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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

SMOKE GETS IN THEIR EYES – 

April 7, 2021 – “No one noticed at first,” the comic reads in the beginning. “The changes were subtle.” So subtle, in fact, that a basketball player emanates billowing clouds of green gas from his body as his teammate, terrified, looks up at him from the floor. It only gets worse. A girl who “usually maps out her whole year before breakfast” has no summer plans. The basketball player can’t make a shot.

Oblivious to this looming threat, two young scientists in the school lab—Javier and Amy—have meanwhile invented a device to see into the future.

The green vapor spreads. Eventually, a group of possessed students corner Amy and Javier in a parking lot, as the pair figure out that their classmates must be “being controlled.” Then Amy gets captured. What does this menace want? To control first the town, followed by the world—“until every teen was in its thrall.” 

It’s not until Javier uses his device to help everyone see into their future—and the “true cost” of the “malevolent chaos” afflicting them—that they fight back and defeat the foe.

“If you vape, nicotine addiction can take control of you,” warns a final panel. The repercussions of seeing your future laid out before your eyes are not further explored.

more@FilterMag

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

IT’S ALL IN THE BOOK – 

April 12, 2021 – Audrey told me they fought a lot when he stayed with her. She didn’t want him doing drugs in her house, and often noticed cash missing. “I was so furious with him when you were there over the weekends and I could tell he was high,” she told me, her voice cracking a little.

She said that she was never sure if he actually liked her or if he just didn’t want to have to take a bus to work every day. She was not holding back. She was telling me all the little angry private thoughts that she had then, that she’d held onto. She was telling me what she really thought of my father, like I’d been trying to get everyone I’d interviewed to do. But now I felt defensive of him, suspicious that she was exaggerating, romanticizing the idea of having known a junkie once in her own artist heyday. Audrey described what she called his ‘lair,’ a little hovel tucked away in the corner of the Academy Studios warehouse where he would collect scraps of leftover materials and periodically hide to work on his own projects.

“He treated it like his personal art supply store,” Audrey said. “He stole so much stuff!”

He used to smuggle out supplies for us to play with: little Ziploc bags full of incredibly lifelike fake eyes, plaster molds of lizard scales, scraps of fake fur. It was one of the things that made him magical: pockets always full of treasure.

more@Salon

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

HAND TO HAND COMPASSION – 

April 14, 2021 – HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT, New England non-profit, The Connecticut Community for Addiction Recovery (CCAR), has developed an industry-leading training department that has trained a total of 55,000 individuals and grown markedly during COVID-19. Building on a history of service to the recovery community, CCAR has worked since 1998 to support individuals and communities affected by substance use by providing recovery support services, advocacy efforts, and training initiatives. 

The role of recovery coach as an integral part of systems of care for those affected by substance use disorder (SUD) has grown rapidly in the past ten years, with CCAR leading it’s development by way of personally providing this service in a variety of venues. In 2006, the organization’s leadership saw the need to personally begin creating and providing curricula specifically designed to establish a level of professionalism and legitimacy for this emerging role with the hopes of expanding its availability worldwide. What resulted was the creation of a new department within the organization – CCAR Training. 

Since then, CCAR Training has provided recovery coach training to tens of thousands of individuals domestically in forty different states and abroad in Canada, Sweden, Vietnam, and the United Kingdom and created a new means for vetting competency among recovery coaches called the Recovery Coach Professional (RCP) designation.  

The global leader in recovery coach training, CCAR Training’s catalog of curricula consists of seven different first-of-its-kind trainings, including the internationally respected “Recovery Coach Academy” (RCA) – a week long immersion in the tenets of recovery coaching, delivered by facilitators widely respected in America’s recovery movement and with extensive experience working in the addiction services field. 

more@EINNEws

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

BOOZY ESSAY – 

April 15, 2021 – I got bored of so much drinking. One night, I looked down into my half-empty stem glass and sighed, like, “You again?” It became as monotonous as remote learning, and it wasn’t rewarding anymore. After the first few sips, I found myself chasing a feeling that had abandoned me, like trying to feel the heat of the sun after it had set. The second and third glasses just made that wonderful sunny feeling, and all feelings, more elusive. The evening slid by in a haze of sauvignon blanc and streaming TV. In the morning, I would think, “I’m worn out, maybe I’ll take a night off,” but by the late afternoon, the message was, “Almost time for my drink.”

The negative effects of my drinking were so subtle, it took years to believe they were really there: impatience with my daughter’s bedtime avoidance (reorganizing her t-shirt drawer at 9:30 p.m.); drowsiness (dozing off in her bed while she reorganized); anxiety in the middle of the night (pandemic!); and disappointment with myself the next morning. (“You don’t even want to be drinking anymore.”) The process of deciding to stop was a long argument with myself that I lost over and over again.

A person isn’t labeled an alcoholic anymore — she has an “alcohol use disorder.” It’s the substance that’s the problem, not the substance user. But maybe my problem wouldn’t be a problem for you. I do not have the problem my father had, with his weakness for scotch in the afternoons. He came from the generation of drinkers that thought if it wasn’t hard liquor, it didn’t even count. Wine and beer were what they drank after they quit real booze.

more@WBUR

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

WATCH – HARM REDUCTION ARGUMENT – 

April 15, 2021 – Five years after B.C. declared the overdose and illicit drug crisis a public health emergency, a panel of community advocates discuss how far Canada has come in its fight against illicit drugs and how much still needs to be done.

more@CBC

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

NAKED SOUL – 

April 12, 2021 – Lena Dunham is ready for mental health to not be considered a secret anymore. The multitalented star revealed on The Drew Barrymore Show that she at first was resistant to seek treatment given the stigma surrounding addiction. “We are in a culture that sees illness as weakness,” Dunham explained. “We are in a culture that sees sick women as hysterical women and we are in a business that doesn’t look kindly at illness because people are working at such a pace with so much money involved that for people to be in any way unable to show up or potentially a liability and so I wanted to bring it out into the open.” Dunham suffers from endometriosis, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and autoimmune arthritis; her medical ailments led to various prescriptions, resulting in her pill addiction, per Entertainment Tonight Canada. “I just remember being so terrified of the idea of disappointing people that really for me, at first, I was like ‘If I can take these drugs and they make me more like myself, isn’t that a better thing?’” Dunham questioned. “And then suddenly I realized I was becoming less and less like myself and suddenly it was like sobriety wasn’t a choice for me.” 

On April 10, 2021, Dunham took to Instagram to celebrate three years of sobriety. “If you are caught in a cycle of pain and shame around addiction, you are so far from alone,” Dunham captioned. “Thank you for the love you’ve shown me in the last 3 years as I’ve crawled further away from the center of the storm- but in the process I’ve realized it’s continually storming (that’s alright) AND the sun is shining too. It always was.” 

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

A LEGEND IN OUR MIDST – 

April 13, 2021 – When Oleg passed, he left me his autobiography to complete. As I interviewed top Soviet actors and directors, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Walter Hill, Roger Donaldson, as well as friends and colleagues across three continents, I decided his story was worth a film. … Oleg Vidov was born with an angel on his shoulder in a now-dead totalitarian country that did not tolerate the concept of individual freedom or rule of law. Travel outside the USSR was a privilege denied to all but a small number of the cultural elite but because his mother was a well-respected specialist in the field of literacy, he spent his early childhood in exotic Mongolia and in bombed-out Leipzig, a city in Soviet-controlled East Germany. There he learned piano, which he would play for the rest of his life, to speak German, and to be precise. During his three childhood years in the Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, on the Chinese border, he discovered cinema watching the pre-war films produced by the USSR and the American trophy films like Tarzan and Grapes of Wrath that the Soviet troops pilfered from Joseph Goebel’s archives in Potsdam. He entered the workforce at the age of 14 when his mother became too ill to work…

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

LOCK DEM UP? – 

April 16, 2021 – “I want to make my arguments to him, as many other advocates will,” Schumer said. “But at some point we’re going to move forward, period.”

Schumer is likely worried, at least in part, about a primary challenge from the left in the future — something Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has openly discussed.

But there’s a bigger issue here for Biden. Increasingly, the president is out of step with not just his party but the country and perhaps even most Republicans on marijuana legalization.

Marijuana legalization is extremely popular. Gallup and the Pew Research Center, two of the country’s leading polling organizations, have consistently found at least two-thirds of Americans back legalization. Support is so high that, at this point, a majority of Republicans — who are generally more skeptical of drug policy reforms — may support it. Pew found 55 percent of Republicans back legalization. Gallup found a slim majority of Republicans supported it in 2017, 2018, and 2019. That reversed in 2020, but the difference between support and opposition among Republicans was still within the sampling margin of error. And, at any rate, a solid minority of 48 percent were behind it.

more@Vox

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

LISTEN – SLIMS OUT – BLUNTS IN – 

April 8, 2021 – Michael Wilson at United Food and Commercial Workers Local 400 says prohibiting worker misclassification and union busting actually fits in nicely with the purpose of the new industry. 

“This is an industry that was specifically designed to combat some of the problems and failures that were caused by the War on Drugs,” explains Wilson. “And specifically the impact on certain communities, especially Black communities and brown communities.” 

The issue of what kind of worker protections exist for the newly-created marijuana industry is likely to be one of the key debates in the next General Assembly session in 2022. 

more@WVTF

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

STUCK IN THE WEEDS – 

April 17, 2021 – It’s important to note that smoking marijuana doesn’t come without risks, particularly if you do it every day. Here is what could possibly happen, so you can be aware of the risks…”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.”

more@EatThis

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