Report Calls for More Access to Take-Home Meds for Opioid Addictions

Addiction Recovery Bulletin

Pandemic relief –  

Jan. 5, 2021 – “To get methadone, you have to show up in person every day and have people watch you take the medications,” Burke said. “Imagine if you had diabetes and you had to show up to get insulin every day – people would often miss doses and have health problems. So it’s a huge barrier.”

Ideally, patients should have similar access to both methadone and buprenorphine, researchers said. But since buprenorphine is available by prescription only, those who don’t have health insurance or a primary care physician may not be able to get it — and doctors who are able to prescribe it aren’t always doing so. 

According to the report, “the median active buprenorphine provider in our sample in 2017 served only about half as many patients in a given month as they could have,” the report said. “Even more concerning, beginning in 2016, an increasing number of providers in our sample appear to have stopped prescribing buprenorphine altogether, despite continuing to prescribe other medications.”

Rhode Island officials should take a closer look at where buprenorphine prescribers are located, and figure out what might be keeping them from treating more people with buprenorphine, Burke said.

“One surprise is that some practitioners have said they treat zero patients with buprenorphine,” she said. “What is going on with them? Why did they burn out? We need to see if the regulatory oversight needs more work. We need to get to the bottom of this, and it’s not just in Rhode Island.”

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The Road to This Wedding Was Paved With Theft, Lies, Tears

Addiction Recovery Bulletin

Sobriety sometimes leads to marriage –  

Jan. 8, 2021 – The lessons from the love story of Irene Sibaja and Hal Karp are many, but here are some of the more obvious: The old dating adage “right person, wrong time” is real; forgiveness is a gift; sharing your darkest moments can have a positive outcome; and looking for an ex online can sometimes be a good idea.

Mr. Karp and Ms. Sibaja first met in 1993. Mr. Karp, who graduated from Southern Methodist University, had grown up in Denver and Dallas, the oldest of three children of David Karp and Renee Karp. Ms. Sibaja, from Houston, was the third of four children of Jane Root and the late Dr. Elihu Root. Ms. Sibaja graduated from Rice University and has an M.B.A. from Harvard, and was working in Dallas for Bain & Company in strategy consulting.

Mr. Karp was then a freelance writer and editor. He had organized an event, through a young adults’ group at Temple Emanu-El in Dallas, to update a playground he had designed a few years earlier for children with H.I.V. Ms. Sibaja went to volunteer. 

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James Argent Celebrates a Year After Overdosing

Addiction Recovery Bulletin

Happy to be alive – 

Jan. 2, 2021 – The 33-year-old sought help and weeks before Christmas 2020 he told his followers on Instagram that he was nearing the milestone of a year of sobriety.

“A year ago today on my birthday I was rushed into hospital after a near fatal drug overdose,” he said.

“Today I’m over 11 months clean & sober, If I can achieve this in 2020 with everything against me then I believe I can achieve anything. “Thank you for your love & best wishes. I will continue to make my family, friends & supporters proud of me.”

more@Yahoo

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Serious Side Effects of Smoking Pot Every Day

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.”

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Guy Eats a Ton of Poppy Seed Bagels and Takes Various Drug Tests to See if He Tests Positive for Opiates

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:

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Eminem re-learned to rap after near-fatal overdose

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.

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Men Find Community, Self-worth at Recovery Farm

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.” 

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Pharmacists Say Walmart Ignored Opioid Sales Red Flags

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.

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What Everyone Got Wrong About the Opioid Epidemic

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.

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Entrepreneur Helping Gamblers Beat Their Addiction

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.”

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