Addiction

Marijuana In Recovery — Why Not?

May 2, 2013 by Recovery Blogger Leave a Comment

“If caffeine and nicotine are accepted in the program, and they are both mood-altering substances, how come weed isn’t? Pretty soon doctors will be able to prescribe it. They already can prescribe it in some states.”

Most drugs are useful and manageable when properly prescribed and used, but history has made it clear that such is often not the case. Doctors can prescribe Oxycontin, and you can buy beer at the gas station. However, legality has absolutely nothing to do with addiction. (And it has never been shown that doctors are the best source of ideas for staying sober, except in the very rare cases when they are specifically trained to treat addiction.)

The First Step reads, “We admitted we were powerless over (alcohol) (our addictions) – that our lives had become unmanageable.” It doesn’t say and that our lives had become unmanageable. Our lives were unmanageable because we were powerless over a drug.

There are many different kinds of mood-altering substances. Some are clearly problems, some less so, some aren’t problems at all, and some are problematic over such long periods that we tend to think they’re not major issues. Nicotine is an excellent example. Tobacco products are the number-one preventable cause of death in the world, yet the next cigarette, cigar, chew or dip isn’t likely to be the one that kills us – as far as we can know. Obviously there is, at some point, a level of exposure that makes the difference, but we can’t see it and it’s easy to ignore.

Denial, as they say, is not just a river in Africa. And, for the record, many treatment centers no longer permit nicotine use during treatment and strongly encourage newcomers to quit smoking. Their position is that an addiction is an addiction, and that we are either ready to be clean or we are not. While nicotine may be an “outside issue” in AA, it certainly isn’t in NA, but in both cases the fellowships take the position that the drugs with the most serious immediate effects need to take priority, and experience has shown that to be the case. No fellowship that I know of, however, has ever stated that they believe nicotine to be harmless.

Caffeine, in anything like reasonable quantities (200-250 mg. a day, not five energy drinks), is unlikely to make our lives unmanageable. Small quantities, in fact, are now believed to be good for us, especially if gotten from brewed coffee.

Drugs like alcohol, opioids, barbiturates, benzodiazepines and – yes – weed, are a different story. All have been shown, in repeated scientific studies that have been published in reputable scientific journals for the review of any expert who wishes to challenge them, to have both short-term and long-term effects that can negatively affect both users and the people around them.

Marijuana works on the same pathways in the brain as other drugs of abuse. As long as those pathways are kept active, the brain cannot make the repairs that allow long-term recovery to be successful. From that standpoint alone, there is no place for marijuana in recovery.  Nicotine works in a slightly different way, and does not seem to impair recovery as much.  However, recent research has indicated that it may have more undesirable effects than has been believed.

From an overall point of view, consider that the purpose of recovery is to learn to live a healthy, productive life without the crutch of drugs – to face life on life’s terms, to learn to live, love and prosper in a healthy way, and fit into the rest of society.

There are many things that can block that progress, from eating disorders to sexual obsessions, shopping, gaming and any other activity that can be used – to excess – to keep us from having to deal with life.  When we depart from our purpose of living life on life’s terms, and need to use things outside ourselves to make us feel good, we are not truly in recovery.  The exception, obviously, are medications such as antidepressants, which do not affect the brain in the same way as drugs of abuse.

Sobriety is about getting sober. Either you’re on board that flight, or you’re not.

Filed Under: Addiction, Cannabis-Marijuana, Marijuana, Recovery, Support Groups

Complete Honesty In Step 4 Is Difficult The First Time

April 27, 2013 by Recovery Blogger Leave a Comment

This is going to offend some folks, and that’s the point.

Over the years, I’ve spoken with alcoholics and other addicts who have done three and four 4th Steps, and (presumably) a 5th and 6th along with them. I’ve also talked with others who have adamantly stated that they did their 4th Step, cleaned house, and that’s it, that The Book doesn’t say anything about doing it more than once, and The Book is the way they work their program.

Without wanting to seem confrontational, that’s pure b.s. Honesty in Step 4, especially, is nearly impossible in early recovery and The Book doesn’t say we shouldn’t repeat it, either.  When Bill Wilson wrote the book Alcoholics Anonymous three-quarters of a century ago, there was a boatload of things that he left out simply because no one had thought of them yet. Bill followed up the Big Book with several others that expanded on his thinking, but some folks seem to believe that all essential knowledge about addiction reached its peak in 1938-39. And, let’s be honest, the basic texts of virtually all the other fellowships rely so heavily on the Big Book that they’re practically interchangeable except for the adjectives and a few nouns, so it’s easy to carry that thinking over to those fellowships as well.

Fast-forward 70-odd years, and we know incomparably more about alcoholism and other addictions than Bill ever thought of. For example, there’s a superb article in last week’s edition of The Fix, CBT and the 12 Steps Have a Lot in Common, that compares the Twelve Steps to Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT).  It establishes in one more way the validity of the Steps as they compare to modern knowledge and theory, and also confirms (once again) Bill Wilson’s brilliance.

I recommend the article, but it’s not the point of this one. The real point is that in the first stages of sobriety we aren’t able to face and/or talk about all of our issues. Our fragile self-image, just beginning to emerge from the shame of our primary addiction(s), can’t take any more battering, and we’re extremely likely to sweep a lot of stuff back under the pantry door instead of finishing the job of cleaning the kitchen. We aren’t able to be completely honest with ourselves, let alone with someone we’ve known for only a few months, no matter how sincerely we try.

So how can we trust a process we went through in the first few months of our recovery, and truly believe that we’ve done a good job with that initial inventory? The answer is our old demon, denial. We want to believe that we’re finally okay, and we are afraid to face the facts that mean we are not, that ignore issues that we’ve failed to address, and that are still screwing up our lives.

My drug of choice was alcohol (not that I didn’t sample many others over 20+ years of active substance addiction) and I was also addicted to some prescription drugs. Fortunately, circumstances in my life precluded easy access to illegal drugs, or undoubtedly I would have been hooked on some of those too. In any case, booze brought me to my knees, and that and the surrounding issues are what I dealt with during my step work. There was enough chaos connected with alcohol that it was easy to ignore some other things that were, in their way, creating dysfunction just as powerful if much less obvious. I’m still working on some of those, many years after that initial step work.

Nicotine, shopping, sex, codependency, gambling, energy drinks, eating disorders of any kind, hoarding, collecting carried to ridiculous extremes, video games (again, to excess), over-exercising — anything that will allow us to distract ourselves and that will give us that brief rush of feel-good brain chemicals — are disorders of our brains’ reward response. They make us feel better, while allowing us to ignore for a bit the normal problems of life that we haven’t learned to face. The trouble is, the good feelings don’t last and we’re so confused we don’t know or remember how to look for them in places less harmful.  Our unhealthy attempts to avoid the normal unpleasantries and pain of life simply increase, along with our dysfunction, until we are in some way forced to contemplate change.

So I put it to you this way, my fellow addicts: If we think we have nothing to deal with but our substance abuse, the chances are we’re fooling ourselves. Until we become willing to revisit Steps 4, 5 and 6, whether in the rooms or with a good therapist who understands addiction, we may be hopping through life on one lame leg, thinking we’re just fine. And that kind of movement through life is not only uncomfortable, it also makes us far more likely to fall under a bus.

Filed Under: Addict, Addiction, Alcoholic, Recovery, Staying Sober Tagged With: , ,

Keep Celebrity Worship Out of AA (And the other groups)

April 13, 2013 by Recovery Blogger Leave a Comment

I have been sighted coming and going from thousands of AA meetings. The difference…is that nobody knows who I am and nobody cares. This has been very much to my advantage.

I”ve written about this before, and will again.  No one is more aware of this problem than people who work in treatment centers — except, of course, for the victims of the publicity themselves.  We see well-known faces come and go quite often. When we see them again, we have to wonder how much of their relapse was due to being hounded by people who can’t mind their own business. Personally, I wonder just how much effect the lack of consideration from other recovering people might have. Do we give celebreties the same shot at sobriety in the rooms as we would anyone else, and how do we think we’d feel if the shoe was on the other foot?

A good article that should make us all think.

Read more: Keep Celebrity Worship Out of AA

Filed Under: Addiction, Alcoholism, Recovery, Relapse, Support Groups Tagged With: , ,

Sugar Addiction In Recovery

April 11, 2013 by Sunrise Detox Leave a Comment

After we get clean and sober, many of us discover that we are still addicted to sugar: in our coffee, in our snacks, in our desserts and elsewhere. Sugar addiction is common, in and out of recovery. Our bodies have a natural attraction to sweet things. We need sugars and other carbohydrates in our diets, and we are pre-programmed to like them because they are good for us (in the right quantities). They are easily burned by the body for energy. In fact, every cell in our bodies are fueled by glucose, a form of sugar.

READ THE LABEL! This one's not bad

READ THE LABEL!
This one’s not bad

The problem with our modern lifestyle, however, is too much of one good thing and not enough of another. We get far too much of the wrong kind of sugar in our diet, and we don’t exercise enough to burn it up. Our metabolism, however, makes adjustments in order to insure that we have energy when we need it, so unburned sugars are converted to fat, which is sort of our bodies’ gas tank. Our lack of exercise insures that this fuel supply, too, remains mostly untouched, and so we gain weight.

As we put on weight, through too many calories and too little exercise, our bodies fall victim to a variety of health issues connected with excessive weight, including heart and arterial deterioration, pre-diabetes and diabetes, and several other metabolic diseases.

Our taste for sugar and the problems associated with it — along with poor eating habits in general — make maintaining a healthy lifestyle difficult. Food manufacturers and most cooks know that mediocre food can be made more palatable by adding sugars, and they do so in abundance. The great majority of the calories we get from sugars in our diet come from foods that, if questioned, we wouldn’t even identify as sweets! That’s because we become accustomed to sweet flavors, and don’t even notice them unless they are missing. Careful perusal of the labels on packaged foods will amaze!

Those of us addicted to sugar didn’t ask for it, any more than we asked to become addicted to alcoholor other drugs. For many of us, given too many sweets as kids, it became part of our lives when our brains were still developing. So if we have a “problem” with sweets, the first thing is to forgive ourselves and not beat ourselves up. Sugar is highly addictive to some of us, especially recovering alcoholics, and substitute addictions are common. Combined with any previous histories with sweets, it would be fairly amazing if we weren’t having some problems. Remember that you are on your side, you’re not the enemy!

For those with sugar addiction issues, we recommend finding a meeting of Food Addicts Anonymous or Overeaters Anonymous. FAA tends to fit best for sugar addicts, as their approach to controlling intake is more specific than that of OA. Overeaters Anonymous is a great program. Don’t get the idea that we’re saying one is better than the other. It’s just that FAA’s focus fits best when we are considering foods as an addiction.

Second, we try immediately to address substituting something else for the sugar when we have cravings for alcohol, other drugs — or sugar. Peanut butter and whole grain crackers are good, as they have protein and fats that help assuage hunger and that will not cause blood sugar swings that affect appetite.

We need to watch how we eat in general, and avoid getting hungry. We eat small, well-balanced meals and between-meal snacks of whole grain breads, proteins, beans, nuts,

Good Sugar!

Good Sugar!

bananas and so forth. If we balance things properly, we can probably get by eating less than we are now, because we’ll avoid getting really famished, which brings on the urge to binge.

We need to avoid white flour whenever possible. There are great similarities between it and sugar as far as the body is concerned, and it will only prolong and increase cravings. We try to stick with fruits and high-protein snacks, and we check ingredients carefully for their sugar content.

It is most important that we see a doctor for a checkup and lab work. There are metabolic issues that can affect cravings for both sugar and alcohol. If there, they need to be addressed.

Baaaaad Sugar! BAD!

Baaaaad Sugar! BAD!

We also avoid dieting — like the plague. Weight control is about developing new eating habits for a lifetime. Diets are reverse binges. They teach us nothing about proper eating, and do nothing to develop the lifetime habits that are necessary if we are to maintain good nutrition and healthy weight. Because they are regimens of deprivation, it is extremely likely (if not inevitable) that we will return to our old eating habits, gain the weight back, and enter a dieting and eating cycle that can only defeat us and cause us to decide that our efforts are useless.

As with any other addiction, we are likely to fall off the wagon and into the sugar bowl occasionally in the beginning. We are going to be learning how to manage our eating in a whole new way. Relapse is a symptom of addiction, and it’s going to happen in this case because it’s impossible to eat perfectly regardless of how hard we try. If we “slip,” we can be thankful that it isn’t as deadly as drinking or drugging would be, and decide that we will do better. We don’t think of ourselves as weak, or strong. It’s about powerlessness. It’s also about reality. We can’t expect to be perfect. If we make mistakes, we immediately return to our program. We can’t abstain from food, so if we slip, we just decide to do better. We try to be good to ourselves.

Buddhists talk about “skillful” and “unskillful” behavior. In recovery, we want to become more skillful in our ways of living. When we’re learning, we’re apt to make occasional mistakes. That’s human, not weakness. Keep moving toward skillful. Forget perfection — that way lies more addiction.

Filed Under: Addiction, Alcoholism, Nutrition, Recovery, Support Groups Tagged With: , ,

Sobriety Got Me Though One Heck Of A Week

March 29, 2013 by Recovery Blogger 2 Comments

Occasionally in life we have periods that just plain suck. As a sponsor of mine was fond of saying, “When I got sober, life didn’t get better right away, but it got real clear!” The difference is, in sobriety we’re able to feel our pain, work our way through it, and come out the other side in a healthy way, instead of stuffing all those feelings and having to deal with them later when they start squishing through the cracks in our mental armor.

One of my oldest friends passed away last Friday. I’ve known Ed since I was about 10 years old. He was one of the first kids I met when I moved to a new town, and his friendship made a huge difference in my adjustment to an environment that I was in no way prepared to deal with. Over the next six or so years we weren’t inseparable, by any means, but most of the time each knew where the other was and pretty much what he was doing.

Ed and I studied, worried about the things teenage boys do, hung out, camped and hunted, and did all the usual high school stuff — most of it together. We even had a singing act that we were known to inflict on folks occasionally. (Neither of us ended up in show biz.) Along with a couple of other guys, we almost literally dragged each other out of the confusion of adolescence into whatever state you’re in when you graduate from high school. My girlfriend and I set him up on a double-date with Judy, the girl he was eventually married to for nearly 50 years. Ed and I were tight.

After high school and college we had only occasional contact for the next thirty years or so. I, of course, became a drunk — some other things, true, but still a drunk and addict. About to get drafted into the Army after college, Ed joined the Air Force instead. In typical all-or-nothing fashion, he went on to become a highly-decorated officer. As head of the White House communications unit, he accompanied Presidents Ford and Carter everywhere they went. As a lieutenant colonel, he headed the communications team that travels with Delta Force. As a full colonel he was boss of an outfit so secret I don’t even know what it was. Then, although he was being groomed for general, he retired. He told me he did so because he decided his family needed some stability after being dragged all over the world. So he put down the sword and took up the plow as a teacher, dean, contributor to the community we grew up in, and as a man of god.

To say that I “miss” Ed would devalue our relationship, which was the kind where you just take up the conversation you didn’t finish the last time you were together — however many years ago that may have been. I didn’t have to be around him during those years. I just knew that he was wherever, and I was wherever, that our friendship stretched between, and I had faith that it might stretch but that it would never break.

If I’d still been drinking and drugging I would have missed the last years of that friendship, of getting to know Ed as “elder statesman.” I would have missed the bittersweet pleasure of meeting his grown kids and grandkids this week. I would have missed the grace and poise of the Colonel’s Lady, putting guests and old friends at ease while her heart was breaking. I would have missed my own grief, and my appreciation for the man Ed was and for what he gave to his country, his god, the thousands of other friends he accumulated over his nearly 69 years — and to me.

Ed’s life reminded me, once again, that it ain’t over until it’s over. If I’d ended mine with booze and drugs all those years ago, there’s so much I would have missed, a lot more than just Ed. I would have accomplished virtually none of the things that I consider important in my own life. I wouldn’t be writing this, and I think the message is pretty important:

Sobriety is worth a little pain now and then.

So are you.

Filed Under: Addiction, Alcoholism, Family and Friends, Recovery, Relationships Tagged With: , , , ,

Celebrity Rehab: Addiction Kills 100 Americans Every Day

March 27, 2013 by John F. Moriarty III Leave a Comment

Following the death of Mindy McCready, there has been buzz about deaths from addiction. McCready was the fifth cast member on Dr. Pinsky’s “Celebrity Rehab Show”  to die from either suicide or overdose.  This seems unusual to many people, some of whom think the statistic reveals something about the show. But the unfortunate truth is people die from addiction every day. Addiction kills.

According to the Centers for Disease Control,  100 people die from drug overdose every day in America.

More than 12 million Americans report using prescription pain medication without a medical reason. Even more frightening — 55 % of prescription drugs taken off label are acquired from a friend or family member.

The number one cause of death with prescription painkillers is respiratory failure. Breathing stops, due to the overdose.  In January of 2012 I urged for increased adoption of prescription drug monitoring programs.  Thankfully, more  states have adopted these programs following Florida and New Jersey. According to the National Conference of State Legislators, 43 states have now passed or filed Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs.

But prescription drugs aren’t the only path to death by sedation after overdose. A 2011 World Health Organization report claimed that alcohol related deaths now outnumber deaths from AIDS worldwide. More than 2.5 million people die each year from alcohol. In the former Soviet Union, 1 in 5 deaths are related to alcohol. Alcohol,  according to the W.H.O., also accelerates 60 different types of diseases.

What are we missing here? The disease of Addiction is a deadly epidemic that we need to look at further. Medical detoxification, treatment and a strong aftercare are only the beginning. On a daily basis I personally wonder why we as a society are not doing more. Why aren’t we taking more preventive measures for this serious problem we face.

As an addiction professional I am reminded daily that addiction kills. I know only too well of the countless lives of celebrities, famous people, sons, daughters, mothers, and husbands that have ended way too early. People like you an me.

 

 

Filed Under: Addiction, Alcohol Abuse, Drug Abuse

It’s Okay Not To Feel Okay

March 23, 2013 by Sunrise Detox Leave a Comment

We addicts are delicate folks. Things that other people shrug off hit us deep in the gut and stay there. Discomforts that other people find annoying are major issues. An off-the-cuff remark becomes a long-term resentment, minor aches and pains a medical catastrophe, and heaven help us if we have real issues to deal with!

We were people who didn’t know that it’s okay not to feel okay, and we knew just what to do about it. We chased okay around casinos, crack houses, malls and singles bars, shooting galleries, sleazy hotels and online porn sites, and into and out the other side of all sorts of jackpots. We messed up our lives and those of bystanders (innocent and not-so-innocent), and we finally reached a point that the alcohol, other drugs, sex, shopping, football pools and what have you no longer did it for us. In the end, we were unable to believe that we were okay, even for a few minutes, no matter what we did.

That’s what got us into recovery: the realization, momentary though it may have been, that if we didn’t get clean and sober we had no chance of feeling okay, ever again.

Then we discovered that early recovery is, to a considerable degree, a lot of not feeling okay. We had to deal with the aspects of day to day living without the cushion of alcohol, drugs and other feel-good behavior. Accustomed to easy, quick answers to troubled feelings, and to easy obliteration of them when we couldn’t find the answers, we found ourselves bewildered when things in our lives didn’t get better right away. Personalities used to popping a pill, downing a couple of beers, hitting the slots or the mall or the back streets suddenly had to face real feelings, and life on life’s terms. At one time or another in early recovery, every single one of us thought that sucked.

But if we stuck with our programs of recovery, we got over it. We came to understand that the changes we made in our view of the world and others by our use of artificial ways of coping with feelings had caused, or were the results of, personalities that needed readjustment. It eventually got through our addled senses that we couldn’t expect bodies — especially our brains — that had been changed by the presence of those artificial ways of coping to get back to normal right away, either. It finally occurred to us that the days of buying answers were over, and that we needed to learn how to live a new way of life without covering up emotions artificially. We took suggestions, and we learned to work through the things that we used to use over. Slowly, we learned how to live without using, and to enjoy it.

Those of us who made those changes in our worldview, who learned that it’s a normal part of being a human not to feel okay sometimes, stayed clean. We learned that it’s okay not to feel okay.  We found that feeling okay only part of the time worked just fine for us, because gradually the problems that we were trying to solve with drugs, booze and other behavior just seemed to sort of fade away — and that, sometimes, we were just plain happy, often for no particular reason.

The folks who were afraid to do the work…well, we don’t see them around much any more. And every single one of us thinks that sucks.

Filed Under: Addict, Addiction, Recovery, Staying Sober, Twelve Steps Tagged With: , , , ,
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