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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

Voice of recovery –  

December 8, 2020 – If you had told me 15 years ago that I would grow up to be an IV-using, heroin-addicted shell of a person, I would have never believed you. I grew up in a devoutly religious family. We were homeschooled, raised with morals, values and manners. We were shielded from the darkness of the world outside. As the middle child of eight children, it was quite often that I was able to slide under the radar, the attention never being on me (which always served me quite well).

I obviously never intended to grow up and become a drug addict, but life had other plans. The very first drug I tried at 15 years old was an opiate, and to this day I can still vividly remember how it made me feel. I felt like I had never felt before. An escape from an uncertain, cruel, cold world. After that experience, I dabbled with other substances, as most teenagers do. But eventually, it all came back to opiates. To the feeling of escaping, completely.  At 23, I went into rehab for the first time at the urging of my family. I went through detox, inpatient and outpatient. I moved into my very first apartment by myself and I was thriving for a short while, until I made the decision that I wanted to not feel anymore — I wanted to escape again. Life had become overwhelming and sad. I wanted to feel something and nothing at the same time, and I found that once again in heroin.

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

Happy. Sober. Free! –

December 2020 – Learn secrets on how to cultivate freedom, confidence, joy and abundance in sobriety! Free online show! Hosted by Emily Killeen.

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

What a wonderful way to live! – 

Dec. 13, 2020 – The spot — part of CRI-Help’s “Fight” campaign — debuts on the eve of the center’s 50th anniversary and is aimed at raising awareness around substance abuse recovery. It arrives during the holiday season, a time known to be challenging for some struggling with drug and alcohol addictions, not to mention during a global pandemic that has increased isolation and fueled financial insecurity for many Americans.

Says CRI-Help COO Brandon Fernandez, “The physical and emotional triggers often imbued in this time of year can lead to increases in drug and alcohol consumption. Over the last decade, CRI-Help has consistently seen an uptick in admissions right before and after the holidays. We want people to know that we are here to help.”

In the moody spot, Trejo fights his demons — literally and figuratively — in and out of a boxing ring. He appears alongside four CRI-Help counselors (and onetime clients), none of whom had any prior acting experience. “Casting former clients who are now role models at CRI-Help helps add to the authenticity of the piece and reinforces the value of one addict working with another,” says A.J. Lewis, CRI-Help board member and Emmy-winning producer of the campaign.

The ads are helmed by Clio Award-winning director Sean Ross, and all creative talent involved donated their time and services to the nonprofit.

Seeing Trejo in a ring will be a familiar image for those who know his backstory as a top prison boxer at California’s San Quentin State Prison, where he spent time for armed robbery in the 1960s. It was there that Trejo found recovery and got clean. He’s been sober for 52 years.

“Everything good that has happened to me has happened as a direct result of helping someone else,” says Trejo, who detailed his journey in the Brett Harvey-directed feature documentary Inmate #1: The Rise of Danny Trejo.

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

One soul helping another… – 

Dec. 9, 2020 – At first, he said, the politicians saw his priest’s collar and dismissed him as just another do-gooder but, after presenting them with the cost of incarceration, he got some attention and support.

“I proved it was cost-effective,” Young said in 2008. “That’s how I got credibility,” and, eventually, “after years of work, Young won support for decriminalizing alcoholism,” The Enterprise editorialized in 2012. That’s what enabled people to get help: When they no longer had to admit to being a criminal to attend Alcoholics Anonymous, Young said.

Father Young “spawned a movement,” The Enterprise wrote in a 2014 editorial. “He changed the way lawmakers and the public look at alcoholics and drug addicts. With this perception came help, real help, to set people on the course to productive lives.”

In the 1980s, Father Young was ahead of the state in setting up an Honor Court program to offer non-violent offenders who had committed alcohol- or drug-related crimes an opportunity to go to drug treatment instead of jail. 

Father Young would go on to run 121 not-for-profit addiction treatment and rehabilitation programs that treated more than 18,000 people each day.

But he was ahead in another important way, too. 

When people with addictions would emerge from a program like Young’s, or after convicts served their time, they can often end up where they started — on drugs or in jail. 

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

Mormons gone wild –  

Dec. 9, 2020 – Jen goes outside with Heather to remind us that it cannot be later than 1 p.m. and to give Lisa a chance to stir the pot a bit further. They come back in so Mary can call Heather a hypocrite with “very many faces” and Jen a “ghetto hoodlum.” Jen then brings up a previous incident in which Mary told her that if there were Black people outside of a 7-Eleven, she would go to a different 7-Eleven. Absolute yikes. This feud keeps getting deeper and more insidious and seems destined to rage until the end of time. Jen finally leaves, and Mary asks for her $1,200 AirPods back. No word on the betta fish or the Women Helping Women in Business journal set, but it would have been nice to at least offer them up to Valter and Arturo as a drop in the restitution bucket.

The next day, the dust settles as Meredith gives Brooks the postgame report, Lisa tells her kid he’s getting two birthday parties, and Mary puts on the boots from her grandma’s high-school majorette uniform so she can pour protein powder into a blender and demand her housekeeper put on a beatboxing performance. Nothing to see here! At Heather’s house, we find out her ex is great at making his child-support payments and that Heather lets her daughter Ashley break ye olde Mormon rule about not going to multiple dances in a row with the same boy. Her boyfriend, Jaydon, plans actual dates and knows his way around the back end of the Supreme website, so here’s hoping they last long enough for us to see his hair reach tiny-ponytail length (we’re close! Maybe six more weeks). Heather also tells her daughters they can skip church the following day if they want, because what’s one more week without going? Say what you will about her “I’m not a regular mom — I’m a cool mom” energy, but this is merely giving kids age-appropriate agency in the face of community pressure not to, and, honestly, it’s really refreshing to see.

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

A merrier Christmas for sure – 

Dec. 9, 2020 – Just this week, The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHRMC) released new guidelines around alcohol consumption. Under the recommendations, they suggested adults should drink no more than 10 standard drinks in a week and no more than four in one day.

Retrofitting these guidelines onto my previous drinking habits makes it pretty clear that my behaviour was unhealthy. I don’t think I ever had just 4 drinks in one day and definitely wasn’t sticking to the 10 a week suggestion either.

When everyone around you is doing the same thing and drinking the same amount as you, it’s difficult to take a step back and critically think about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. 

Drinking was such a habitual thing for me and the cornerstone of most of my social life. If there was a brunch I was going to, it was probably boozy, if I was catching up with a friend, we were catching up over drinks. Alcohol gradually became something that facilitated most of my social interactions.

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

Do not offer to buy her one drink… –  

Nov. 26, 2020 – How she deals with it is a whole different story – if she hadn’t had that much of a booze-filled night with Alex, she maybe could have pieced the night together. In fact, in the trailer, we hear her clearly say, “I’m a crazy drunk flight attendant, not a killer,” and while we can’t tell if the latter is true, the former sure is.

Dealing with her drinking habit seems to not be her priority though considering she’s still trying to figure out who killed Alex — it’s just ironic that a drunken night filled with drunk sex is what led her to this daunting reality in the first place. The first three episodes of ‘The Flight Attendant’ premiere on HBO Max Thursday, November 26, followed by the launch of two new episodes on December 3, two episodes on December 10, and the finale episode on December 17.

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

One solo at a time –  

Dec. 11, 2020 – The Bronx native’s drive to help fellow addicts led to his diving into a four-day-a-week, five-month training program to become a substance abuse counselor in training and certified recovery coach. Byrd also recorded two albums composed of songs that “…deal with addiction, recovery, hope and change for the better,” he said. The first outing came via 2017’s Clean Getaway followed up by the recently released Sobering Times. A true family affair, this project, like its predecessor, features photographic contributions by college student daughter Frankie. Byrd also made both albums 12 songs long (“the same number as a certain recovery program”) and made sure both releases follow a distinct theme.

“Each one of these songs speaks to some aspect and angle of either addiction or recovery,” Byrd explained. “I try to have a solution at the end of each song and try to be positive. On this record compared, to the last one, I tried to widen the path of what the messages were. Part of it is business—I wanted to get some airplay too. I don’t mention drugs or alcohol at all. It’s about getting knocked down, getting back up and coming back stronger.”

A rock and roll die-hard dating back to the first time he saw the Rolling Stones and Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show as a 12-year-old who decided that’s what he wanted to do with his life, Byrd describes his material as “…a product of what I listened to between the ages of 13 to 20 style-wise.” obering Times finds Byrd reteaming with bass-playing co-producer Bob Stander and penning songs with a number of longstanding collaborators including Aerosmith songwriter Richie Supa and New York City singer-songwriter Willie Nile, both of whom Byrd has known for four decades. The guitar-driven delights include the glammy stomper “Together” (featuring Blackhearts drummer Thommy Price), the mando-guitar-soaked gratitude track “Hear My Song” and the Georgia Satellites-flavored shuffle “Tired.” One of the album’s many highlights is a rollicking cover of the Merle Haggard classic “The Bottle Let Me Down” featuring the kind of accompaniment that would put a smile on the face of late Chuck Berry pianist Johnnie Johnson. Equally resonant is the melancholy acoustic number “Pour Me,” a nod to a Harold Arlen/Johnny Mercer standard.

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

Death Marches On –  

December 6, 2020 – In a study published in JAMA Psychiatry this week, researchers monitoring an emergency medical systems database in 47 states found that medics were responding to more than double the number of overdose-related cardiac arrests in May, at the height of the pandemic lockdowns, than they had in 2018 and 2019.

“There have been controversies around the lockdowns — people arguing the treatment is worse than the disease, that it’s going to cause mental health and substance use issues, and that we shouldn’t have lockdowns,” said Leo Beletsky, a Northeastern University professor who runs the school’s Health in Justice Action Lab and was one of the study’s authors.  “That’s not what we’re saying. What we’re saying is that when you design COVID response measures, you have to keep in mind that additional measures are necessary to mitigate the negative consequences of these mandates to stay home,” he said.

“People need access to [overdose reversal drugs] and treatment. People need access to economic and social supports. And in all of those, the COVID response measures are really lacking.”  In Philadelphia, between January and March 2020, 273 people died from overdoses. Between April and June, there were 309 fatal overdoses — the highest number in a single quarter since the third quarter of 2017.

“It’s preliminary still, but Quarter 3 of 2020 is going to look even worse than that,” said Kendra Viner, the director of the Division of Substance Use Prevention and Harm Reduction at the city health department.

The drugs driving the city’s fatal overdoses are shifting as well. More people are dying with a combination of a stimulant like cocaine and the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl in their systems. Prescription opioids — long targeted by law enforcement and the medical community — are much less of a factor than illicit drugs. Philadelphia’s heroin supply, once famous for its purity, now is virtually all tainted with fentanyl, officials say.

And finding victims with a combination of stimulants and opioids, which act as depressants, suggests fentanyl contamination is spreading, killing drug users who never built up a tolerance for opioids, making even a small dose of fentanyl deadly, health officials said.

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

WATCH – It works if you work it? – 

Dec. 8, 2020 – But many of the workers in these rehab programs are not receiving pay. By not paying recovering drug and alcohol abusers, these programs do not provide the most effective approach to healing patients. Moreover, such arrangements are wrong — and illegal.

Most rehab programs that require work act essentially as temp agencies, farming the rehab residents out to commercial enterprises. The work is often for third parties, such as tree trimming services, dairies, poultry processing plants or oil refineries. The wages are remitted not to the workers but to the rehab centers. In many cases, these workers are not receiving the benefits of a hard day’s work, working for no pay, no Social Security credits, no unemployment insurance payment, with all of the fruits of their labor accruing to the treatment centers.

Other rehab-affiliated programs, notably the Salvation Army, have their patients perform grossly underpaid work for their commercial enterprises — if they did not have this captive workforce, they would have to seek labor from the open market.

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