the usual stock prayers. These were acknowledgments of DMX’s faith and how he moved about the world with it. “A Love filled praying child of God named Earl has been called on,” Q-Tip tweeted on April 9. Missy Elliott wrote, “Even though you had battles you touched so many through your music and when you would pray so many people felt that.”

Many pop stars co-opt religious imagery, but few did it as earnestly and seamlessly as Earl Simmons, who made spirituality his mantle in life. He tucked his hardships into lyrical scriptures and tried to reconcile the struggle to be good and the temptation to entertain evil forces. DMX made gospel rap for the unconverted and for those who’d long lost touch with religion, for those who couldn’t manage their family trauma because no one had taught them how. His music reflected a generation of Black children left unprotected by the world and its systems, who suffered but dared to emerge victorious anyway. 

He revealed the fragility of being young and uncared for, and his entire rap career was a search for meaning.  DMX’s salvation was inevitably tied to hip-hop’s. It’s no coincidence that, because of his gritty vulnerability on records and in his performances, he contributed to the explosion of rap into the mainstream in the late ’90s. During an era when the genre was defined by endless yachts and flashy clothes, he offered brave, hardened, and angry songs that more gravely reflected the tragedies under which the culture was born, not where it had arrived. His frenetic energy was nothing without his spirituality, though it was also a reflection of his lifelong addictions. After a show on the pioneering Hard Knock Life arena tour in 1999, he questioned his good fortune: As producer Irv Gotti once recalled in an interview, X broke down backstage after performing and screamed, “Why, why God, why me? I ain’t supposed to be shit.”

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