What If My Child Isn’t Motivated to Get Treatment for Addiction?
Suggesting Treatment to a Loved One
Intervention – a Starting Point
Drug Use, Stigma, and the Proactive Contagions to Reduce Both
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What is one of the key drivers of addiction? Engagement with substances and permission to do so. Now we have some bad actors in the political space promoting greater and greater permission models to engage in and promote drug use - Thus, adding to the burden of this non-communicable disease by increasing suicide risk. In what #publichealth metric is this good practice? #addiction is just one Unnecessary Harm, and promoting drug use is culpable. #preventiondontpromote
(for complete article WebMD Health Services)
Also see
- Cannabis & Suicide – Causal and Correlate?
- A Lifecourse Perspective on Self-Harm, Suicide and Alcohol Use Among Men
- Study of Cannabis Use Impact on Mental Health, Depression & Suicide:
- Alcohol and deaths of despair
- Does Substance Use Disorder Cause Suicidality? Or, does Suicidality Cause Substance Use Disorder?
- Marijuana Related Suicide of Young People in Colorado
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‘Let me try it,’ I said. A friend was smoking it in the bathroom of a Berlin club. My cares and denials were too heavy. My friend looked at me, and I will never forget those eyes. They were begging. ‘You don’t want this. You really don’t. This is not what you need.’
I am the sheep, and the smack is the shepherd. I’ve been following the shepherd for fifteen years…. I made a choice, and the consequence of that choice was relinquishing control.
It is a miracle potion, a magical compound that makes the world disappear. Troubles evaporate. Failures are forever hidden.
It was heaven. A false paradise. I was riding the wave of peace that I had always desired. I inhaled, and I laughed. I laughed at the absurdity of the situation I was in. I was smoking heroin in the toilet of a Berlin club, and it was the best feeling I have ever had. It coursed through my body, replacing every toxin with a new one.
There is a romanticisation of heroin, a mythology. The tale omits the truth. They don’t tell you about the exit, only the entrance.
The world will come back with a vengeance. This miracle compound was not efficacious in every case. I was, and to a degree, still am currently in a state of acute denial. I can handle this.
This is costing me my world, but more, it’s costing me my very existence. Weight is falling off me. I am becoming a ghost. My skin feels waxy. I am becoming a finished candle. My eyes are heavy. I am blind to the truth.
There is little more to do than accept that I need help.
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The length of stay in intensive care varies greatly, from a few days up to a month. When taken home, for several months these babies may still experience signs of withdrawal.
This baby had tense and clenched muscles. She could not organise a suck pattern to feed effectively and required a feeding tube, and she would tremor and jerk so much she rubbed her chin raw on her blankets.
The nurses would take turns swaying and rocking with her for hours. This baby was medicated with morphine and gas drops, and was tried on multiple different formulas to help try to soothe her and settle her reflux.
Often it is the case that mothers with drug dependence really want to get off drugs and care for their baby. They love their children, but the truth is that their addiction has a strong hold on them. (for complete article https://newsweekly.com.au/newsweekly/addictions-littlest-victims/)
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Key Points
Question: Which pharmacotherapies are associated with improved outcomes for people with alcohol use disorder?
Findings: In this systematic review and meta-analysis that included 118 clinical trials and 20 976 participants, 50 mg/d of oral naltrexone and acamprosate were each associated with significantly improved alcohol consumption-related outcomes compared with placebo.
Meaning: These findings support oral naltrexone at 50 mg/d and acamprosate as first-line therapies for alcohol use disorder.
Abstract
Objective: To compare efficacy and comparative efficacy of therapies for alcohol use disorder.
Study Selection: For efficacy outcomes, randomized clinical trials of at least 12 weeks’ duration were included. For adverse effects, randomized clinical trials and prospective cohort studies that compared drug therapies and reported health outcomes or harms were included.
Main Outcomes and Measures: The primary outcome was alcohol consumption. Secondary outcomes were motor vehicle crashes, injuries, quality of life, function, mortality, and harms.
Conclusions and Relevance: In conjunction with psychosocial interventions, these findings support the use of oral naltrexone at 50 mg/d and acamprosate as first-line pharmacotherapies for alcohol use disorder.
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(This is the same trajectory our National Drug Strategy has been re-tasked to comply with. Harm Reduction, an important pillar in our 3 Pillar strategy, has not only become the only priority, but has been used to rename the Harm Minimisation Platform to the point where Demand and Supply Reduction, are not only downplayed, but more and more ignored.
Sadly, pro-drug activists, who seek not to end addiction – thus decrease the cause of it, drug use – they instead seek only ways to normalise substance use and silence the overwhelmingly responsible non-drug using public through coercive speech codes that don’t even permit the identification of a problem. Ah, but that is a key to normalisation of behaviour, no matter how aberrant. You must compel people to accept it, and all the attending harms that accompany it. And this is the ‘new normal’?
This callous soft-bigotry and worse, humanity diminishing endorsement, enabling, and empowering of self and public harm, is a reckless public health destroying strategy that generations will pay for, and not just fiscally.
Who is driving this narrative? Who is controlling the policy interpretation levers?
Dalgarno Institute Comments
Also see
- Ripple Effect – Chemsex, Violence, Road Toll, and the Growing Failure of Misused Drug Policy: Reducing or Increasing Harms?
- Re-tasking the Judicial Educator to Rehabilitate Not Incarcerate
- AOD Primary Prevention & Demand Reduction Priority Primer: TASKING THE NATIONAL HEALTH STRATEGIES FOR COMMUNITY WELL-BEING.
- Drug Use, Stigma & Proactive Contagions to Reduce Both)
Methadone accounts for almost 50 per cent of all Scotland’s drug related deaths; a figure which has almost tripled since 2015. This is more than double the rate of the United States. Methadone is prescribed by doctors wanting to wean addicts off heroin and this comprises a key part of the Scottish government’s harm reduction strategy.
In recent years, tensions have emerged between the governments of the UK and Scotland over how to view and deal with drugs. Unlike health, drug law is not a devolved issue. And whereas the UK government seemingly favours a criminal justice approach to dealing with drugs, the Scottish administration has opted for a public health centred approach. However, this apparent difference is not as clear cut as first presented. Both governments approach the problem largely through the purview of ‘harm reduction’. Yet in the case of Scotland, advocates steadfastly argue against the idea of abstinence and prohibition as appropriate approaches to drug treatment, with disastrous results.
Indeed, as recent academic research has identified, the rapid increase in opioid related deaths in Scotland is both ‘remarkable’ and ‘worrisome’. When comparing opioid related death rates across the UK as a whole, research suggests that there are ‘… no clear regional differences…’ and the role of demographics and deprivation as key drivers of the Scottish opioid crisis is limited (2). The key distinction between Scotland and the rest of the UK is policy.
The Scottish government has become enthralled to the idea of harm reduction as an end in itself, rather than as part of a more comprehensive strategy that places the problem of addiction at its centre. Policy has largely jettisoned any assumption that with opportunity and support, an addict might overcome their addiction. Indeed, in April 2021, Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon suggested that public discussion on the ‘rehabilitation’ of addicts was largely a distraction and that too much time had been wasted debating the issue.
The SNP view is that the discrimination experienced by drug addicts, rather than their actual addiction, is responsible for the annual increase in drug deaths.
In reality, the Drug Deaths Taskforce campaign has little to do with helping drug addicts. It is a deliberate attempt to forcibly reengineer the common norms and values that shape wider Scottish society. Far from promoting tolerance and respect, the campaign sets out to stigmatise the belief held by many ordinary people that individuals are responsible for what they do, and if their actions are harmful to themselves or others, they have a responsibility to desist from such behaviour
As such, the Scottish government has set itself the task of re-educating local communities, and the Scottish population more broadly, in how their stigmatised options are discriminatory and perpetuate social inequality and, ultimately, drug deaths.
However, the view that underpins this outlook is highly cynical and dangerous. The focus upon harm reduction, at the expense of recovery and rehabilitation, and the targeting of so-called stigmatising views against addicts, endorses an idea that addiction is socially acceptable and, in fact, should be respected by wider society. It provides a technocratic managerial solution – albeit dressed up in the language of therapy – to what is in fact a fundamentally moral question about the individual’s responsibility to wider society and their ability to contribute purposefully to that society – in this case the addict’s willingness to exercise personal responsibility for their condition.
Conclusion: The Scottish government’s weaponization of addiction serves as the basis through which an increasingly technocratic and unaccountable political class delegitimises the moral and restitutive capacity of shared social norms. Legislative attempts to normalise addiction, through the undermining of liberal values such as individual responsibility and agency, seem to be readily accepted by politicians, policy makers and academic experts alike. Might this not be the real cause of Scotland’s drug crisis?