Category: From Addiction Recovery Bulletin

Addiction Recovery Bulletin

Gray matter matters –  

Jan. 2, 2021 – “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.” …”Functional MRI studies have also revealed functional and structural changes in brain areas involved in reward processing after chronic cannabis use and in the processing of emotion,” says Dr. Langdon. “Some studies show a higher incidence of schizophrenia in chronic adolescent and teenage use of marijuana.”

more@Yahoo

The post Serious Side Effects of Smoking Pot Every Day appeared first on Addiction/Recovery eBulletin.

Addiction Recovery Bulletin

WATCH – Jews at risk of false imprisonment – 

Jan. 5, 2021 – I was a little kid watching that episode, it was a Sit-Com, it never crossed my adolescent mind that failing drug tests from eating bagels was a real possibility in life nor did I realize this was an urban legend that existed outside of Seinfeld. I probably hadn’t even gone through D.A.R.E. in school yet at that point in life and I’m not even sure I knew what drug tests were for other than old people needed them to get jobs or whatever. Anyway, I’m getting all sorts of sidetracked here so let’s refocus…

Trace Dominguez is a YouTuber who did a guest video on Tom Scott’s channel this week and he set out to test if eating too many poppy seeds will actually cause you to test positive for opiates (Opium, Codeine, Morphine, etc).

He started by tracking down an older drug test where the threshold for testing positive was lower and then went deeper and got tested at a lab. Each time, he’d eat the poppy seeds at least 2 hours in advance so his body could metabolize the poppy seeds aaaaand the results are pretty interesting. He does, in fact, test positive for some controlled or banned substances. Check it out:

more@Brobible

The post Guy Eats a Ton of Poppy Seed Bagels and Takes Various Drug Tests to See if He Tests Positive for Opiates appeared first on Addiction/Recovery eBulletin.

Addiction Recovery Bulletin

Thank God he did –  

Jan. 5, 2021 – “Like the rhyme schemes didn’t even sound like familiar to me,” Eminem said. “So I was caught off-guard too. I was like, ‘What the fuck, I said that?’ I said it and I was wrong for saying that [line about Rihanna]. It was fucking stupid. “You know, a lot of times, especially with the ‘Relapse’ record, when I first started learning how to rap again, because of the drug situation that I went through and having to relearn a lot of things, that was one of those things that it was like: ‘Well, if it rhyme, say it.’”

Eminem initially wrote the offending verse for his 2009 album ‘Relapse’ but the song it featured in was scrapped, although it eventually leaked online in November 2019.

more@NME

The post Eminem re-learned to rap after near-fatal overdose appeared first on Addiction/Recovery eBulletin.

Addiction Recovery Bulletin

Planting Esteem Seeds – 

Jan. 9, 2021 – He lost his job and, over the summer, his ex-fiancé beat him up, putting him in the hospital with a broken arm, a fractured foot and a gash across the bridge of his nose. 

“Only one of my friends was sober, so I called him up crying, bawling my eyes out saying I needed a change,” he says. “I was in the hospital, and I just lost it. I had to get out, so I packed all my things.” He eventually landed at Ranch House Recovery outside Elgin, a peer-to-peer recovery program for men that includes an animal rescue operation and Simple Promise Farms, a nonprofit farm that raises money for addiction recovery scholarships. 

It’s a rare combination of agricultural and 12-step work that Quintero credits with helping him find sobriety during this difficult year. 

“I never had farming experience, but I knew that idle hands are the devil’s playground,” says Quintero, who is one of nearly 80 recovering people with addictions who have lived at the facility since it opened in late 2019. “I never thought I could work a whole day without alcohol, but now I’m the first one out there and the last to come back in.” 

more@Austin360

The post Men Find Community, Self-worth at Recovery Farm appeared first on Addiction/Recovery eBulletin.

Addiction Recovery Bulletin

Death for sale on aisle 5 –  

Jan. 3, 2021- When Ashwani Sheoran showed up for early morning shifts at pharmacies in rural Michigan wearing his white Walmart smock, he often found customers waiting, desperate for bottles of pain pills.

“I see my patients, 15 to 20, already lined up to get prescriptions filled for morphine sulfate, oxycodone and other straight narcotics,” he said.

This was in 2012 when the prescription opioid epidemic was exploding, killing tens of thousands of Americans every year.

Sheoran, now 41, told NPR he kept seeing what the Drug Enforcement Administration considers “red flags.” Patients were driving long distances to buy their pills from Walmart. They couldn’t explain why they needed such powerful opioid doses.

He started raising alarms, sending emails to his bosses in Michigan and to Walmart headquarters in Arkansas. He warned that their pharmacies were feeding a black market for opioids like Oxycontin.

What happened next made him angry. “They start putting more pressure on me to just be quiet and not to say anything more,” Sheoran said.

“They told me, ‘Do not reach out to the DEA, do not call the police. If you do so, your employment is going to be terminated immediately,’ “ Sheoran said, describing a warning he said was issued by his supervisor.

more@NPR

The post Pharmacists Say Walmart Ignored Opioid Sales Red Flags appeared first on Addiction/Recovery eBulletin.

Addiction Recovery Bulletin

WATCH – Disease model flawed –  

Jan. 4, 2021 – The original formulation of OxyContin didn’t create the opioid crisis, argues psychiatrist Sally Satel, and removing it from the market didn’t make the problem go away.

more@YouTube

The post What Everyone Got Wrong About the Opioid Epidemic appeared first on Addiction/Recovery eBulletin.

Addiction Recovery Bulletin

No more suicides, please – 

Jan.  7 , 2021 – Having tried everything, from parental controls software to gambling-blocking software to curb his activity, he came up with his own solution Gamban.

Launched in 2016, the technology behind Gamban blocks access to any online gambling across all of a customer’s devices. The company works with the likes of Lloyds Banking Group as well as major players in the gambling industry to help people regain control without compromising on the benefits of new technology.

Symons had previously been freelancing as a business development consultant for several design agencies. He’d also cofounded video networking startup 85by55, which had started well, but following rejection at Y Combinator interview was acquired and transformed into video recruitment tool PowerMeeter.

He admits to having gambled online from an early age. “At university, not a day went by when I didn’t play online, and on many occasions, I was playing up to 14 hours a day,” he says. “Online gambling is generally much easier to hide than other forms of offline gambling, so I was able to keep it hidden.”

more@Forbes

The post Entrepreneur Helping Gamblers Beat Their Addiction appeared first on Addiction/Recovery eBulletin.

Addiction Recovery Bulletin

LISTEN – Bubba, Tyrone, Brutus, Hammer & Joey –  

Jan. 4, 2021 – In describing his memoir, “The Five People You’ll Meet in Prison,” author Brandon Stickney offers a hard look at New York’s prison system and himself. The book is “more of a psychological journey,” according to Stickney who says he is bipolar and suffers from depression. He wants to depict “what it’s really like to be inside a prison with mental illness.” Stickney recalls how pain medications prescribed following surgery started him on the road to opiate addiction, a path that would lead to time in jail.

more@WBFO

The post Memoir Reflects on Prison, Addiction appeared first on Addiction/Recovery eBulletin.

Addiction Recovery Bulletin

We can, he did – 

Dec. 27, 2020 – He also created the Addiction Counselor Education Program at Westfield State University (then Westfield State College) and served as the director for 25 years (an extension of that program was later brought to Berkshire Community College). A participant in Alcoholics Anonymous for 46 years, according to his obituary, Cote’s work in addiction services continued until he retired in June.

“He was the guy. He was Mr. Sobriety,” said Cote’s widow, Francesca “Cessa” Cote, who ran the Doyle Detox Unit in Pittsfield until it merged with McGee in 2000. The couple were married for 22 years. “There’s a lot of us out there who owed a lot to Bob.”

Cote also founded the Berkshire Men’s Council and the Men’s Leadership Council of Boulder, Colo., groups that he served on for 25 years. Participants in Alcoholics Anonymous are often referred to as a “friends of Bill W.,”, after Bill Wilson, who co-founded the group in the 1930s. People who knew Cote well often referred to themselves as “Friends of Bob,” his wife said.

Cote’s influence on others was displayed on written tributes to Cote that are posted on Legacy.com.

“Bob helped me tremendously in my struggles with mental illness and alcoholism,” wrote Peter T. McGovern on Christmas Day. “He was a wonderful man. I’m sorry for his loss.”

“Bob saved many lives over the years,” wrote Jim Edelman on Christmas Eve. “A selfless human being who quietly and diligently went about his life doing the best he could for others. And that was a lot.”

more@BerkshireEagle

The post ‘Mr. Sobriety’: Robert Cote remembered appeared first on Addiction/Recovery eBulletin.

Addiction Recovery Bulletin

LISTEN – Listening to loss –  

Dec. 28, 2020 – For many mothers, the arrival of a newborn comes with more than enough challenges. Imagine not only trying to take care of a baby, but also trying to withdraw from drugs at the same time. 

For some women, who are addicted to opioids, that’s exactly what they need to do, to maintain custody of their child. The World Today went to Phoebe House, the only specialist opioid treatment centre of its kind for mothers and their young children in NSW. Duration: 7min. Broadcast: Mon., 28 Dec. 2020, 12:00pm

more@ABC

The post Only Rehab in New South Wales Helping Mothers appeared first on Addiction/Recovery eBulletin.