Category: From Addiction Recovery Bulletin

Addiction Recovery Bulletin

The whole world is toking – 

Dec. 2, 2020 – The drugs that are on Schedule IV are a subset of those on Schedule I of the convention, which already requires the highest levels of international control. The agency voted to leave cannabis and cannabis resin on the list of Schedule I drugs, which also include cocaine, Fentanyl, morphine, Methadone, opium and oxycodone, the opiate painkiller sold as OxyContin,

Wednesday’s vote therefore does not clear U.N. member nations to legalize marijuana under the international drug control system. Canada and Uruguay have legalized the sale and use of cannabis for recreational purposes, but many countries around the world have decriminalized marijuana possession.

The schedules weigh a drug’s medical utility versus the possible harm that it might cause, and experts say that taking cannabis off the strictest schedule could lead, however, to the loosening of international controls on medical marijuana.

more@ABCNews

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Don’t wait!!!!!!!!!!!!!! – 

Dec. 6, 2020 – Then, just before entering a shed on his girlfriend’s posh waterfront property in the wee hours, the on-edge Hsieh asked pals to check on him every 5 minutes, sources told the outlet.

Details of the ensuing fatal shed fire remain murky, although authorities have said the Harvard-educated business genius died from smoke inhalation and that the blaze was accidental.

But Hsieh’s obsessions and fascination with experimenting with his body — for example, trying to see how much food and oxygen he could live without — may provide some clues as to what happened.

He was entranced by fire — with a real-estate agent recalling seeing an estimated 1,000 candles in Hsieh’s Park City, Utah, home earlier this year, the Journal said.

Hsieh, who wrote a 2010 bestseller about his alternative path to success called “Delivering Happiness,’’ “explained to me that the candles were a symbol of what life was like in a simpler time,” the agent, Paul Benson, told the Journal.

The quirky entrepreneur, who sold his business to Amazon for $1 billion in 2009, also liked to use a heater in his girlfriend’s shed to decrease his oxygen level, sources told the media outlet.

more@NYPost

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

The good, the bad and the ugly – 

Dec. 4, 2020 – On Thursday, Dec. 3, three Congress members introduced a bill aimed at improving the quality of care offered to recovering addicts living in sober living homes.

Dubbed “The Excellence in Recovery Housing Act,” the proposed law would require the National Academy of Sciences to study high-quality recovery housing and make recommendations for increasing its availability. It also would determine how to improve data collection about recovery, ensure that medication-assisted treatment would be available for people seeking to stay sober and explore the legal tangles that still exist on the state and local front involving recovery housing.

The bill also would push the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration to work with “reputable providers” to come up with comprehensive guidelines for struggling state governments, and would provide some $57 million in grants states could use to help make quality housing a reality.

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Gone way too soon … 40 years ago today –  

Dec. 2, 2020 – “He was probably, in those years, the most notable stay-at-home dad in America,” said Larry Kane, author of “Lennon Revealed,” a 2005 biography, and “Ticket to Ride,” a chronicle of the Beatles’ early American tours.

It was a pointed turn for a celebrity who was once one of the international avatars of the “sex, drugs and rock-’n’-roll” cliché. Lennon said he bottomed out while he was separated from Ono in the early 1970s, during an 18-month “long weekend” of substance abuse, according to Kane.

But it was also an unusual role for a middle-age man in that period: Just 2 percent of American households had stay-at-home fathers from 1976 to 1979, according to a Pew Research article citing a 2013 study published in the Journal of Family Issues.

Lennon, according to news articles published at the time, apparently had some help from a nanny. But nearly all contemporaneous stories depict Lennon as a steadfast and joyful father, totally consumed with domestic life. (“Lennon Is Playing Daddy,” a headline from the time read in part.)

“John talked baby talk, tickled [Sean], threw him in the air… 

more@NBCNews

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Sober mother, sober daughter –  

December 3, 2020 – Willis also said she finds herself “becoming [her] mother in the most complimentary way” and feels that Moore is someone she can “really draw from.”

“She’s even, I think, at this point in her life now still exploring and coming into herself creatively which is so inspiring for me because I think you can get really hung up on ‘I didn’t figure it out soon enough’,” she shared, noting that she herself struggled to “figure out” her “life path.”

Moore even had an influence on her daughter’s style.

“… So much of it was probably my mom. It really was. She is constantly shifting and evolving her style, but is also a hoarder,” Tallulah explained. “She’s kept every iteration of vibe that she’s ever had.”

Being the child of two Hollywood juggernauts — not to mention the youngest of their three shared children — Willis found herself under some pressure in her early years.

“There was a little bit of [pressure with] me being the youngest, and kind of seeing a lot of people in already-developed stages of creativity. There was pressure, not spoken, but pressure that I put on myself to kind of figure it out,” she explained.

However, Tallulah feels she’s hit her own stride these days.

“At 26, I think you start to know yourself,” she said. “I think you start to see these patterns really kick in.”

more@PageSix

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Weighing the Alternatives – 

December 3, 2020 – That’s when she started the binge-purge cycle; uncontrollably eating large quantities of food before forcing herself to vomit. “I’d go to the corner shop and buy a ridiculous amount of food – triple sandwiches, big bags of crisps, sweets and fizzy drinks – binge-eat them in a specific order, then purge until there was nothing left. It completely took over my life.”  When Jeni saw her doctor, she was told that her potassium levels were so low – due to electrolyte imbalances caused by vomiting – that she was at risk of having a heart attack. She was referred for therapy but relapsed dangerously five years later, making herself sick around six times a day.

“I was scared so eventually I went to my GP for help,” Jeni says. “But my doctor told me I wasn’t underweight enough for treatment. I was crushed. I’d always felt like a fraud for having an eating disorder and not being ‘skinny’, and that just confirmed it.” 

Now 32, Jeni is in a much better place mentally, but still purges from time to time. Like so many women over the age of 30 who have been battling bulimia since a young age, she’s simply learnt to deal with it on her own.  Jeni’s experience may sound familiar if you’ve been watching the latest season of The Crown, which depicts Princess Diana’s battle with bulimia in graphic detail. The show portrays a young woman thrust onto the world stage, under constant scrutiny, struggling to cope in a doomed marriage. Consequentially, we watch a vulnerable and deeply troubled Diana resorting to binging and purging as a coping mechanism, gradually cloaking herself in bulimia like a security blanket. It gives her control in a situation in which she has none.  “Unfortunately, there is a lot of stigma and misguided judgement attached to bulimia,” says Jessica Griffiths, clinical lead at eating disorder charity Beat. “There’s an assumption that people with any sort of eating disorder are just underweight, or that people with bulimia are simply greedy and can’t control how much they eat. But it’s not about the physical state – it’s not about discipline or willpower – it’s about the mindset, and the really powerful, distressing feelings driving these mental health issues.”

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Thumbs Down – 

Nov. 30, 2020 – The September debut of “The Social Dilemma” on Netflix sounded this alarm for millions of viewers.

The documentary centers on Tristan Harris, the former Google engineer who has been leading the assault on social media as cofounder of the Center for Humane Technology, 

Harris started talking about smartphones as “slot machines” years ago: “Every time I check my phone, I”m playing the slot machine to see, ‘What did I get?’ This is one way to highjack people’s minds, to form a habit.” 

At a Nov. 17 hearing to grill Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Lindsey Graham borrowed Harris’ “slot machine” language and promised further inquiries.

The catch: For psychologists, “Facebook addiction” is a subset of “internet addiction.”

“Internet addiction” follows previous alarms over video game addiction, TV addiction, comic book addiction and so on. 

“Social media is a drug” is the latest version of “TV is a drug,” which was an update of “rock music is a drug,” and so on.

Every new media technology or format, particularly those that gain popularity among younger users, has sparked a wave of fear and concern among adults that kids’ attention is being hijacked and their minds are being warped. 

Media historians call these reactions “moral panics,” and many view them as ways of deflecting attention from deeper social ills.

more@Axios

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Now more than ever… –  

Dec. 2020 – In the general Buddhist style of befriending complexity through simplicity and with his particular gift for simple words strung into a rosary of immense wisdom radiating immense kindness, Thich Nhat Hanh writes: ”We have a great, habitual fear inside ourselves. We’re afraid of many things — of our own death, of losing our loved ones, of change, of being alone. The practice of mindfulness helps us to touch nonfear. It’s only here and now that we can experience total relief, total happiness… In the practice of Buddhism, we see that all mental formations — including compassion, love, fear, sorrow, and despair — are organic in nature. We don’t need to be afraid of any of them, because transformation is always possible.”

Such transformation is possible only through deliberate practice — none more challenging, or more rewarding, than the practice of transforming fear into love. In consonance with his teaching that “to love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love,” he anchors this transmutation practice in four mantras “effective for watering the seeds of happiness in yourself and your beloved and for transforming fear, suffering, and loneliness.”

more@BrainPickings

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

The American way of death – 

Now, 2020 – Overdose deaths have spiked in San Diego County this year, as an already worsening drug epidemic collides with the coronavirus pandemic. Over the summer, that amounted to an average of three deaths a day.

Part of the increase is attributed to the illicit drug supply getting deadlier as traffickers increasingly rely on fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid. It is either laced into traditional street drugs or sold as counterfeit prescription pills similar to the ones that ended Alexander’s life. But experts say the bleakness of 2020 has played no small part. “I don’t know of anyone who is not impacted by what’s going on,” said Scott Silverman, a crisis coach and founder and CEO of Confidential Recovery, “and someone who suffers from the dependence of self-medication has really found themselves in a precarious position.”  Rising threat! The scourge of fentanyl has been a growing focus of public safety and health campaigns for a few years now. Fentanyl, a prescription pain reliever mostly used for surgery or to treat cancer pain, is up to 100 times more potent than morphine and up to 50 times stronger than heroin. Even small amounts can be deadly. Mexican drug cartels widely introduced fentanyl into the illicit street market about five years ago, won over by how cheap and easy the opioid is to manufacture compared to cultivating poppies for heroin. The cartels also seized upon another trend — Americans’ growing appetite for prescription pills. Little blue pills that began showing up on the streets and sold as oxycodone — with the signature “M” and “30” stamps — were actually filled with fentanyl. Fentanyl has also been regularly found in methamphetamine, cocaine, heroin and counterfeit Xanax, making the illicit drug supply deadlier overall. Users are oftentimes unable to identify what they are consuming, much less its strength. Batches not mixed thoroughly can contain fatal hotspots of fentanyl. “One pill can kill,” said San Diego County District Attorney Summer Stephan, “and it has killed many.”

The demographics of the fentanyl crisis in particular are wide-ranging, from a teen at a pill party to a parent self-treating anxiety to a long-time drug user.

more@ENewspaper

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Never stop trying … it pays off with life – 

Nov. 29, 2020 – Henry continued to use and would go on to fail more than 50 drug tests administered through Indiana Department of Child Services, who still allowed him to participate in supervised visits with his kids. Henry was placed in treatment and was 40 days clean when he was able to have a second visit with his kids. It was during that visit that his then 7-year-old son said something that brought him “out of the fog” of substance abuse.

“He said, ‘Dad, I’m done being bad. Can I come back home?’” 

“This little kid, this little person blamed himself for being in foster care. He blamed himself for everything that I’ve done,” the father said. “For the first time in my life, I cried for someone other than myself. And that was the day that my path to recovery started.”

Henry would go on to attend Narcotics Anonymous and other therapeutic meetings, and lived at the Home with Hope, a facility in Lafayette that provides care often following primary treatment or detox for alcoholism and other drug addictions, for men and women age 18 and older. It was there where he met his wife Lori Henry, who Dock’s kids now call their mom.  

more@JCOnline

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