|
||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
desperate, and suicidal, I still felt blessed for a moment of clarity:
acceptance set in that I was the problem. I was graced with the
willingness to change... The process of working on me had finally
begun." 
requires a bundle of supports and services. 
services at our Recovery Community Centers; and advocacy for removal of barriers to long-term recovery. 
| DONATE |
Donations help us to reduce the impact of addiction for more individuals and families. The Council is a 501(c)(3) organization.
|
Wednesday, June 4, 2014
Suboxone Diversion Concerns Some Experts
/By Join Together Staff
June 3rd, 2014/
Diversion of the opioid addiction treatment Suboxone concerns some experts, who say in some cases it may be a gateway drug to heroin or opioid use, The Christian Science Monitor reports.
Suboxone, which contains the drugs buprenorphine and naloxone, is being sold on the street along with heroin and prescription painkillers, according to the newspaper.
“The benefits of the appropriate medical use of Suboxone probably far outweigh the potential for abuse,” said Eric Wish, Director of the Center for Substance Abuse Research at the University of Maryland. “But those benefits will be jeopardized if we don’t take care of this abuse issue.”
In contrast to methadone, which is only dispensed at clinics, Suboxone can be prescribed by certain physicians for at-home use. The Food and Drug Administration has approved a generic version of Suboxone and a generic version of buprenorphine without naloxone.
Suboxone can be life-saving, by helping to prevent opioid overdoses, some experts note. After Maryland expanded access to buprenorphine, heroin overdose deaths dropped from 312 in 1999, to 118 in 2009.
Physicians who want to prescribe buprenorphine must get a waiver from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, take an eight-hour training course, and prescribe the drug to no more than 100 patients at one time. Patients prescribed the drug must be given regular urine tests, and are supposed to attend counseling. Doctors must keep detailed records showing the patients are taking buprenorphine as directed.
Some patients sell some or all of their buprenorphine on the street. In some cases, they use the proceeds to buy heroin. While some people buy buprenorphine to medicate heroin withdrawal symptoms, others start with buprenorphine and move on to stronger opioids.
Nationwide police seizures of buprenorphine rose from 90 in 2003, to more than 10,500 in 2010. The number of emergency room visits related to the drug rose tenfold over five years, reaching more than 30,000 in 2010. More than half of the incidents involved nonmedical use of buprenorphine.
/By Join Together Staff
June 3rd, 2014/
Diversion of the opioid addiction treatment Suboxone concerns some experts, who say in some cases it may be a gateway drug to heroin or opioid use, The Christian Science Monitor reports.
Suboxone, which contains the drugs buprenorphine and naloxone, is being sold on the street along with heroin and prescription painkillers, according to the newspaper.
“The benefits of the appropriate medical use of Suboxone probably far outweigh the potential for abuse,” said Eric Wish, Director of the Center for Substance Abuse Research at the University of Maryland. “But those benefits will be jeopardized if we don’t take care of this abuse issue.”
In contrast to methadone, which is only dispensed at clinics, Suboxone can be prescribed by certain physicians for at-home use. The Food and Drug Administration has approved a generic version of Suboxone and a generic version of buprenorphine without naloxone.
Suboxone can be life-saving, by helping to prevent opioid overdoses, some experts note. After Maryland expanded access to buprenorphine, heroin overdose deaths dropped from 312 in 1999, to 118 in 2009.
Physicians who want to prescribe buprenorphine must get a waiver from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, take an eight-hour training course, and prescribe the drug to no more than 100 patients at one time. Patients prescribed the drug must be given regular urine tests, and are supposed to attend counseling. Doctors must keep detailed records showing the patients are taking buprenorphine as directed.
Some patients sell some or all of their buprenorphine on the street. In some cases, they use the proceeds to buy heroin. While some people buy buprenorphine to medicate heroin withdrawal symptoms, others start with buprenorphine and move on to stronger opioids.
Nationwide police seizures of buprenorphine rose from 90 in 2003, to more than 10,500 in 2010. The number of emergency room visits related to the drug rose tenfold over five years, reaching more than 30,000 in 2010. More than half of the incidents involved nonmedical use of buprenorphine.
Tuesday, June 3, 2014
JUNE 3 v 1 v 2 TWELVE STEPPING WITH POWER IN THE PROVERB
My son, do not forget my law,
But let your heart keep my commands;
For length of days and long life
And peace they will add to you.
STEP 11 Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
Get sober , follow God and find peace ! That is not a bad deal ! I lived for myself in addiction ,had nothing but shame sorrow pain guilt anger fear and the list goes on .This is your choice insanity or sanity ! Follow God read His book (Bible ) and work the steps.
Psalm 118:5
In my anguish I cried to the LORD, and he answered by setting me free
By Joseph Dickerson
AA Critic Lights Another Fire
Dr. Lance Dodes co-authored the latest book arguing why AA is not effective treatment for alcoholics. Lots of people are angry.
haters hate Dodes
By John Lavitt
05/30/14
By co-writing The Sober Truth with his son Zachary, Dr. Lance Dodes has ignited a familiar brushfire in the recovery community. His anti-AA book is making more of an impressionthan the usual attacks. His book takes a slash and burn approach to dealing with 12-step programs. Dodes talked to The Fixabout how he came to his convictions and the options that he thinks exist for treating alcoholism.
Anti-AA sentiment regularly comes up in the news. Why do you think this is the case? And how is your work different?
When we talk about why AA has been so fabulously successful in being accepted by the general public, it’s the same answer as to why all of the other books seem to fade away. The people who are pro-AA and getting something out of it - the people who are devoted to it in a quasi-religious sort of way - have a huge influence. Many of them are successful in other ways and they have risen to positions of prominence. This has always been the case as we reviewed in the book. From the incredibly positive and completely inaccurate review of AA written by Jack Alexander in the 1940s [the article was originally published in the Saturday Evening Post] that helped to promote the idea that AA was the best treatment for alcoholism
On the other hand, it’s also true that there’s a kind of silent majority, although I hate to use that phrase. Most people with addictions do not belong to 12-step programs, and many of those people have tried them and failed. But those people don’t talk about it and this is what we call the sampling bias in the book. We hear from the people who do well and we don’t hear from the people who don’t do well. If you go to the recovery section of a bookstore, you’ll see book after book about how AA saved my life, but you won’t see any books about how AA didn’t save my life. People don’t write those books and no one reads them.
The basic answer is that AA is sort of self-sustaining. It’s now added a bunch of people who should know better because they are scientists and researchers and now they have done studies to try to prove AA’s effectiveness. That’s why we wrote the book; to see if those studies are valid and it turns out that they’re not. They are riddled with errors and the science that supposedly is supporting AA is no good. The bottom line is that AA does have a five to ten percent success rate and that’s fine. We need AA and it should be there for those five to ten percent. The problem is that because of the power structure, we prescribe AA for everybody and that’s just a mistake.
The answer to your second question if my book will make a difference is I don’t know.
Do you see a distinction between theory and practice when it comes to the 12-step programs in general and AA in particular? Is the theory behind the 12 steps as expressed in the Big Book the same as the practice of the program in the rooms? Shouldn’t the two things be distinguished?
Okay, that’s a good question, and we tried to address that in the book as well. Since AA is intentionally unregulated, anyone can start an AA group. AA groups are very different from each other. Any one AA group may be composed of thoughtful, mature people who are simply there to help each other stay sober. You go to other groups and they have a power structure within them in which there are fundamentalist people who will berate you if you are not doing well and who insist you buy into the religious aspect of AA - which is very powerful in many groups that are much less thoughtful and much less flexible. If you look at the practice of it, it’s all over the map and that is actually one of our main issues with AA. Namely, there are groups which are much better than others. As a result, the overall practice of AA is not so great because there are places where people have had a terrible experience and we know this from first-hand testimony.
As far as the theory goes, I don’t think the theory has any merit whatsoever actually. If you look at the 12 steps themselves, if that’s the theory behind it, it’s based on an idea that this deeply religious stockbroker Bill Wilson came up with based on the Oxford Group which was, of course, a very fundamentalist Christian organization [The Oxford Group was a Christian organization founded by American Christian missionary Dr. Frank Buchman in 1928]. There is no reason to think that a spiritual approach to addiction makes any sense at all. Nothing against spirituality, but it is the same as saying you should use a spiritual approach if you have a compulsion to keep the things on your desk parallel to each other or a compulsion to clean the house.
There is just no role for it. Bill Wilson just dreamed it up and even though a lot of people can find some use of it, it is still one of the main things that limits AA from being truly useful. We put a suggestion to AA in the book that to make it more popular, they should take out some of this religious stuffbecause it has no bearing on the problem. Bill Wilson originally said that addiction is a failure by a person to be closer to God and he later changed this for marketing reasons into a failure to be closer to a higher power. If the idea is that we are sinners and we need to be closer to God to be free of our addictions, I think that’s utter nonsense.
Can you clarify your position on the genetic background of alcoholism? Although your book refutes the disease model of alcoholism, you seem to agree with the idea of a genetic predisposition. For example, you mention how alcoholism plagued the family line of Bill Wilson. Is there a genetic predisposition towards alcoholism, and what does such a genetic predisposition imply?
I have no personal opinion about it at all, and I tried to avoid putting any opinions whatsoever in the book. There is, however, a lot of scientific literature about it and the literature suggests that there is some evidence for some genetic loading or some genetic influence in some people with alcoholism. But those studies also are quite inconsistent.
The one study we cited specifically in the book was the twin study. If you take two people who have exactly the same genes and one of them has alcoholism, the statistical likelihood is that the other doesn’t. It would be hard to say it’s a genetic illness if that’s the case. Of course, you can have some genetic influence on almost anything. And that is true. The analogy I’ve seen from geneticists - I didn’t make this up - is that the inheritance for alcoholism is probably similar to peptic ulcer disease or essential hypertension which is ordinary high blood pressure.
So could there be a genetic factor? There could, but you have to understand one more thing. When people study this, their studies are flawed by the fact that they are looking at a behavior, namely drinking. But if you look at a behavior, you are not looking at the right thing because genes don’t control complex behavior. They may control something else, but if you look only at this specific behavior, you are leaving out people who are compulsive in other ways. What happens if you add those people in? What happens if you have people who instead of compulsively drinking are compulsively cleaning their house. Same problem, but they don’t get included in the data.
I would say that I don’t deny there is a genetic influence because there is for almost anything. But I don’t think the studies are good because they [don't include] everybody who has this kind of trait - if you want to call it that, but I would rather call it a symptom. I don’t think the statistics are very good for that and you can’t rely on them. Now if you said to me, “If there were a genetic factor, how would I explain it?” I can’t explain it because obviously no gene ever told anyone to walk into a bar. It would be very complicated and nobody actually has a valid explanation for it even though they like to tap these faulty statistics.
In your book you conclude that addiction is a psychological challenge, not a disease, and that the challenge of addiction can be overcome through a therapeutic process that engenders self-knowledge. It is well-known that such therapeutic strategies of treating addiction have not worked in the past. Why would the results be different this time around?
Okay, that is the one place in the book where you could say that you might criticize the wording of it. What I should have said is that everything I say about that works for some people. It was unintentional to suggest that that is the way to treat everybody. However, I will stand my ground about the idea behind it: To call addiction or alcoholism a disease, doesn’t help understand it, and I have always felt it interferes with understanding it. When you add the label in there, it tells you nothing and kind of confuses matters. Second of all, I don’t think it’s accurate because we know that people can switch from addictively or compulsively using alcohol to addictively or compulsively gambling or addictively or compulsively having sex or shopping. We know that because that really happens in the real world.
So what’s the disease? If the disease is that you have compulsions that shift from one thing to another, I don’t need to call that a disease because I already know what that is. It’s called a compulsion and it’s been well-studied for over a hundred years. It does have a psychological basis. Your point that it’s been studied and it doesn’t work well is true. But I’m not sure it has been well-studied. People have been studying and using cognitive behavioral therapy, but the kind of treatment I’m talking about hasn’t existed. It really hasn’t been studied and I wish somebody would study it.
When I wrote my first book, The Heart of Addiction, I described a way of thinking about addiction and, in my second book, Breaking Addiction, I described a way of treating it that nobody was doing. I do believe it’s accurate to say that that approach has not been studied. I think what has been studied is old-fashioned treatment which I agree with you is not effective. I don’t think you can walk up to somebody and say to them, “Okay, let’s start talking about your mother” and hope to treat the addiction. That’s not good treatment for addiction. You may get to your mother eventually, but that’s not going to deal with the issue. What I came up with was a way of dealing with the issue and dealing with the underlying factors behind it. No one has tested that.
I want to say one more thing to further muddy the waters. The harm reduction movement is quite important because to consider that you are not doing better if your addiction is improving is wrong, and that’s part of my criticism of AA. If you relapse, you go down to zero in terms of the number of days sober and you have to start all over and that just makes no sense - to criticize people for not being absolutely abstinent. When you do a kind of introspective therapy which is designed to root out the cause of it, naturally there are going to be up and downs in the behavior and the behavior may last for a while. If you’re only looking at complete abstinence, then you’re going to say that it’s an ineffective treatment. Like with all psychodynamic therapy, the longer you follow it, the more effective it is because instead of looking at the superficial system, you are looking at the changes in the human being.
To recap, I think that the way it was worded in the book overstated the case. Of course, this isn’t the treatment for everybody and it isn’t the treatment for the 10 percent who are doing well in AA. I stand behind the idea because I think it is an effective psychotherapeutic approach.
You refer to Carl Jung as “the eminent psychoanalyst” in the book so you clearly must respect him. Why do you disagree with Carl Jung’s belief that a spiritual solution is necessary for an alcoholic or an addict?
I don’t have any particular respect for Carl Jung, and I believe your reading of that is not what we intended. He was an eminent psychoanalyst at the time - eminent meaning well-known - not because he was such a great analyst because he was not. His backing of AA is one more example of why I don’t respect him or his work. He recommended religion as a way to be cured of alcoholism, and it’s a position I do not respect and it’s one of the reasons he’s not well-respected today in my field.
What's the Matter With Drug Testing Students?
As more public schools climb on the testing bandwagon, is there supportive evidence it makes a difference or is it simply butt-covering by school boards? The debate rages across the country.
Shutterstock
05/29/14
As members of a substance abuse task force at Northern Valley Regional High School in Bergen County, New Jersey, Susan Hertzberg, along with a group of other parents and school officials, examined the impact of drugs at the school. They conducted research on the issue and found that the number of students who tried alcohol and other drugs doubled from ninth to 10th grade. The task force recommended that the school increase substance-abuse education for ninth-graders and concluded that student drug testing wasn’t the answer because it was costly and research suggested that it was not effective in combating drug use among teens.
The task force’s recommendation for increased education was made during the 2005-06 school year, but was not put into practice. The school held a few assemblies on substance abuse, but didn’t make major modifications in how students were educated on the subject, Hertzberg said.
And, in spring 2013, another of the group’s suggestions was disregarded when the school board began the process to implement random student drug testing at Northern Valley, without properly informing parents or presenting a valid argument for the policy, Hertzberg said.
“There were so many issues with this I hardly knew where to begin,” she said. “They hadn’t identified what the substance abuse problems in our area were or provided analysis of alternatives. They immediately went to random student drug testing without intervening steps. We were simultaneously trying to understand why student drug testing was a solution to a problem that wasn’t identified. All of a sudden there was a random drug test information night in late May. After that, the board, at a subsequent meeting, met to go ahead to draft random drug test policy.”
Drug testing is not a particularly effective strategy, and there are issues with the validity of tests, false positives and privacy violations.
Hertzberg said the school board presented only “one-sided anecdotal stories” in favor of student drug testing with little research to back up their arguments. This didn’t sit well with her or other parents. When the task force had considered student drug testing, she said they had presented both sides of the issue and opened the meetings to the community.
The parents of Northern Valley decided to fight the school board on the issue of student drug testing. They conducted their own research, filed Freedom of Information requests and found experts to speak on their behalf.
Roseanne Scotti, the New Jersey state director at the Drug Policy Alliance, was one expert who joined the Northern Valley parents in their fight. The Drug Policy Alliance, which promotes drug policies based on scientific practices that consider health and civil rights, is against student drug testing. Scotti said in recent years the organization is being called on more frequently to assist parents in similar fights.
“When [student drug testing] first started bubbling up in the Supreme Court about 10-12 years ago, there wasn’t much research and not much parental opposition,” she said. “Now, a growing body of evidence shows random drug testing is not effective and has unintended consequences [such as an increase in] substances not tested for. In light of this, there’s a growing backlash among parents.”
Scotti said that there are no peer-reviewed, evidence-based, objective studies supporting student drug testing. She said studies show that random drug testing destroys school environment, invades privacy and does not stop students from using drugs.
A study, titled “Student Drug Testing and Positive School Climate: Testing the Relation Between Two School Characteristics and Drug Use Behavior in a Longitudinal Study,” published in the Journal of Study on Alcohol and Drugs earlier this year showed that positive school climate was more effective in deterring student drug use than random drug testing.
Dan Romer, co-author of the study, said students surveyed over a one-year period were less likely to use drugs when they had a positive outlook on their school. One of the main takeaways, he said, is that schools worried about students using drugs should look to other solutions, like educational programs, not student drug testing.
“If school is a more comforting and inviting place, where students feel respected, where they work on academic needs, it’s a better environment all around,” he said. “Resorting to drug testing is a bad sign. It’s an educational institution, not a penal institution.”
In the study, students were interviewed about their current drug use and school climate. The students were re-interviewed a year later and school climate was re-examined. Students who said they had a positive school climate were less likely to start using drugs or progress to harder drugs. However, there was no reduction in alcohol use, a surprising finding, Romer said.
Other studies on the subject have had similar results. The University of Michigan conducted two national studies using data collected from 76,000 students in more than 700 schools. The studies found no difference in drug use in schools that test students and those that do not.
The Oregon Health and Science University School of Medicine conducted a study, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health in 2003, of two schools on random drug testing of student athletes that showed some evidence that testing was effective in deterring drug use in the previous year, but not in the previous 30 days. But, a follow-up study published in the same journal in 2007 examined 11 schools over two years and found that testing didn’t deter student athletes’ drug use.
Romer, director of the Adolescent Communication Institute of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, said schools may be intrigued by the idea of student drug testing because it seems like it could work. But there are many issues that are overlooked or ignored. Most schools only test students involved in extracurricular activities, and Romer said these students tend to be less likely to use drugs. Also, not all drugs can be detected.
Are You Addict Enough?
The author of Drunk Mom on the A's, B's, C's, and D's of addiction and diagnosis.
Shutterstock
05/27/14
There used to be a certain terrifying thought in my head. It would show up rarely but when it did, I would recognize the horror of it instantly and I would bombard my mind with every unicorn and every rainbow I could think of to make it go away.
The thought was that I wasn’t addict enough to deserve recovery - or perhaps that I wasn’t even an addict! I would experience “a regret of not dying a little harder.” And so I regretted not having some of the Hemingwayesque experiences that my fellow sober addicts sometimes talked about in 12-step meetings: all-nighters, weekenders, drinking on waking. I regretted not waking up in a foreign city wearing pants that didn't belong to me. I regretted not going to detox even, or only being to rehab once. Perhaps this was a perversion of a writer in me, to regret not having such experiences, because, hey, almost every experience is material - even your own death can be material.
In the meetings I heard people trying to outdo each other. Like the guy who went to a wedding in one part of the country and woke up in another, in bed, with two strange women. And there I was with not even one alcoholic seizure to talk about! Instead of hearing the stories as warnings, I saw them as ways in which I didn't quite belong. Was I addict enough?
The so-called “war stories” in meetings are there for a reason. People talk about them to make sense of where their addiction took them. Even the most pathetic stories serve as a way to identify each other, and oneself, to other addicts. In a grotesque way, some sharers make the stories seem like their badges of honor - or at least that’s how I perceived them. And there's a lot of dark humor too given that addiction causes the kind of sadness that is so deep that sometimes you can only laugh about it. It's kind of similar to laughing at a funeral - your own.
My questioning of my addiction might have contributed to my relapse and when I relapsed, it was very bad: I was by then a mom to a lovely baby boy and I couldn't stay sober. There were no sexy stories there - just me trying to not to drink and failing while a baby needed me. I ended up writing a memoir about it and after it was published and after non-addict people were horrified by it - that was, honestly, the first time that I felt properly vetted as an addict. So today I have no doubt about myself and the only extreme that works for me is total abstinence.
At the same time, I know that there are many people who question their addiction and their belonging in places like 12-step meetings. There are such people in my personal life and some of them probably aren’t really addicts - whatever that means. Maybe what it means is that their use does not interfere with their everyday lives. They learn to drink moderately, they don't wake up soaked in piss, they don't miss work. Some have gone to AA and left sober and stayed sober. And then there are some who haven’t stayed sober but insist on keeping things under control.
Robert, 32, says he’s addicted to alcohol, but wouldn’t classify himself as an addict. He says that for him, “the problem comes from the word ‘addict.’ If someone is addicted to quinoa or broccoli or kale, are they an addict? Why do we only associate that word with harmful substances?” He says, “If I started having blackouts, or engaging in violent behavior, losing jobs or harming people I love, then I would feel I'd taken a step in the wrong direction, but I feel like I have it very regulated right now, very under control. I limit the amount of drinks I'm ‘allowed’ to have, and I rarely go over.” A writer by trade, Robert says, “Drinking fuels my creativity, it helps me relax and unwind, relieves stress.”
Sounds perfectly reasonable and although I’m no expert on addiction, to me, the one sign is having it interfere in your daily life. So, allow me to speculate a ridiculous idea: if obsessively chomping on kale in the morning is making you perpetually late for work, it’s probably an addiction. At the same time, nobody dies from kale.
Dr. Vera Tarman, a Toronto, Canada-based specialist in addiction behavior and treatment, points out two definitions of addiction. The ”ABCDE” of addiction, which is a clinical tool made for addiction doctors and “the DSM V definition of substance abuse disorder is what is used for research purposes and for diagnosis for funding and for the prescribing of meds. Both are used interchangeably,” she says. Here’s how Dr. Tarman sums up the ABCDEs:
Abstinence: Are you able to abstain when you want to, within a reasonable time frame? Everybody can abstain for a day but can you do it longer if you have to?
Behavior: Do you have behaviors that you’re unable to regulate? For example, you're just going to have two cookies but you end up having a bag.
Cravings (and obsession): Even if you don’t have the substance you keep thinking about it.
Diminished responsiveness to consequences (“I also call it Denial,” Dr. Tarman says): I’m gonna stop when I get this or that – diminishing the effects of addiction, attributing consequences to something else
Emotional – how it affects your emotions: your emotions are up and down when you use it
Karen, 31, says she’s never going to be 100% convinced she’s an addict but that’s just part of the illness. She says, “I cannot say no to certain things that cause me great pain or damage. I cannot dabble or ‘just have a little bit.’ I must abstain altogether or run a very high risk of being pulled in to my old, dangerous habits. This being said, I have what I call, a ‘Fuck-it monster’ that lives in my head. It tells me all the time that I am better now, or that one night out with friends and a bottle of vodka will be fine. It can be very convincing and I often times need to white knuckle my way through staff or family gatherings that involve alcohol.”
Karen says her drinking very nearly killed her. She says it ruined great friendships, put people in danger. She has attended 12-step meetings but they weren’t for her even though she admits they helped her focus in the beginning. “I didn’t like the idea that it was the only path and that anyone who strayed would fail and die a horrible death. I left.” She also left her unhappy relationship, her career and the city she was living in. Today, she’s in a different city, in a different career and in a loving relationship. In her new career her accountability is key and it’s accountability in general that keeps her in check. She says she doesn’t clench her fists while walking by the liquor store. “I can sit with my friends in a restaurant as they have wine and I’m okay with my club soda. I don’t need to pretend that I believe in a higher power. There are other paths to sobriety.”
Dr. Tarman says that in addiction medicine there’s a whole spectrum of treatments from a doctor’s point of view (example: harm reduction, medication) that suggest success. For example, if before treatment you used to drink eight drinks a day but now you’re down to let’s say four drinks a day, that’s clinically successful. Dr. Tarman’s personal opinion is that AA is possibly most helpful in overcoming addiction: “If you want to get sober and you’re doing to do the work [suggested in 12 steps, for example] it’s very successful.” With other treatments, it’s helpful to a limited degree – no matter what tools you have,“people, places, things” might get you: you’re going to drink at a wedding no matter what your resolve.
Paul, 54, says he’s able to quit for periods of time. “I like to stop for a few weeks, sometimes longer. Once, I quit for six months, crossing days off on a calendar.” Paul admits to having trouble with moderation when drinking and he often thinks of taking an “alcohol holiday” – or, perhaps more accurately: freedom-from-alcohol holiday. He wonders if what he has is alcoholism. “Perhaps. To me it is behavior which is best characterized as ‘one of the struggles of life,’ on par with career, love, spirituality, etc. Alcohol is for me a battleground. I win a little, I lose a little. I don’t want to be full on or full off.” Mark says, “But ultimately, one day, I would like to quit drinking entirely.”
Finally, there’s Mark, 43, who has his own definition of addiction, two ways of figuring out if what he has is an addiction: external and internal evidence. The concern of the people he loves the most is the external evidence and the internal part is his own awareness of “my body's predictable, intractable, seemingly unchanging reaction to alcohol beginning at drink number one and moving on toward incapacitation.”
He says, “What I feel/sense most acutely at the intake of alcohol is the intense, overriding, bodily, automated, burning (and almost always unvoiced) knowledge that this one will not be enough. My cellular chemistry literally yearns for more even as I'm drinking what's in my hand. And to be honest, short of incapacitation, I've never, in my life, experienced (silently, or voiced to others) the thought ‘this one's enough, I've had enough, I'm going to pack it in after this one.’ Literally never. Because I've never had enough. There's no such thing. I've asked for a drink while vomiting, while being arrested, while being assaulted, while being rejected, even while unconscious.”
He admits to being a binge drinker but says it’s been years since he drank daily or chronically. Mark is now seeing a therapist and using anti-anxiety meds as well as treating his accountability to his family “as deterrents. Or at least brakes. Or speed bumps.” Like all the others, Mark got in touch after I asked people to get in touch if weren’t entirely sure about being addicts.
Jowita Bydlowskais a regular contributor to The Fix. Her memoir Drunk Mom is published in the US by Penguin today.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)