Category: From Addiction Recovery Bulletin

Addiction Recovery Bulletin

WROTE BEST-SELLING BOOKS – 

March 7, 2025 – Her experiences as a drug addict, a chemical dependency counselor and the wife of an alcoholic informed a best-selling book about codependence that has guided countless people to shed toxic relationships, died on Feb. 27 in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. She was 76.

Her daughter, Nichole Beattie, said the cause was heart failure. She had been hospitalized from Nov. 30 to Dec. 12, then evacuated from her home in Malibu because of a wildfire and moved into her daughter’s home, where she died.

CONTINUE@NYTimes

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

NEW DOCUMENTARY – 

March 12, 2025 – Benjamin Flaherty spent three years shooting “Shuffle,” a documentary that follows three addicts who are trying to stay alive in rehab facilities that are scamming insurance companies. Flaherty reveals that patients are being bought and sold for their insurance policies…and ushered into a cycle of care designed to keep them sick. With the help of an FBI informant, an insurance analyst, and the former executive director of a Philadelphia-based treatment facility, the director uncovers collusion at the highest levels of government.

Flaherty, who uses his personal journey of recovery from addiction as a way into the 82-minute doc, unravels a web of public policy and private interest preying on a desperate population for the sake of profit. 

“I was only a few months sober when I heard a story about people being lured into sober homes for their insurance policies,” he says.

CONTINUE@Variety

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

AND MAKE YOU HAPPY –

March 3, 2025 – How far away is your phone right now? When did you last look at it? For many of us, these digital devices are almost constantly in our hands, and a new study highlights the effects on brain activity that can happen when we cut back on using them.

The research involved 25 young adults aged between 18 and 30, who were asked to restrict their smartphone use as much as possible for 72 hours: Only essential communications and work-related activities were allowed.

Researchers from Heidelberg University and the University of Cologne in Germany used magnetic resonance imaging ( MRI) scans and psychological tests before and after the phone diet to determine what kind of effect this had on neural patterns and activity.

“We used a longitudinal approach to investigate effects of smartphone restriction in smartphone users,” write the researchers in their published paper.

“Associations between changes of brain activation over time and addiction-related neurotransmitter systems were found.”

CONTINUE@ScienceAlert

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

HOW IT WORKS –

March 7, 2025 – Svenja, age 24, works at an artificial intelligence (AI) startup in Berlin, Germany. She is also Germany’s first content creator for sober living. Growing up in the north of the country, drinking alcohol seemed like the norm. Yet Svenja realized that alcohol was damaging her physical and mental health. Two years ago, she made the decision to stop drinking for good.

“I just stopped. There was no transition period. I woke up one morning and just decided I wouldn’t do it anymore. I haven’t had a single sip since!”

Challenging societal norms

Svenja recalls, “I had my first sip of alcohol when I was 13 years old. I drank all the way up until I was about 22. When you grow up in the countryside in Germany, it is just a very normal thing to do – to drink with your peers and with your families. You do it because otherwise you will be seen as weird or an outsider.”

She reflects on the societal norms she grew up with: “Growing up, having your first hangover is almost expected of you. It is weirdly romanticized in our culture.”

CONTINUE@WHO

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

BOSOM BUDDIES – 

March 11, 2025 – The actress, 71, opened up to Christina Applegate and Jamie-Lynn Sigler on the March 11 episode of their podcast, MeSsy, saying she “started using drugs and alcohol when I was really young, when I was 15.” “I’m a person that for probably the first 30 years of my life, didn’t deal [with] s—t,” said Sagal.  “I medicated myself to where I didn’t really deal with my emotion. My parents died, I had cancer in my 20s, I mean, a bunch of s—t happened, and I didn’t really deal with it. And then, you know, I stopped medicating myself, and now I have no choice but to deal with it.” Sagal referenced Applegate and Sigler’s struggles with the chronic immune disorder multiple sclerosis, saying, “I’m sure as you deal with a life-threatening illness — which as an alcoholic, I deal with a life-threatening illness — it brings into the forefront of your brain your own mortality,” Sagal said.

CONTINUE@People

The post Katey Sagal Tells Christina Applegate: Life-Threatening Alcoholism ‘Burned Down’ Her Music Career appeared first on Addiction/Recovery eBulletin.

Addiction Recovery Bulletin

BOOK SUGGESTION – 

Publication Date, March 4, 2025 – Deserted by her dad, the folk singer legend Donovan, Skye was a ninth-grade dropout who sought solace and validation in the eyes of audiences and dreamy costars like Keanu Reeves, River Phoenix, Matthew Perry, John Cusack, and Robert Downey Jr. Skye’s greatest weakness was musicians. On the heels of a toxic relationship with the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Anthony Kiedis, which began when she was just sixteen and he was twenty-four, the actress leapt into wedded bliss with her first great love, Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz. But marriage was not the magical hall pass to adulthood Skye had imagined. Awakening to her bisexuality and desperately insecure, she risked her fairytale marriage for a string of affairs with gorgeous nineties “bad girls.” The dream marriage imploded, and Skye’s trust in herself and her future along with it.

Set against a backdrop of rock royalty compounds, supermodel cliques, and classic late-century films like River’s Edge, Gas Food Lodging, and Wayne’s World, Say Everything is a wild ride of Hollywood thrills as well as a lyrical reflection on ambition, intimacy, and a messy, sexy, unconventional life.

CONTINUE@Amazon

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

AUDIO – LOST AND FOUND – 

March 10, 2025 – (Elena and Vadim live on the street) “This is not a blip. We are on track to return to levels of [fatal] overdose before fentanyl emerge.”  Overall drug deaths in the U.S. are down roughly a quarter, according to provisional CDC data. That includes fentanyl and other illicit drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine.

Dr. Nora Volkow, head of the U.S. government’s National Institute on Drug Abuse, said the decline in fatal overdoses linked to fentanyl is even greater.

Drug deaths in the U.S. have now dropped from a peak of 114,000 in August 2023 to just under 87,000, according to the latest provisional data from September 2024 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, where drug use has long been a widespread public health concern, many people told NPR they believe the situation has improved. “I can tell, you know, the numbers [of people dying] dropped a lot,” said Elena, who regularly smokes fentanyl and xylazine, also known as tranq.

NPR agreed not to use the last names of people who were interviewed about their drug use because the activity is illegal under state and federal law.

CONTINUE@NPR

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

AUDIO – STUPIDITY – 

March 11, 2025 – “Every part of the department will be impacted in some way but this is primarily a streamlining effort for internal facing rules, not external facing roles,” the official said, giving examples such as finding six separate strategic communication functions for different offices that will be consolidated. Advocates were already gearing up to fight to preserve the department through lawsuits and civic action when reports came in that Trump was going to sign an executive order directing the dismantling of the federal agency but then canceled the plans. “I expect that any actions to shutter the agency or to dismantle it will be challenged in the courts, and those challenges will prevail,” said Julie Margetta Morgan, a former deputy under secretary of Education during the Biden administration.

CONTINUE@TheHill

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

REDUNDANT? – 

March 3, 2025 – The stash house property also contained 23 firearms, including a shotgun kept where the drugs were stored, and the pills manufactured. In his car, Slocumb kept several firearms including a loaded .40 caliber pistol behind the front seat. In a suitcase in the trunk were a 9mm handgun with a high-capacity magazine and an AR-15 type rifle with a folding shoulder stock and a loaded 115-round drum magazine. Also in the suitcase was a 9mm firearm silencer.

During this conspiracy, law enforcement intercepted Slocumb and the ringleader Bryson Gill discussing kidnapping a rival drug dealer. Slocumb was surveilling the target’s apartment when law enforcement made a show of being in the vicinity to get Slocumb to leave and ward off any violence.

Following the stash house raid, Slocumb was heard on the wiretap discussing his plan to move drug operations to Arizona. Slocumb and Gill continued their drug trafficking in Arizona until they were arrested in March 2023. When law enforcement searched the Arizona property, they seized approximately 70 firearms and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

Slocumb pleaded guilty in November 2024 to conspiracy to distribute controlled substances and possession of a firearm in furtherance of a drug trafficking crime.

In asking for a 15-year sentence, prosecutors wrote to the court, “Slocumb’s conduct in the drug conspiracy involved massive numbers of firearms, as well as ammunition, firearms accessories, large capacity magazines, and a firearm silencer. It is clear that he played a trusted role in partnership with Gill in not just distributing drugs but acting as an enforcer—he took direction from Gill in picking up guns following a trip to get drugs from the stash house, and on another occasion, he conspired with Gill to kidnap a co-conspirator who was a drug redistributor.”

CONTINUE@DEA

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

VOLUNTEERS? –

March 7, 2025 – A hood will be placed on his head. A target will be over Brad Sigmon’s heart. The three volunteers with rifles about 15 feet away will complete his punishment, the United States’ first firing squad execution in 15 years. The bullet is designed to shatter on impact sending fragments meant to destroy the heart… 

CONTINUE@CBSNews

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