Category: From Addiction Recovery Bulletin

Addiction Recovery Bulletin

BOOZE APP, WHAT COULD GO WRONG? – 

Feb. 2, 2021 – Drizly will eventually integrate with the company’s Uber Eats app, but it will also maintain its own Drizly app, per the release. Drizly has been called the “Uber for alcohol delivery.”

Feb. 2, 2021 – “By bringing Drizly into the Uber family, we can accelerate that trajectory by exposing Drizly to the Uber audience and expanding its geographic presence into our global footprint in the years ahead,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in the press release.

The deal is expected to finalize by this summer, with more than 90% of the sum being paid to Drizly stockholders in the form of Uber common stock. The deal is “subject to regulatory approval,” per the release. 

more@BusinessInsider

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

SOMETHING TO SCREAM ABOUT – 

Feb. 4, 2021 – “A LONG time ago … In a galaxy far, far away … I was a young STAR at WAR with herself,” she began.

“I didn’t know it then. I chased everything. I kept it hidden. I was a sick as my secrets. With God’s grace and the support of MANY people who could relate to all the ‘feelings’ and a couple of sober angels … I’ve been able to stay sober, one day at a time, for 22 years.”

Curtis, 62, said the picture she shared serves as a reminder of who she used to be. Curtis has been open about her addiction, talking about her dependence on opiates three years ago.

“I was ahead of the curve of the opiate epidemic,” she told People in 2018. “I had a 10-year run, stealing, conniving. No one knew. No one.” Curtis said she became addicted in 1989 after having minor plastic surgery on her eyes. She would seek treatment a decade later.

The “True Lies” star comes from a family that has struggled with addiction. Her brother, Nicholas, died of a heroin overdose and her dad, acting legend Tony Curtis, sought treatment for alcohol and drug abuse.

“But I shared drugs with my dad,” she told Variety in 2019. “I did cocaine and freebased once with my dad. But that was the only time I did that, and I did that with him. He did end up getting sober for a short period of time and was very active in recovery for about three years. It didn’t last that long. But he found recovery for a minute.”

more@Today

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

LISTEN – FORTY-NINE MORE STATES NEEDED – 

Feb. 5, 2021 – And on February 1, the new law, called the Drug Addiction Treatment and Recovery Act, went into effect. To help break down this act, Portland Monthly spoke with Ron Williams, outreach director at the Health Justice Recovery Alliance, the statewide advocacy coalition tasked with ensuring the new law is implemented. 

more@PDXMonthly

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

THE SHOT GLASS DOESN’T FALL FAR FROM THE TUMBLE – 

Feb. 5, 2021 – Addiction experts often say that the disease runs in the families who struggle with substance abuse, and Jack and Ozzy Osbourne are sharing their story about their battle with drugs and alcohol. In a new interview with Variety, Jack admits that having a dad who was a rock star definitely influenced his choices, and while he’s been sober for 17 years now, it was a slippery slope when he was in the midst of his own addiction struggles. At the beginning of his experimentation with drugs and alcohol, it seemed pretty glamorous to Jack, who started using in his early teens. “I guess I didn’t want to be the downside of [addiction]. I wanted to be the upside of it, because the upside of it, when things were great, it seemed like a lot of fun,” he revealed to the publication. “I wanted the excitement of crazy adventures inebriated.”

The fun side of being intoxicated didn’t last long, though. Jack admitted that he fell into a deep depression; with plenty of money from doing MTV’s The Osbournes and also coping with his mother Sharon’s colon cancer diagnosis, he couldn’t balance using drugs and alcohol and maintaining a normal life. “But in these times, I would dip in and be like, ‘Things aren’t great.’ And then I’d pull back — ‘Oh, things are OK. So it was this dance,” Jack said about the tipping point of his despair. “Eventually, my mom received a phone call from a friend who was like, ‘This is bad.’”

more@SheKnows

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

ONCE A MENSCH, ALWAYS A MENSCH – 

Feb. 4, 2021 – And then we walked two blocks up Eighth Avenue. We made a right on 24th Street and headed east. I went to my first 12-step meeting at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis’ David Geffen Center. I don’t remember much about the meeting except there were about a dozen men sitting in chairs in a circle. For the first time, I said, “My name is Marc, and I’m a crystal meth addict.”

That was almost 17 years ago. I have been clean and sober for seven and a half years. In other words, it took me about a decade to get long-term sobriety.

I have been an entertainment journalist for 25 years. Much of that time I was working in the “gossip biz,” with stints at the New York Daily News, Us Weekly, New York magazine, “Entertainment Tonight” and “E! News.”

I spent most of my waking hours reporting, writing and talking about the private lives of celebrities. I may have excelled at my job, but I was never fully comfortable prying. My uneasiness really took hold when I was active in my addiction. How could I ask celebrities (or their publicists) about their deepest, darkest secrets when I was living with one myself? I felt like a fraud, an impostor. I worried all the time about being found out.

In the summer of 2004, just weeks after Scott introduced me to Frank, I moved to Los Angeles to help launch the “Entertainment Tonight” companion series “The Insider.” Moving 3,000 miles across the country meant I could start over. Or so I thought. I told myself I would stop drinking and using, but I broke that promise within two weeks.

more@Variety

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

TOO QUIETLY! – 

Feb. 4, 2021 – The White House seems to have done little to alert media to the changes. Drug Policy Alliance* Director of Media Relations Matt Sutton told Filter that National Public Radio (NPR) was the only outlet to have received the statement to his knowledge. Other mainstream publications appear to have been left in the dark, he suggested. At publication time, the notice cannot be found on ONDCP’s website.

“While our nation grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic, we must also face the addiction and overdose epidemic that affects communities all over the country,” Moreno said in the statement. “I’m honored to be working to implement President Biden’s agenda, which will focus on saving lives by prioritizing public health approaches to substance use disorder, while finding ways to confront historic racial inequities in drug policy.”

The other three priorities are as follows: “Advancing recovery-ready workplaces and expanding the addiction workforce,” “Supporting evidence-based prevention efforts, related to both supply and demand reduction,” and “Expanding access to evidence-based treatment, including by lifting burdensome restrictions on medications for opioid use disorder.”

more@FilterMag

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

SEEING THE LIGHT … IN PEANUTS – 

Feb. 6, 2021 – Andrew Heinz wrote in a 1999 profile of Rabbi Twerski for Judaism, the quarterly magazine of the American Jewish Congress. “He was moved by the example of men and women who would willingly be awakened in the middle of the night to go out and help a fellow alcoholic.”

He saw no contradiction between the 12 steps and his belief in the laws of Torah, according to his granddaughter Chaya Ruchie Waldman. “The 12 steps may have been created by Christian believers,” she said, “but it was about spirituality, surrendering to a higher power, and that is synonymous with Judaism.”

Rabbi Twerski melded an eclectic menu of treatments in his work as director of psychiatry at St. Francis Hospital in Pittsburgh. The Gateway Rehabilitation Center, which he founded, was named one of the top 12 rehabilitation clinics in the United States by Forbes magazine in 1987. He also wrote 80 books, many on Jewish topics but many others on addictive thinking and the addictive personality, all of which enhanced his international reputation as an authority on addiction.

more@NYTimes

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

TOO MUCH IS TOO MUCH

Feb. 8, 2021 – Work addiction is a clinical condition characterised by an obsessive and compulsive interest in work. People usually work more than they’re required to… characteristics include being concerned about their performance at work, rigid thinking and perfectionism, which is often projected onto others. 

more@TheConversation

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

EMPTY BOTTLES, FULL COFFINS – 

February 2, 2021 – Between January and September, 5,460 deaths were registered with this cause – up 16% on the same months in 2019.  It is the biggest toll recorded since records began in 2001. The high rates spanned the period during and after the first Covid lockdown, the Office for National Statistics figures show. It reached a peak of 12.8 deaths per 100,000 people in the first three months of 2020 and remained at this level through to September – higher than in any other time on record.  As in past years, rates of male alcohol-specific deaths were twice those seen for women. Experts say the coronavirus pandemic will have had little effect on how the data was gathered and recorded.  But it is not clear how much it may have contributed to the deaths. ONS spokesman Ben Humberstone said: “Today’s data shows that in the first three quarters of 2020, alcohol-specific deaths in England and Wales reached the highest level since the beginning of our data series, with April to September, during and after the first lockdown, seeing higher rates compared to the same period in previous years.” “The reasons for this are complex and it will take time before the impact the pandemic has had on alcohol-specific deaths is fully understood.”

more@BBC

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

IT’S OK, WE’VE GOT EYES IN THE BACK OF OUR HEADS – 

February 4, 2021 – And yet, the more I hear my patients use the term “burnout,” the more I think it doesn’t capture the depth of despair they describe.  To get another perspective on burnout, I spoke to Dr. Wendy Dean, a psychiatrist who has dedicated her career to fighting moral injury in physicians, which is the concept that systemic problems in the medical industry prevent doctors from doing what they know is right for their patients. Dr. Dean said what working moms are facing is not identical, but it’s similar, and a consequence of “our society’s decision to pursue profit at all cost.”  The crushing toll on working mothers’ mental health reflects a level of societal betrayal, according to Dr. Dean. “This isn’t burnout — this is societal choice,” she said. “It’s driving mothers to make decisions that nobody should ever have to make for their kids.”  “Betrayal” describes what my patients are feeling exactly. While burnout places the blame (and thus the responsibility) on the individual and tells working moms they aren’t resilient enough, betrayal points directly to the broken structures around them.

more@NYTimes

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