Category: From Addiction Recovery Bulletin

Addiction Recovery Bulletin

BETTING REAL MONEY – 

Jan. 30, 2021 – But industry experts say Robinhood’s addictive elements have been such a well-known problem that rival startups, like Public and Titan, have been casting themselves as abbreviated or even outright opposite versions of Robinhood. Both companies said they hope to use different kinds of design choices to nudge their users in a more thoughtful direction.

Titan co-CEO Joe Percoco said in an email that his company is the “polar opposite of Robinhood,” likening inexperienced Robinhood investors to hopping into a “fast new car, without driving instructions.”

“Robinhood is designed and makes money based on clients trading addictively,” he wrote. “This is horrific.” Gamblers and investors have always had plenty in common, Whyte said. He noted they often draw young men who exhibit self-destructive behaviors and take their obsessions too far.

In one extreme example, a 20-year-old Robinhood trader took his own life last summer after seemingly misunderstanding his financial statement and blamed the company for his circumstances.

Robinhood told CNBC at the time that it was “deeply saddened to hear this terrible news,” adding that it had reached out to the family.

“In both online gambling and online trading, being unable to set and stick to limits, and the consequences, too, are incredibly similar,” Whyte added, underscoring that he would like to see these apps institute self-imposed limits and self-exclusion lists, like casinos do.

The latest versions of these trading apps can also trigger similar behaviors. Other digital experts have reached comparable conclusions regarding in-app design choices, including Dave Guarino, an Oakland, California-based product lead at the California Office of Digital Innovation, a relatively new agency opened under Gov. Gavin Newsom that aims to make state-run websites easier to use.

more@NBCNews

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

WAKE AND LIVE – 

Jan. 30, 2021 – “Our findings suggest that higher storefront cannabis dispensary counts are associated with reduced opioid-related mortality rates at the county level,” the authors write. “While the associations documented cannot be assumed to be causal, they suggest a potential association between increased prevalence of medical and recreational cannabis dispensaries and reduced opioid-related mortality rates.” The study by Greta Hsu, at the University of California, Davis, and Balázs Kovács, at Yale University, was published this week in The BMJ, a respected medical journal previous known as the British Medical Journal. It follows a Canadian study published this week that found legalizing cannabis led to a “marked decline” in the volume of opioids prescribed across Canada.

more@NationalPost

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

BATTLING A DEMON –

Jan. 20, 2021 – Those interwoven storylines follow Dr. Tyrone Brower (Oldman), a university professor who battles unexpected revelations about his research employer, a major pharmaceutical company bringing a new “non-addictive” painkiller to market; Jake Kelly (Hammer), an undercover DEA agent who attempts to infiltrate an international Fentanyl smuggling operation.

more@EW

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

WATCH – FICTION? – 

Jan. 26, 2021 – Over the past couple years, I’ve read several articles about shady rehab facilities and treatment programs, so when I was offered the opportunity to check out the new indie movie Body Brokers, I leapt at the chance. Now, Collider can exclusively debut a trailer and a poster for the indie crime drama, which hails from writer-director John Swab — himself a former addict… 

Indeed, as Body Brokers explains, when the Affordable Healthcare Act was signed in 2008, it required every healthcare provider to cover substance abuse treatment. Since the bill was passed, nearly 2,000 sober livings, 100 in-patient treatment centers, and 200 detox facilities have opened up, and that’s just in Southern California alone. That is nearly 35,000 beds that need to be filled each month, and almost 500,000 beds that need to be filled each year, which means that the dirty business of getting clean is a multi-billion dollar industry.

more@Collider

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

LISTEN – HUH? – 

Jan. 19, 2021 – What does it take to get a man to listen — really listen — to women? Well, in Stuart Watson’s case, it took being slapped, fired and flat out told by his own wife that he wasn’t an empathetic listener.

It also took a recovery from alcoholism, finding his birth family, coming to terms with abandonment and a slow-dawning realization that sometimes the story isn’t about him. The Peabody Award-winning former investigative journalist chronicles it all in his new memoir, “What She Said, What I Heard: How One Man Shut Up and Started Listening.”

more@WBUR

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

THEM AND US –  

Jan. 19, 2021 – On May 23, 2019, the day my son was coming home from college, I was flying to Warsaw for an awards ceremony. He texted me that he’d gotten home all right but complained that he was “in a lot of physical pain” because he’d been practicing backflips. On WhatsApp, the Sacklers were vetting an op-ed that the Purdue board chairman, Steve Miller, was about to publish in the Wall Street Journal. The piece bemoaned a “campaign of public vilification” and complained that Purdue was facing nearly two thousand separate lawsuits all over the country. It argued that the real solution to the opioid crisis lay in dropping the litigation and letting the company establish anti-addiction charitable programs. “Steve Miller’s piece is excellent,” Ilene, daughter of Mortimer and a former member of the Purdue board, wrote. “I got them to eliminate any mention of the family,” her brother Mortimer wrote. Their sister Samantha, who had not been a member of the board, was less enthusiastic. “It does nothing to change the narrative,” she wrote.

The next morning, I was in the lobby of my Warsaw hotel, being interviewed by a journalist, when my daughter called. It was four or five in the morning in New York. She said that her brother was not breathing. She had already called 911.

more@NewYorker

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

READ THEM AND WEEP –  

Jan. 19, 2021 – This was the place where it happened, and the person on whom everything hinged was her mother — beautiful, capricious, cruel. Ditlevsen was a bright girl and a good student, and her mother’s moods were her earliest training; she had to learn to decipher them, learn to read her mother’s face. Poetry was an early consolation. “Long, mysterious words began to crawl across my soul like a protective membrane,” she writes. “When these light waves of words streamed through me, I knew that my mother couldn’t do anything else to me because she had stopped being important to me.”

Few writers have written so rapturously of the joy, the necessity, of writing. It became a compulsion for Ditlevsen. Language dulled her pain and papered over the past. “My poems covered the bare places in my childhood like the fine, new skin under a scab,” she writes.

There is a quality of trance, of autohypnosis, in her style. It’s as if the writing replaced the mother and became the place to analyze and obsess. It was a clandestine joy, “something secret and prohibited” — the very vocabulary of concealment and private ecstasy that we encounter when she discovers Demerol.

She married the first available man — the publisher of her first poems. The attraction, in no small part, was his working shower. But from the start she was restless. She left him, married again.

At a party, she met Carl, a doctor. They slept together, and when she discovered herself pregnant, she went to him for an abortion (how’s that for a second date). He injected her with Demerol — “a bliss I have never before felt spreads through my entire body,” she writes. Carl confessed to her that he had suffered bouts of mental illness in the past, but she couldn’t hear him. She was already in love, with the colorless liquid inside the syringe.

The world contracted and became very simple. She needed more Demerol. It wasn’t enough to leave her husband and marry Carl — as she did, swiftly — she must have his child immediately; a child would fasten him to her. She must adopt one of the children Carl already had, binding him even closer. She feigned ear pain for extra doses. Carl introduced her to methadone.

more@NYTimes

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

WATCH – SATIRE OR BAD TASTE? – 

Jan. 20, 2021 – Oatly’s new ‘Help Dad’ campaign and website are designed to help young persuade their parents to give up dairy and switch to oat milk and is filled with recipes, tips, arguments and other resources.

Stated on the website, Oatly explain:“Whether your Dad just needs some helpful reminders because he already gets that ditching dairy can save the planet loads of carbon emissions… Or, if he needs more of a total reprogramming because he is pretty much good with watching the planet burn so long as he can do it while eating a double cheeseburger. This guide has you covered.”In a series of four short adverts, Oatly shows teenagers catching their parents sneaking in cows milk, refusing to buy cows milk for them, and watching with judgement while their parent answers ‘no’ to milk in his beverage.While the adverts come from a place of lighthearted fun and champion young people as the instigators of change, there have been criticisms that they mock alcohol addiction.

more@VeganFoodAndLiving

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

TIME TO FREE ALL POT DEALERS – 

Dec. 2020 – In the 1960s, I was the first federal drug agent to arrest a student on a college campus for sale of marijuana. In the 1970s and ‘80s, as head of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s New England office, I supervised the seizure of hundreds of tons of marijuana. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, leading the New York field office, I spearheaded the agency’s battle against crack. Since then, I have educated schools, physicians and others on substance abuse addiction and prevention. In terms of marijuana, the political landscape has changed drastically. The U.S. House of Representatives voted on Dec. 4, largely along party lines, to legalize marijuana under federal law. A few days earlier, the United Nations took the same stand. In the November elections, four states passed marijuana legalization measures, bringing the total number of states with legal marijuana use for adults to 15. Medical marijuana is now legal in 36 states. But marijuana is still listed as a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act of 1971. That places it in the same class as heroin, cocaine and methamphetamines because, the DEA maintains, it has “no currently accepted medical use.” Whatever the states say, marijuana users remain criminals under federal law.

more@TheHill

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

FRIES SURPRISE –  

Jan. 19, 2021 –

#2. You might have never guessed that your favorite bag of chips can increase your risk for cancer. According to the American Cancer Association, a chemical called acrylamide that appears in processed foods has carcinogenic properties and can lead to a variety of cancers.

This comes as terrible news for chip lovers—potato chips contain high levels of this chemical, and they present a very direct avenue through which many people consume acrylamide. You might assume that there’s no way potato chips could present the same dangers as a high-risk carcinogen like nicotine, but don’t be fooled! Both cigarette smoke and potato chips contain this carcinogen, making a threat to your health very immediate and apparent.

#3. You have always heard that processed fatty foods can do some serious damage to your heart, and chips don’t pull any punches when it comes to ruining your health. If you love digging into a bag of chips, you should plan to face the potential side effect of heart disease, thanks to the carcinogenic acrylamides.

According to Science Daily, acrylamides can lead to an increased chance of heart disease. A 2009 medical study published through the National Library of Medicine confirmed the grave results of consuming acrylamides on heart health, making chips a scientifically proven dangerous snack if you need to avoid any heart complications.

more@EatThis

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