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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How the former 'heroin capital of Europe' decriminalised drugs (Winning the War on Drugs?)| SBS Dateline
The How is not the issue – that’s easy. What has it achieved and why are key public figures wanting things to change? Portugal Mayor Supports Recriminalizing Public Drug Use
Some points one may miss in the ‘showcase of progress’ that isn’t?
- Treatment and recovery but you must have the desire to stop.
- Underground drug trade is thriving. 24:00 Minutes
- All drugs in Portugal are no longer treated as a criminal offense but are still illegal.
- Person can have up to 10 days’ supply e.g. 25 grams marijuana
- Selling is a felony.
- Drug use is widespread with decriminalisation.
(For complete episode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0BwrwB0wno )
See also
- The Truth on Portugal – Countering False Claims by Pro-Drug Activists
- Portugal Drug Policy – A Review Of The Evidence! Portugal Drug Policy Highlights Many Problems that Make it Unsuitable for Australia
Better Options:
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“If we are going to say ‘NO’ to violence against women – and we must – then we cannot say ‘Yes’ to drug use!” Dalgarno Institute
“Continuing acceptance and normalisation of drug using behaviours by the culture, whether overt promotion of products or the libertarian pursuit of individual ‘rights’, the acceptance of psychotropic toxins in social and familial settings only grows and will act counter to the need to shift cultural attitudes underpinning ‘acceptable’ violence toward women and children.”
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Warning of “history repeating,” researchers list ten problems with psychedelic research that make conclusions about efficacy and safety uncertain.
March 20, 2023
Drugs like ketamine, psilocybin (mushrooms), LSD, and MDMA are at the forefront of a new wave of overhyped treatments for mental health problems that may fail to deliver on their promises, according to a new article by researchers Michael van Elk and Eiko Fried at Leiden University, the Netherlands. They write that psychedelic research is plagued by methodological problems that make the efficacy and safety of these drugs uncertain.
Despite the minimal research and its limitations, the drugs have been hyped as “miracle” drugs, with some, like esketamine, even receiving FDA approval—despite failing to beat placebo in five of its six initial efficacy trials (the sixth trial reached statistical, but not clinical, significance). In fact, last year, researchers wrote that the promotion of ketamine/esketamine treatments poses “a significant risk to the public.”
In their new article, published before peer review on the preprint server PsyArXiv, van Elk and Fried focus on the top 10 methodological problems rampant in psychedelic research, how these issues undermine the evidence base, and how researchers can avoid them in the future.
“These problems threaten internal validity (treatment effects are due to factors unrelated to the treatment), external validity (lack of generalizability), construct validity (an unclear working mechanism), or statistical conclusion validity (conclusions do not follow from the data and methods),” the researchers write.
Worse, they add, most psychedelic studies feature more than one of these problems, which makes the studies far more unreliable: “These problems tend to co-occur in psychedelic studies, strongly limiting conclusions that can be drawn about the safety and efficacy of psychedelic therapy.”
Also see LOBBYING FOR MEDICINE – AROUND WE GO AGAIN (THIS TIME IT’S PSYCHEDELICS)
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Increasingly the addiction treatment field is recognizing the benefits associated with non-abstinent substance use disorder remission pathways. At this same time, this study, and others like it suggest individuals pursuing abstinence-based recovery may experience more psychological and functional gains.
Abstinence was associated with generally better psychological and functional outcomes.
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The aim of this study was to better understand the role of social networks in maintaining recovery from opioid use disorder (OUD). Researchers completed longitudinal surveys (2 surveys, 3 months apart) with 106 adults receiving medications for OUD in Delaware who planned to disclose their substance use, treatment, or recovery to a person in their life. Surveys assessed the degree of social support provided, and closeness to—and history of shared substance use with—the person to whom they disclosed.
- Participants who disclosed to someone with whom they felt close had increased commitment to recovery. This was stronger among individuals whose close contacts provided higher social support.
- Disclosure to someone with whom participants had previously used substances was associated with decreased commitment to recovery.
Comments: Social networks and relationships can influence recovery. This study demonstrates that disclosing substance use, treatment, or recovery to a highly supportive and close person—without a shared substance use history—may be beneficial to recovery.
Elizabeth A. Samuels, MD, MPH, MHS Reference: Brousseau NM, Karpyn A, Laurenceau JP, et al. The impacts of social support and relationship characteristics on commitment to sobriety among people in opioid use disorder recovery. J Stud Alcohol Drugs. 2022 Sep;83(5):646–652.