LISTEN – NO BOOZE IS GOOD BOOZE – Jan 30, 2021 – You don’t realize how many times an alcoholic is asked, “Why can’t you just have one glass and stop drinking?” I didn’t know. I wanted to answer that question so badly for so long. I could, and did, have periods of complete abstinence from drinking, like Dry January. The fact that I could do that, just stop drinking for five, 10 or 20 days, kept me wrapped warm in my disease of alcoholism for years. Decades. The not-dry decades. I told friends and family “see, I can’t be…
Author: Leonard Buschel
A FAMILY MATTER – Jan 29, 2021 – Some days her energy was endless. She’d go on massive shopping sprees. I pity the salespeople who encountered Ma’s wrath when her credit card was declined. My sister and I knew Ma wasn’t well, and we’d beg her to see a doctor. But that would tick her off, because she didn’t believe she was sick. Shannon Wallace grew up with me in Nashville and saw things unravel. “You went from a mother who was fully present, fully involved and attentive, to a mother who was vacant and often clearly in another place…
IT’S A DARK DEADLY DISEASE – Jan. 29, 2021 – Camden County deputies arrested a man and his girlfriend connected to his mother’s overdose death. Prosecutors charged Derick Beck, 24, of Camdenton and Morgan Walters, 23, of Camdenton with first degree involuntary manslaughter. Deputies responded to a home in Montreal on January 19 regarding an overdose death. Investigators say Beck supplied his mother with a purported controlled substance he created from other illicit ingredients. This substance was believed to be the cause of death… more@KOMU
STICK WITH THE WINNERS! – January 28, 2020 – Gretchen Burns Bergman is Executive Director and Co-Founder of A New PATH (Parents for Addiction Treatment & Healing), a non-profit organization that works to reduce the stigma associated with addictive illness through education and compassionate support and to advocate for therapeutic rather than punitive drug policies. She served as State Chairperson for Proposition 36 in 2000, which mandates treatment instead of incarceration for non-violent drug offenders in California, and she was one of the three signers of Prop 64 in 2016 to regulate and legalize marijuana. She is leading the international…
ONE YEAR AND A HALF AT A TIME – Jan. 27, 2021 – She “got clean” but six months later she fell off the wagon again and “lost everything.” “I lost my marriage. I lost my house I worked for 10 years to buy. My career started sinking. I lost all my friends. I was so resentful. So angry all the time. Really felt like the world owed me stuff,” she said on the podcast. “That went on for another four years.” But she sobered up again and has been going strong ever since. “I’m in the process of breaking…
LISTEN – WHEN WILL IT END? – Jan. 29, 2021 – “Our country is facing many simultaneous crises and President Biden understands that,” an administration official wrote in an email. “The President has laid out key plans to address the urgent opioid crisis and he will execute on these plans throughout his administration.” Officials pointed to its $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief proposal, which includes a request that Congress allocate an additional $4 billion to fund mental health and substance use disorder programs. The new administration has also appointed California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to head the Health and Human Services…
WHAT WOULD BILL AND BOB SAY? – Jan. 27, 2021 – Some of this is well-publicized. Unsurprisingly the anxiety, fear and isolation COVID-19 has caused lends itself to increased risks for alcoholism and substance abuse. Evidence shows overdoses increasing, and analysts noticed marked upticks in alcohol consumption from the very first week of stay-at-home restrictions. But while it’s relatively easy to track indicators of substance disorders, more difficult is assessing the challenges COVID poses to those ready to leave the bottles and baggies behind. Here, the growing pandemic-caused recovery gap is rooted in two truths: Getting sober is really…
WATCH – WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW – Jan. 29, 2021 – “You know what, I had one of those mamas, too, that used to tell me I was fat and ugly from the time I could remember,” Nichols admits in her own clip. “And then as I got older, I quit listening to that heifer!” Women around the world have been struggling with body image during the coronavirus pandemic, many taking to social media to share their worries. Facing criticism from dates, friends and strangers online is one thing, but many young women have revealed they even feel body-shamed…
YOU HOLDING? – Jan. 28, 2021 – The most important thing you can do to help someone with a substance use disorder is to be there for them without judgment. “You want to be supportive of someone seeking treatment, understanding of the challenges in doing so, recognizing that relapse can — and is likely to — occur, and acknowledging the work put in and helping them continue in treatment if relapse occurs at any point in their recovery process,” says Ruberto. Educating yourself about drug addiction allows you to understand their experience better and support them in a healthy,…
THE RECOVERY SHOW – Jan. 29,2021 – Though the Grammy Award-winner recalled years of shame, he reminded fans that there is always hope and self-growth in the road to recovery. “You work these 12 steps and you get better,” he explained. “You figure out your character defects. You say you’re sorry to some people. You have a spiritual awakening and you go out and you carry that message to someone else. The most meaningful step to healing is paying it forward, he says, which inspired him to start his own podcast, “The Recovery Show.” “We have to destigmatize this whole…
KEEP COMING BACK – Jan. 25, 2021 – This January, I would have been 15 years sober. In 2006, after 24 years of drinking addictively, I crawled — metaphorically — into a meeting of recovering alcoholics, got with the abstinence-based recovery programme, and never looked back. As the days and weeks turned into months and years, life turned from isolated black and white to connected full colour, so that the idea of ever drinking again seemed preposterous. I loved my sober life and all of its rewards, from a profound peace of mind and sense of useful purpose to…
A HOUSE IS NOT A HOME – Jan. 25, 2021 – Department officials said earlier this month that they were completing an internal review of draft regulations and planned to send them to the Attorney General’s Office by the end of January but couldn’t commit to a timeline for when licensing and oversight would begin. “I’m saddened by that because the longer it takes to set that up, the more individuals could pass away in these unstructured recovery homes,” said Amber Longhitano, a former council member in Bristol Township, Bucks County, who pushed state lawmakers to create oversight for recovery…
ONE ROTTEN APPLE? – Jan. 25, 2021 – According to the Boulder Police Department, detectives began investigating Yepes earlier this month after a female client reported he “repeatedly contacted her and initiated contacts that were sexual in nature.”A spokesperson with Mental Health Partners, Kristina Shaw, told CBS4 that Yepes worked full-time as a member of support staff in a group area and was not a licensed therapist. She said Yepes was terminated Dec. 1st, shortly after the initial complaint was received. Yepes had been hired Oct. 19th. Yepes was advised of the charges in court Monday afternoon. His bond was…
SUGGESTIONS TO GO BUY – Jan. 27, 2021 – While there’s no one-size-fits-all treatment strategy to address problematic drinking, many people turn to 12-step programs for peer support—most notably, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). For Whitaker, the program, which was developed in 1935 and requires participants to admit a powerlessness over alcohol, has never resonated. When Whitaker began exploring sobriety at age 32, she didn’t identify with the core concepts of the sobriety programs she encountered. So when she set out to design her own recovery program, she knew it had to address four major issues she perceived as problematic with…
WHEN IS IT TOO TOUGH? – January 12, 2021 – The years leading up to my being taken and the eventual break out is now a blur of misanthropy. I was reckless, taking my mom’s car out for joy rides without permission, skipping class, distrusting authority figures like the high school principal and local municipal authorities sent to curb my behavior, to put me back on a path more, how should we say, normal. In the nearly 12 months I’d spend between the experiential wilderness therapy program (twice), a therapeutic boarding school in Massachusetts and a residential treatment center on…
SUFFER THE CHILDREN, AND TEENS, TOO – Jan 12, 2021 – KRISSY WILLIAMS, 15, had attempted suicide before, but never with pills.The teen was diagnosed with schizophrenia when she was 9. People with this chronic mental health condition perceive reality differently and often experience hallucinations and delusions. She learned to manage these symptoms with a variety of services offered at home and at school. But the pandemic upended those lifelines. She lost much of the support offered at school. She also lost regular contact with her peers. Her mother lost access to respite care — which allowed her to…
YOU’RE CHECKING YOUR PHONE RIGHT NOW APRIL, 2020 – “He knew it the way an alcoholic just knows this will be his last drink of the night. So he went in with everything he had and then some (compliments of his margin account), and sat back to watch the exchange rate swing in his favor. And swing it did; only in the wrong direction. more@USNEWSU
BETTING REAL MONEY – Jan. 30, 2021 – But industry experts say Robinhood’s addictive elements have been such a well-known problem that rival startups, like Public and Titan, have been casting themselves as abbreviated or even outright opposite versions of Robinhood. Both companies said they hope to use different kinds of design choices to nudge their users in a more thoughtful direction. Titan co-CEO Joe Percoco said in an email that his company is the “polar opposite of Robinhood,” likening inexperienced Robinhood investors to hopping into a “fast new car, without driving instructions.” “Robinhood is designed and makes money based…
WAKE AND LIVE – Jan. 30, 2021 – “Our findings suggest that higher storefront cannabis dispensary counts are associated with reduced opioid-related mortality rates at the county level,” the authors write. “While the associations documented cannot be assumed to be causal, they suggest a potential association between increased prevalence of medical and recreational cannabis dispensaries and reduced opioid-related mortality rates.” The study by Greta Hsu, at the University of California, Davis, and Balázs Kovács, at Yale University, was published this week in The BMJ, a respected medical journal previous known as the British Medical Journal. It follows a Canadian study…
USE ONLY FOR TOOTHACHES – Jan. 30, 2021 – There are “stories of pool parties, people filling inflatables in the pool with nitrous oxide, so you could be just floating on it and huffing on it,” said Mike Jay, the author of “The Atmosphere of Heaven,” a book about the origins of nitrous. Decades later, a 2010 Village Voice article chronicled the Nitrous Mafia, a coalition of dealers who sold nitrous-filled balloons from gas tanks at raves and jam-band concerts, using violence to maintain their dominance. Concertgoers would consume so much nitrous they would pass out. (“I’ve watched so many…
“It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up.” –Vince Lombardi
BATTLING A DEMON – Jan. 20, 2021 – Those interwoven storylines follow Dr. Tyrone Brower (Oldman), a university professor who battles unexpected revelations about his research employer, a major pharmaceutical company bringing a new “non-addictive” painkiller to market; Jake Kelly (Hammer), an undercover DEA agent who attempts to infiltrate an international Fentanyl smuggling operation. more@EW
WATCH – HOLLYWOOD FICTION? – Jan. 26, 2021 – Over the past couple years, I’ve read several articles about shady rehab facilities and treatment programs, so when I was offered the opportunity to check out the new indie movie Body Brokers, I leapt at the chance. Now, Collider can exclusively debut a trailer and a poster for the indie crime drama, which hails from writer-director John Swab — himself a former addict… Indeed, as Body Brokers explains, when the Affordable Healthcare Act was signed in 2008, it required every healthcare provider to cover substance abuse treatment. Since the bill was…
LET’S PRAY IT DOES – Jan. 20, 2120 – Standard behavioral treatment for meth addiction typically involves highly structured group therapy, Volkow explained. Another option is a rewards-based motivational therapy, involving monetary incentives, although this controversial approach is largely deployed outside the United States. The study was led by Dr. Madhukar Trivedi, a professor of psychiatry at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. All participants were outpatients seeking to get their addiction under control at one of several treatment clinics across the country. The study unfolded in two stages over three months. In the first stage, patients (aged 18 to…
THEM AND US – Jan. 19, 2021 – On May 23, 2019, the day my son was coming home from college, I was flying to Warsaw for an awards ceremony. He texted me that he’d gotten home all right but complained that he was “in a lot of physical pain” because he’d been practicing backflips. On WhatsApp, the Sacklers were vetting an op-ed that the Purdue board chairman, Steve Miller, was about to publish in the Wall Street Journal. The piece bemoaned a “campaign of public vilification” and complained that Purdue was facing nearly two thousand separate lawsuits all…
LISTEN – HUH? – Jan. 19, 2021 – What does it take to get a man to listen — really listen — to women? Well, in Stuart Watson’s case, it took being slapped, fired and flat out told by his own wife that he wasn’t an empathetic listener. It also took a recovery from alcoholism, finding his birth family, coming to terms with abandonment and a slow-dawning realization that sometimes the story isn’t about him. The Peabody Award-winning former investigative journalist chronicles it all in his new memoir, “What She Said, What I Heard: How One Man Shut Up and…
READ THEM AND WEEP – Jan. 19, 2021 – This was the place where it happened, and the person on whom everything hinged was her mother — beautiful, capricious, cruel. Ditlevsen was a bright girl and a good student, and her mother’s moods were her earliest training; she had to learn to decipher them, learn to read her mother’s face. Poetry was an early consolation. “Long, mysterious words began to crawl across my soul like a protective membrane,” she writes. “When these light waves of words streamed through me, I knew that my mother couldn’t do anything else to…
WATCH – SATIRE OR BAD TASTE? – Jan. 20, 2021 – Oatly’s new ‘Help Dad’ campaign and website are designed to help young persuade their parents to give up dairy and switch to oat milk and is filled with recipes, tips, arguments and other resources. Stated on the website, Oatly explain:“Whether your Dad just needs some helpful reminders because he already gets that ditching dairy can save the planet loads of carbon emissions… Or, if he needs more of a total reprogramming because he is pretty much good with watching the planet burn so long as he can do it…
TIME TO FREE ALL POT DEALERS – Dec. 2020 – In the 1960s, I was the first federal drug agent to arrest a student on a college campus for sale of marijuana. In the 1970s and ‘80s, as head of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s New England office, I supervised the seizure of hundreds of tons of marijuana. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, leading the New York field office, I spearheaded the agency’s battle against crack. Since then, I have educated schools, physicians and others on substance abuse addiction and prevention. In terms of marijuana, the political landscape has changed drastically.…
FRIES SURPRISE – Jan. 19, 2021 – #2. You might have never guessed that your favorite bag of chips can increase your risk for cancer. According to the American Cancer Association, a chemical called acrylamide that appears in processed foods has carcinogenic properties and can lead to a variety of cancers. This comes as terrible news for chip lovers—potato chips contain high levels of this chemical, and they present a very direct avenue through which many people consume acrylamide. You might assume that there’s no way potato chips could present the same dangers as a high-risk carcinogen like nicotine,…