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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

Prisons are Dangerous –  

Sept. 3, 2020 – This semi-normal life, combined with my White skin and the fact that I lived in an under-policed suburban neighborhood, allowed me to evade criminal justice involvement for years.

All good things come to an end. I was arrested for the first time at age 23, still in my work uniform from the pizza place. Possession of heroin was a Class B felony in Oregon at the time. I knew that if I was found guilty, I would likely lose my EMT license and any chance of a future career in the medical field. I was pretty sure it would also ruin my financial aid and make it hard for me to find housing or jobs. A felony is forever. It was as if being addicted to heroin wasn’t miserable enough and the system making things more miserable would make me stop using. 

Motivated by the fear of that felony, I opted for drug court. If I successfully completed it, the charge would be wiped from my record. So I went to detox and then a drug treatment program (thanks to still being covered by my mom’s health insurance). I also got lucky and found a Suboxone doctor who was accepting patients. 

I was doing better—using only occasionally—until I was arrested by the sheriff’s office. A scrap of plastic they’d found in my mess of a car was swabbed and tested positive for heroin. It could have been in there for months. After I was taken into custody, they supposedly found less than a tenth of gram embedded in the seat upholstery.

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

Staying in the Groove –

Sept. 2, 2020 – “Hey y’all guys, this is my newest piece, I hope you like it,” the reality star, 37, wrote in his caption. “Also I just put out a YouTube video where you can watch me draw a cool picture in timelapse! (Don’t forget to help me out and subscribe, and see my next videos as they come out). God bless.”

It appears the eldest child of the Brown brood is exploring his talents and creativity these days. Just last month, Matt posted a portrait of himself gazing up at the sky and shared how much he enjoyed his hike following his lifestyle change.

more@InTouch

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

We all are! –

Sept. 3, 2020 – In many ways, the current crisis makes it even more important and feasible for people to seek help. For a generation that lives and works online, having the option of Zoom treatment or a virtual Alcoholics Anonymous meeting can encourage more people to seek support in ways that are second nature to them. That includes me. I have been in recovery since March of this year, and these six months have been disorienting, plodding, bizarre and miraculous. In December of 1979, my father walked into a rehab facility in Salina, Kansas to be treated for alcoholism. He got to have his big front door rehab entrance moment – very dramatic and flashy!

Not me. In March, I ended up in a hospital in Washington, D.C., delivered by (I’m told) kind EMTs. This was thanks to the quick thinking and huge hearts of my father and my best friend, who together insisted those first responders kick in my apartment door.

more@NBCNews

The post ‘How lucky I am to be alive right now’: Alcohol recovery in the time of COVID-19 appeared first on Addiction/Recovery eBulletin.

Addiction Recovery Bulletin

Stick with the Winners!

Bob Messinger’s film, LOCKDOWN: The emotional impact of Covid-19 and Quarantine, premieres Wednesday on the REEL Recovery Film Channel. Click here to register for FREE TICKETS. Bob Messinger has studied screenwriting under some of the brightest writers in both New York and L.A. His scripts have placed in competitions such as Francis Ford Coppola’s 2006 American Zoetrope Contest (Semi-Finalist), the 2012 ENDAS International Screenwriting Expo (Best Script), the 2011 Garden State Film Festival competition (Finalist), and eleven of his scripts have been winners in the Indie Gathering International Screenwriting Competition (2012-2020). His first production, “Dongmei” may be seen on Amazon Prime and “Over the Line” is currently finishing its festival run. Bob was inducted into the Indie Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 2018.

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Q. Where did you grow up?
A. I grew up in suburban Philadelphia

Q.  From what school or teacher did you learn the most?
A. Vinnie LaBarbera was my journalism advisor in college. I learned the importance of ethical storytelling from him.

Q.  If you had an extra million dollars, which charity would you donate it to?
A.  I’d probably split it between St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital and NAMI.

full profile@AddictionRecoveryeBulletin

FREE TICKETS TO LOCKDOWN SCREENING

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

WATCH – She had to have something –

Sept. 1, 2020 – Ms Owen was warned from a young age about the dangers of narcotics. But struggling with her mental health as a young adult, she began to “dabble” in party drugs as a means of escape. 

“It sort of went from you know, a more acceptable pile of drugs to these hotter drugs,” she said.

“In the end, heroin and meth got the large majority of us, and there were about five or six of us that ended up in rehab.”

Ms Owen moved to Sydney to break her addiction and was prescribed valium to quell her anxiety. But the treatment only added to her woes when her meth addiction returned.

“My life really started falling apart, I couldn’t keep it together anymore,” she said.

“I was using lots of different drugs at once just to sort of feel normal again and that was just purely to treat an underlying anxiety and an underlying emptiness.”

Ms Owen is now in recovery and is working in the harm reduction field, hoping to change the stigma surrounding drug overdoses.

She said it’s been hard work every day to get where she is now, but the effort has been worth it.

more@SBS

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

Real Family Values –  

Sept. 2, 2020 – “Happy birthday Daxy,” the proud wife continued. “Thank you for dedicating your life to the hard and wonderful work of sobriety, so that we could share it with you. Xo K, L & D.” Last fall, the “Armchair Expert” podcast host spoke to The Huffington Post about sober parenting, revealing his occasional jealousy of buddies who can indulge themselves, especially while on vacation.

“We vacation almost exclusively with three other families who all have kids, and certainly at night, I’m super jealous of them because I’m like, f–k yeah I would love to drink something that turned down the volume of everyone in this house,” Shepard said. “So I’m a little bit jealous in the evenings.” Come daylight, however, things always seem to balance out.

more@PageSix

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

MEDIA: Book Review –

August 4, 2020 – The eye of astrophysics reaches a great deal farther now. Cosmologists calculate the curve and complete the figure by employing a potent arsenal of instruments and methodologies. Optical, radio, X-ray and gamma ray telescopes on mountaintops and in space, underground neutrino detectors and gravitational-wave observatories extend our sight to the edges of the universe. But what that really means is that they extend our sight into the past. This is perhaps the most basic fact of cosmology, sometimes taken for granted, and Mack explains it elegantly. Telescope users have a window into time. Light travels at finite speed, so everything comes to us with its own time delay. We see the sun not as it is now but as it was eight minutes ago. All we can know of a galaxy 10 billion light-years away is what it looked like 10 billion years ago, when the universe was young. “We can look even farther back,” she writes, “and see matter swirling into supermassive black holes in a universe less than 500 million years old, when starlight had only just begun to penetrate the darkness between galaxies.”

more@NYTimes

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

WATCH – A show showing the reality –  

August 31, 2020 – That’s why she decided to let others see what the battle of addiction looks like. It’s a story that – while it may be difficult to watch, and difficult for Lipinski, her students and staff to live through each day – is one that needs to be told, she said. That particular year at the school, much of which was caught on camera, was particularly difficult, said Lipinski. Eight members of the school community died that year – a current student, a former student working as an intern, and others who had attended the school in the past. Those losses are catastrophic for a small student body – the school had 55 students last year.

But the benefits of allowing the rest of America in to see what it’s like for teenagers and young adults battling addiction, and the work that can be done to help them via intervention, is worth it, Lipinski said.

“Definitely for me and for my staff, and for my students and their families, the benefit [is] being able to normalize it,” she said in a recent interview with Boston.com, noting that families of her students supported having the school’s story told.

more@Boston

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

American Horror Story –  

 Sep. 1, 2020 – According to a Department of Public Health report released Monday, 441 people died of an overdose in 2019. That is more than one per day for an entire year, and an astronomical jump from the 259 overdoses recorded in 2018. Fifty-four percent of the deaths in 2019 were related to fentanyl, a drug that can be 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine.

“This doesn’t surprise any of us,” said Kristen Marshall, who manages the Drug Overdose Prevention and Education (DOPE) project at the National Harm Reduction Coalition, a city-funded program that coordinates San Francisco’s response to overdoses. “We had been sounding the alarm bells for the last three, four, even five years. We said fentanyl is coming.” Monday’s report confirms what many already knew: Fentanyl is killing more people as it becomes increasingly prevalent on San Francisco’s streets, and the city doesn’t have adequate services to handle the surge. The report also showed that the majority of overdoses occurred among Black people, men and those in their 50s.

more@SFChronicle

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

Program of difficult options –

August 30, 2020 – Societal judgments create shame when people attempt to receive addiction recovery treatment. DePasquale said that is why some people do not reach out for help sooner.

“People feel ashamed and embarrassed, and it makes the topic not spoken about. Alcoholism isn’t a moral failing,” said DePasquale. “It’s a medically recognized disease, and it takes more than someone saying to get over it.”

When stigmas influence an individual, it creates limitations that make a person question if they are worthy of being helped or if the disease has led them on too far.

Desperately asking what to do, Debbie received no answers. She constantly followed her son around town, did his schoolwork and obsessed over whether she could fix him. Debbie soon realized how powerful addiction was.

Addiction is one of those barriers that limit people from searching for the tools necessary to guide and support them. But through Al-Anon, acceptance and personal recovery are two of the first steps to moving on.

“Recovery is stronger than addiction,” said DePasquale. “We cannot change everything on our own, but we can accept the flaws that represent the struggles of someone we know faces.”

Being deeply engaged in a stressful situation can be a challenge to break away from, but Debbie learned to do just that.

“I’ve learned to practice compassion and learn how to lovingly detach from trying to control the management of someone else’s disease,” said DePasquale.

more@EagleNews

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