Take-Home Naloxone Has Vital Role in Addiction Treatment

By Dr. Sharon Stancliff | August 10, 2012 | 1 Comment | Filed in Addiction,Prescription Drugs & Treatment


Opioid-related overdose deaths are a leading cause of mortality across the United States. Naloxone, the drug carried by ambulances to reverse overdoses, is also available in some states to be administered by trained members of the general public who might be present when an overdose occurs. Many lives have been saved by bystanders, and increasingly, notice is being taken of community-based naloxone distribution. The Food and Drug Administration held a public workshop in April, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration will soon be distributing an “Overdose Prevention Tool Kit” featuring it and in June, the American Medical Association passed a resolution supporting it.

Naloxone is a safe and effective antidote to opioid overdose, restoring respiration and reversing sedation, though it also precipitates withdrawal in dependent people. It may legally be prescribed to anyone at risk of overdose, and many jurisdictions allow for it to be administered to persons other than the prescription holder. A brief training in naloxone use includes hands-on practice with the naloxone device (either an intramuscular injection or an intranasal spray) and a kit contains two doses. A recent CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report reported that, as of June 2010, more than 50,000 individuals had received naloxone kits and that more than 10,000 overdoses had been reversed.

Take-home naloxone has a vital role to play in addiction treatment because relapses after treatment are so common, and in the setting of loss of tolerance frequently, it can lead to overdose. The New York State Offices of Alcohol and Substance Abuse Services (NYS OASAS) were early adopters of take-home naloxone and have urged all the programs they license to do the same. Samaritan Village, the first therapeutic community to offer take-home naloxone, provides overdose prevention training during orientation. Patients are assured there will be a place for them if they return after relapse, and naloxone increases the likelihood that they will be able to.

Some say that the introduction of naloxone into treatment sends the wrong message to the patients: “You will fail”. But in fact, it tells them that the program cares about their lives even if they relapse, a very positive message for someone at a low point in life. It also implies that they are important members of the community with the power to save a life. An OASAS patient relapsed following a 28-day rehab and during the relapse reversed his friend’s overdose; this was a profound experience for him, and renewed his commitment to sobriety.

Naloxone programs have been very effective in targeted populations, as has been shown by the 47 percent reduction in heroin overdose death rates in New York City in the first five years of that program, where distribution was mostly through syringe exchange programs. Opioid analgesic users have been much harder to reach, but regularly turn up for treatment. Provision of naloxone should become a standard of care in drug treatment programs. Treatment providers can become powerful advocates for legislation and funding facilitating community-based distribution programs.

Dr. Sharon Stancliff, MD
Medical Director
Harm Reduction Coalition

Prescription Narcotic Addiction Awareness.The Hugely Unnoticed Epidemic.

I want to do everything I can to wake up the general public!!!
My mission is to make something good come out of tragedy. I want doctors to pay attention and think twice before they write a prescription for a narcotic.I want people to see addiction as a disease that has no predjudice. I want this subject of prescription medication to be headline news. It should be!! If there were this many people dying from a flu or virus it would be covered by every news channel in the country. My goal is to make this happen!!
Description
My brother Aaron "Ace" Cassidy passed away March 20, 2009. He was the last person in the world anyone would ever suspect of having a problem with addiction. Aaron was handsome, athletic, talented, funny, successful, responsible and very loved by his family and friends. His death has left a huge hole in my heart that I feel can only be filled by making something good come out what happened to him.
I want people to start talking about this epidemic, because that is exactly what it is. Addictin is an illness that has nothing to do with willpower or moral character. My brother was strong and he was a good man. He went for help and the treatment (methadone) is what contributed to his death. So many families are losing loved ones unnecessarily. The next time you hear someone talking casually about taking pills for recreational purpose, I beg you to emphasize to that person that these drugs are deadly and no better than heroine or crack. If you are struggling with addiction please know that you are not alone and someone cares.

Mommy Drunkest

No matter how much I loved my newborn son, it was never enough to get me to stop drinking. Not even when, at rock bottom, I feared my drinking might kill him.


The author with her son Courtesy of the author


By Jowita Bydlowska

07/24/12


I often imagined I would fall down the stairs with my son in my arms when I was in a blackout. There were many ways to cause him injury but it was the stairs my brain kept going back to. And yet picturing that didn’t halt my drinking.

This is what I say to my friend, Gina, when she asks me about my rock bottom. I search her face for traces of shock—a twitch, a shutter-speed blink of an eye—but her face is still.

“It’s not that I made peace with it,” I say, suddenly self-conscious. Gina nods. “But I couldn’t stop. And nobody or nothing could stop me.” Gina nods. She nods and she nods because she’s an alcoholic just like me and she knows about not being able to stop.

I recalled this conversation recently, when I heard about Toni Medranoaccidentally killing her three-week old baby when she crushed him after drunkenly rolling over him. Eight months later, she set herself on fire and died. Medrano’s family suggested she killed herself after watching Nancy Grace’s histrionic blame-game on CNN, where Grace called for murder charges, acted out Medrano’s drinking and coined the term “Vodka mom” to possibly further dehumanize Medrano.


Upstairs, I was a good mom but downstairs I was a drunk.

I saw Medrano’s suicide as a non-surprising ending to a tragic event that began with the first sip of vodka on that November 21st, 2011. I imagined myself in her place and thought that the suicide wasn’t just because of Grace’s predictable idiocy, although it may have helped push her over the edge. I think that Medrano was standing at that edge, looking down for a long time—perhaps even before her son died. When I drank, I thought about suicide too. I thought it would be a way to prevent the tragedy I was sure I was courting. I was lucky nothing happened when I drank after my son was born. I was lucky I got sober, not dead. Lucky. Not better, smarter than Medrano or even more responsible. Just lucky.

I first got sober at 27 and relapsed when I was 31, after my son was born.

When I drank, I had a routine worked out. I would put the baby to sleep in his crib and wait until my husband would go to bed. Then I would go downstairs to the living room and watch movies on my laptop and drink in secret. My husband never caught me with a drink. He knew that I was at it again but he had no idea about the extent of it. I hid bottles in the closet, in the inside lining of my purse. I hid them behind the potted plants on the deck and behind the baby’s diaper drawer and in the stroller. I hid them in my shoes. I lied. I made sure I looked well put-together. I never asked for help. It’s true that sometimes, I thought I should probably kill myself to prevent something bad from happening but, again, planning a suicide would mean admitting that something was going to happen.

I knew, too, that my drinking would catch up with me. It would be only a matter of time before I got sloppy, before my brain got too fogged up by too much booze, before I threw routines out the window. As I drank, I kept looking at the stairs. They felt symbolic. Upstairs, I was a good mom but downstairs I was a drunk. I imagined myself in a blackout, climbing up, taking my son out of the crib. And carrying my son as I walked down those tall, polished-white, slippery oak stairs.

There is the famous story that New York Times writer David Carr tells in his memoir The Night of the Gun about driving to his dealer’s house (Kenny’s) with his baby daughters and leaving them in a car for hours as he did drugs. He wrote, “God had looked after the twins, and by proxy me, but I realized at that moment that I was in the midst of a transgression He could not easily forgive. I made a decision never to be that man again.” This is the famous story but the part that I can relate to best is this short passage: “Sometime soon after that night at Kenny’s…I became convinced that something brutal and unspeakable was about to land on all of us, including the kids.” Carr entered treatment shortly afterwards.

Like Carr, I, too, was in the midst of a transgression watching those stairs. I could picture what could happen but I still couldn’t admit it. And the truth is, if anyone asked me if I needed help, I’d say, “I’m fine, there’s nothing wrong.” Yes, I realized I was in the midst of a transgression but no epiphany followed. There was no God to intervene; no clear-cut insight that would make me stop. I was unstoppable. The only hope I had left was that I might also be wrong about that.

See, foresight doesn’t always work. And even people trying to stop you are weaker than the addiction. Toni Medrano’s husband found her passed out on the couch on that fateful night and warned her about falling asleep with the baby next to her. Who knows what she said but she probably told him things were fine—that’s what I often said to my husband too. Everything is fine. (Help.) Everything is fine. Or maybe she even told him she wasn’t going to do it and she did it anyway. In the morning, her husband woke up to her yelling, "The baby is dead!"

I wrote a book about my experience as a drunk mom, which will be published in the spring. I wrote it for all kinds of reasons, the main one being so that I could try to understand how my love for my son was no match for addiction. My husband, who read the manuscript recently, said he would have had my son removed from my care right in the beginning of my relapse, had he known. Had he looked inside of the lining of my purse, the potted plants on the deck? Behind the baby’s diaper drawer? The lining of the stroller canopy? The point is, he wouldn’t have known, he wouldn’t have stood a chance against my hiding. As for me, there was no way I would’ve confessed out loud to the screaming in my head.

I eventually got sober under rather mundane circumstances: I broke a toe, my husband asked me to move out, it was summer. There was no voice from the sky, no decisions. The hope came over me simply and suddenly, completely unprovoked as I limped toward the park with my son in the stroller one sunny morning. My husband will tell you I got sober because he threatened to kick me out. But really? It could’ve been the nice weather, it could’ve been the little toe. It was not my son in my stroller. He was just lucky. I was just lucky. We lived. The epiphanies came only after I got sober.

Jowita Bydlowska is a Toronto-based writer who has previously published articles about such topics as addiction, motherhood, sex, mental illness and healthy eating in various publications such as Salon, The Globe and Mail, Huffington Post, Oxygen and more. She has a book coming out in 2013 about being a drunk mom. She also wrote about her agnostic version of AA for The Fix.

Alcohol Ads Violating Industry Rules More Likely in Magazines Popular With Teens

By Join Together Staff | August 9, 2012 | Leave a comment | Filed in Alcohol,Marketing And Media & Youth


Alcohol ads that violate industry guidelines are more likely to appear in magazines popular with teen readers, a new study finds. Ads violate industry guidelines if they appear to target a primarily underage audience, highlight the high alcohol content of a product, or portray drinking in conjunction with activities that require a high degree of alertness or coordination, such as swimming.

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health studied 1,261 ads for alcopops, beer, spirits or wine that appeared more than 2,500 times in 11 magazines that are popular among teens. The ads were rated according to a number of factors, such as whether they portrayed over-consumption of alcohol, addiction content, sex-related content, or injury content.

“The finding that violations of the alcohol industry’s advertising standards were most common in magazines with the most youthful audiences tells us self-regulated voluntary codes are failing,” said study co-author David Jernigan, PhD. “It’s time to seriously consider stronger limits on youth exposure to alcohol advertising.”

Some of the ads in the study showed drinking near or on bodies of water, encouraging over-consumption of alcohol, and providing messages that supported alcohol addiction, Newswise reports. Almost one-fifth of the ads contained sexual connotations or sexual objectification, the researchers reported in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

“The bottom line here is that youth are getting hit repeatedly by ads for spirits and beer in magazines geared towards their age demographic,” Jernigan said in a news release. “As at least 14 studies have found that the more young people are exposed to alcohol advertising and marketing, the more likely they are to drink, or if already drinking, to drink more, this report should serve as a wake-up call to parents and everyone else concerned about the health of young people.”

DON'T GET ME STARTED

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Painkiller abuse is destroying the lives of young people and adults across Ohio. Visit http://www.DontGetMeStartedOhio.org/ to see their harrowing stories, learn about the dangers of prescription drug addiction and find out where to go for help.
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Painkiller Abuse: Starting is easy. Stopping isn’t.

Prescription painkiller abuse in Ohio isn’t just a problem, it’s an epidemic. And the number of deaths is staggering. More overdoses are now associated with prescription medications than any other drug, including cocaine or heroin. Nearly 15 percent of young adults in Ohio, ages 18 to 25, admitted to the non-medical use of prescription or ille
gal drugs in 2009, according to a National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

Together, we can fight addiction.

Our partners across the state of Ohio are working to educate adults and young people about the dangers of prescription drug addiction and where they can go for help. A wide variety of resources are available to help fight this epidemic including statistics, educational toolkits, resources for community outreach and more.



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Founded 2012


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Phone Call the Ohio Department of Alcohol and Drug Addiction Services (ODADAS) treatment and referral hotline at 1-800-788-7254 from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Website http://www.DontGetMeStartedOhio.org

WOODLAND HILLS CA.

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If you or a woman you love needs help, please call our Admissions Department now at 1-888-866-9778. Kind and immediate assistance is available 24 hours a day / 7 days a week.
MissionRecognized by “Forbes.com” as one of the top treatment centers in the world, Harmony Place, Exclusively for Women, provides disciplined treatment for the woman who is accustomed to a well-appointed life. We offer a comfortable place to do uncomfortable work. We remove concerns for personal comfort so the individual can focus on the primary goals of treatment for addiction and dual disorders. We pride ourselves on furnishing the highest quality treatment, blending traditional and holistic approaches to successful recovery from addiction and dual disorders.
Company OverviewOur primary focus is to provide superior care and assistance to the female client and their loved ones, in the most thoughtful, respectful, confidential and compassionate manner. We hold respect and dignity of the client with the highest regard.
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Harmony Place supports women in recognizing and appreciating their addiction and any co-occurring dual diagnoses. Our program participants are taught to identify how addiction and other diagnoses manifest and which personal interventions are available to them to support lasting recovery. The women are guided through examination and developmental processes, fostering their ability to create their...See More
General InformationHarmony Place is helping women recover from drug and alcohol addiction.
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