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Wednesday, September 3, 2014
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The White House has nominated Michael Botticelli to be Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. He has held the position on an acting basis since March. 
Monday, September 1, 2014
September 1 Chp 60 v 11 v 12 TWELVE STEPPING WITH STRENGTH FROM THE PSALMS
O grant us help against the foe (addiction) , for human help is worthless .With God we shall do valiantly ; it is He who will tread down our foes (addictions).
STEP 3 - Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God.
The definition of valiant is someone or something very brave or determined.with valor; in a valiant manner; "he fought valiantly until the end"
Fighting is what we will do ! For those of us in recovery , we already know some days can be a knocked down all out fist fight .With coach (Jesus ) in your corner is the only way your gonna win the fight . In a real boxing match the fight will last 12 rounds unless you tap out or the referee (you) stops the fight . How many times in the first few rounds have you tapped out .Trying to gain our sobriety we must be diligent and valiant . In order to be successful in winning the fight , most fighters study their opponent and discipline and train themselves .Their coach (Jesus) is someone who is and was a fighter at one point in their lives . The coach(Jesus) has the knowledge and expertise to help .How good of a fighter would someone be if they only listened too themselves - It is like this for a lot of folks in recovery . They are about to take on the greatest fighter(addiction) they have ever faced . It will be a long exhausting bloody fight . Finding the right coach (Jesus) is key to winning the fight but with every good coach (Jesus) comes a team to support (fellowship ,sponsor , AA ,NA) the fighter. So far you have been trying to win this fight on your own and you have fought valiantly and your beaten and bloodied but your not out so get up one more time listen to the coach (Jesus) get your team together train and when the time comes fight like hell and win .
1 Tim 4:7-8 (Phi) ...Take time and trouble to keep yourself spiritually fit. Bodily fitness has limited value, but spiritual fitness is of unlimited value, for it holds promise both for this present life and for the life to come.
By Joseph Dickerson
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Naloxone Distribution: Saving Lives and Restoring Trust in the Police
Law enforcement departments across the country are finally equipping officers with naloxone—a medication that reverses opiate drug overdose—and teaching them to treat overdose as a medical issue before viewing it as a criminal one.
protect and serve Shutterstock
08/27/14
Just a few years ago, no one imagined that police would save lives at the scene of a drug overdose instead of making arrests. But today law enforcement departments across the country are equipping officers with naloxone, a medication that reverses opiate drug overdose, and teaching them to treat overdose as a medical issue before viewing it as a criminal one. To anyone who has ever questioned our nation’s punitive approach to drug use, it’s a welcome change. But not everyone is celebrating.
Though the practice of law officers carrying naloxone is fairly new, the medication itself has been around a long time. Paramedics have used it for decades to reverse respiratory failure in people who overdose on opiates such as pain pills or heroin. The medicine temporarily blocks the opiate effects, allowing a person to breathe again long enough for help to arrive. In 1996 naloxone became available to lay people through a Chicago-based harm reduction program that distributed it to people at risk for opiate overdose and their loved ones. The program has beenimmensely successful at saving lives in the community and is now replicated in 28 states.
As law enforcement naloxone programs increase in popularity, some states have passed legislation limiting distribution only to first responders
Then in 2010 the Quincy Police Department in Massachusetts launched the first program to equip law enforcement with naloxone. Officers often arrive at the scene of an overdose before paramedics and have a unique opportunity to administer the drug before brain damage or death occurs. But there is one problem. As law enforcement naloxone programs increase in popularity, some states have passed legislation limiting distribution only to first responders—and old stereotypes about drug users are resurfacing: they can’t be trusted to handle a medical situation…naloxone would encourage more drug use…drug users don’t care about their own health.
Such rhetoric ignores that fact that naloxone distribution originated among people who use drugs and that they have successfully used it to reverse over 10,000 opiate overdoses over the last two decades. Overdose prevention advocates are disturbed by the new trend in states such as Delaware, Indiana, Louisiana and Missouri. So are some cops.
Chief Ken Ball heads the Holly Springs Police Department, the first department in Georgia to equip all officers with naloxone.
“I think it’s important for people to keep naloxone in the house as soon as they discover a family member is using drugs,” says Chief Ball.
Since their program launched on June 4, 2014, Holly Springs officers have already reversed two overdoses in the community. Chief Ball’s quick action to implement a naloxone program (less than two months after a new Georgia law made such a program possible) was spurred in part by the urgency of the drug overdose situation in Georgia and in part by tragedy within his own department. In August 2013 a Holly Springs police officer, Lieutenant Tanya Smith, lost her 20-year-old daughter to a drug overdose. Lt Smith became the driving force behind efforts to pass the new Georgia law and to equip law enforcement with naloxone. But as a mother who lost a child to drugs, she is also a firm believer in community access to naloxone.
“Giving naloxone to community members provides us with an opportunity to educate people on how to recognize, intervene and prevent overdose deaths,” says Lt Smith. “With the overwhelming number of households with some form of opioid in the cabinets, we cannot rely solely on law enforcement or emergency services personnel to be there in time to reverse an overdose.”
Many paramedics support community access to naloxone as well. Keith Tamayo volunteers for the Wantagh-Levittown Volunteer Ambulance Corps in New York, one of the first paramedic services to dispense naloxone to lay people. The idea for the program developed after Keith and his team responded to an opiate overdose for a 23-year-old man who had received a naloxone kit from a drug treatment program two years prior. Paramedics arrived to find the young man’s mother desperately trying to assemble an intranasal naloxone injector. Keith thought, “Why not start a program where we give naloxone to people in the community and train them continually on how to use it?” They launched the program earlier this summer.
“By giving naloxone to community members who are likely to be present in an overdose situation, we are getting the drug minutes closer to the person who needs it,” he says.
Further south in North Carolina, Guilford County Emergency Services is considering dispensing naloxone to the community as well.
“We absolutely support the concept of ‘civilian administration’ [of naloxone] as a bridge to treatment,” says Guilford County EMS Director, Jim Albright. “Our agency goal is to treat overdoses as a medical condition, manage the immediacy of the emergency, and get patients into a sustained treatment program.”
Still, Albright and others in the medical and law enforcement community have concerns about giving naloxone directly to drug users. One common concern is that if drug users have the antidote to opiate overdose, they might use more drugs.
Dr. Caleb Banta-Green, a Senior Research Scientist at the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute at the University of Washington, has studied overdose interventions, including community naloxone programs, for many years.
“Evaluations done to date show that most people do not use more drugs just because they have naloxone available,” he says. “Are there people that will? Yes, probably a small proportion. But the measure of success of any health intervention isn't that it has the perfect, desired effect for every person, but that on average for most people it has a benefit and that benefit outweighs any potential harm.”
Another concern shared by Albright is that if people are trained on how to respond to an overdose with naloxone, they may delay calling 911 or not call at all. While evidence suggests that this may be true for some people, it may also be the case that people who wouldn’t call paramedics because they have naloxone wouldn’t call paramedics if they didn’t have naloxone either—and would try to revive the victim with a number of common but ineffective methods such as putting the person in a cold shower, placing ice on the groin, or injecting the victim with salt water, milk, or other drugs. While it is difficult to measure how naloxone access would affect 911 calls, delaying or forgoing help from emergency services is certainly a concern. Community groups that distribute naloxone should continue to stress the importance of followup medical care in response to an overdose.
Though there is some debate about which groups to prioritize for naloxone access, there is little doubt as to the benefits of training lay people and law enforcement on overdose response. The shared goal of preventing deaths can help alleviate historic tension between the two groups. Evidence from the Quincy Police Department in Massachusetts, who launched the first law enforcement naloxone program in 2010, shows that offering law enforcement the opportunity to save lives can change how officers view drug users and vice versa. In Quincy, drug users are actively seeking officers for help when a friend overdoses because they have something that rarely exists between drug users and law enforcement—trust. And police are starting to emphasize treatment over incarceration for low level drug offenders.
“Absolutely naloxone programs will improve relationships between law enforcement and drug users,” says Chief Ball of Holly Springs. “They change the mentality of ‘Let’s put everyone in jail’ to one that focuses on saving a life and giving that person another chance to get help.”
Perhaps nothing better illustrates how naloxone is already shifting law enforcement attitude towards drug use than the recent Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) National Summit on Illegal Drugsheld in Washington D.C. in April 2014. During the Summit, more than 200 police executives from across the country joined federal officials and nonprofits such as the North Carolina Harm Reduction Coalition (where I work as the Advocacy and Communications Coordinator) to discuss the issue of opiate drugs and naloxone. Much of the debate centered around law enforcement naloxone programs—and officers were overwhelmingly in favor.
U.S. Capitol Police Chief Kim Dine, remarking on the discussion, said, “This is historic. We are hearing police officials from across the country saying, ‘Heroin is a medical problem.’ That is not the way we have viewed this for the last 40 years…We have put a lot of people in jail, and we have hurt police-community relations in a lot of ways by the way police agencies have historically approached the drug issue.”
As the national discussion on drug policy shifts towards a more health-based approach, overdose prevention and naloxone will likely play key roles. It is vitally important that stakeholder groups such as people affected by drug use, law enforcement, and the medical community avoid territorial issues or the temptation to belittle each other’s contribution towards ending the overdose crisis. There is room for everyone at the table. All that remains is to ensure that everyone feels welcome.
Tessie Castillo is the Advocacy and Communications Coordinator at the North Carolina Harm Reduction Coalition. She writes a regular column for The Huffington Post on overdose prevention, drugs, sex work, HIV/AIDS, law enforcement safety and health. She last wrote about the rise of naloxone distribution programs and joined The Fix's new Ask An Expert section.
Porn Addiction in the Christian Community: Why Are Rates so High?
For the faithful, porn addiction isn't about how much porn is watched—it's about how guilty they feel when they do it.
Cameron Turner
08/26/14
Standing out boldly against a bright yellow background, the tall red capital letters hover above the highway shouting their promise of sexual stimulation to oncoming motorists: ADULT VIDEO! But as turned-on drivers downshift toward the X-rated invite, they can’t avoid seeing another sign. On it, the familiar face of a bearded, long haired man looks down with gentle, disapproving eyes. Alongside the portrait, another set of capital letters warns that “Jesus Is Watching You.”
Catholic leaders in San Juan County, New Mexico installed that billboard as a shame-inducing admonition to porn shop patrons – you may be able to hide your “sinful” behavior from other people, but not from God!
Because of the belief that the Almighty watches everything we do (reflected in Bible verses such as Jeremiah 16:17, “My eyes are on all their ways; they are not hidden from me, nor is their sin concealed from my eyes”) and the traditional church teaching that non-marital sex is immoral, many devout Christians agonize over their experiences with pornography. Feelings of guilt may explain why people with strong religious convictions often believe they are addicted to porn.
In a piece titled “I’m a Christian Addicted to Porn” for the magazineChristianity Today, Shaun Groves describes the torturous shame he felt after enjoying sexually explicit media:
“The pleasure faded. And in its wake I fought pounding waves of regret and guilt. I felt a million miles from good, a billion light years from God. I'd often think back to how I saw that first picture of a naked woman. I had used a stick to keep it away from me. I felt like God had the stick in his hand now, poking at me from a distance, trying not to get any of me on him.”
Joshua Grubbs watched students go through similar anguish during his undergraduate years at a conservative college. So, as a doctoral candidate in psychology at Ohio’s Case Western Reserve University, Grubbs was excited to explore the link between religious values and perceptions of porn addiction.
Grubbs' research team surveyed three representative groups of adults (including undergrads at both a public and a religious university) about their viewing of adult material over the Internet. The study,Transgression as Addiction, concluded that "religiosity and moral disapproval of pornography use were robust predictors of perceived addiction to Internet pornography while being unrelated to actual levels of use among pornography consumers."
In other words, people who object to graphic sexual entertainment for religious reasons are more likely to see themselves as addicts – no matter how much porn they actually watch. "We were surprised that the amount of viewing did not impact the perception of addiction, but strong moral beliefs did," Grubbs said of the findings which were published in February in the Archives of Sexual Behavior.
Gospel music superstar Kirk Franklin thrust the issue of Christians and porn addiction into the limelight ten years ago by revealing his personal obsession with sex videos and magazines. Appearing with his wife, Tammy, on the conservative Christian TV show The 700 Club, Franklin opened up about the all-consuming hunger that threatened his marriage and made him feel like a hypocrite in his ministry. He talked about greedily consuming porn in private – especially when he was on the road. He talked about trying to get Tammy to watch porn with him. Franklin also claimed that his addiction took hold suddenly, when he was a small child. “There's always the boy who has the big brother who has the magazine under his bed. That's how it starts. So the first time I ever saw one, I was around 8 or 9. I saw my first magazine, and from there I was addicted,” Franklin said.
Later, in an interview with Oprah Winfrey, Franklin explained that he became so disgusted by his habit that he packed up all of his porn and drove it to a garbage bin far away from his house. But later that night, he started fiending for the triple-X images. "I tried to go to sleep that night, and it was literally like a drug calling me," Franklin admitted to Oprah. "About three or four in the morning, in my flip-flops and boxers, I got in my car and drove back to that dumpster…"
Franklin realized that he was out of control, so he admitted his porn fixation to his wife and sought professional help. After intense counseling, he said he was no longer tempted by adult media. By going public with his personal struggle, Kirk Franklin helped clear the way for open discussions about pornography among Christians. Since then, there have been countless confessional articles, blogs, books, sermons and seminars by churchgoers and clergy who got caught up in porn.
Former Kansas City pastor T.C. Ryan detailed a 40-year battle with pornography in his autobiographyAshamed No More. In a video promoting his book, Ryan discloses that, as he struggled to balance porn with the pulpit, he "increasingly grew into a life of robust spirituality engulfed in shame and self loathing." Therapy led Ryan to a happier place, and he struck an optimistic chord when he told The Fix, “I hope that from my journey people might learn that we are all sexual beings, and that is good…but for a lot of us we don’t learn how to use our sexuality in healthy, self-integrated ways.”
How much pornography do Americans consume? According to the Pew Research Center, 12% of US adults (including 23% of 18 to 29 year-olds) admit that they have watched adult videos online. Pew concedes that those numbers might be low. Since the survey was done over the phone, the polling company says that some respondents may have felt "a reluctance to report the behavior." Meanwhile, other estimates suggest that adult Americans visit porn sites an average of 7.5 times per month. And those visits last an average of 12 minutes.
As reported by Covenant Eyes, "in a recent survey by the Barna Group, 21% of Christian men say they have thought they were “addicted” to porn or said they weren’t sure. This is more than two times what non-Christian men said (10%). Interestingly, 64% of Christian men say they view porn at least once a month, but a higher percentage (71%) of non-Christians report doing this.
Mental health professionals continue to debate whether frequent or compulsive viewing of pornography actually qualifies as addiction. As The Fix reported earlier this year, New Mexico psychologist Dr. David Ley analyzed the research on porn addiction and found most of the studies to be scientifically weak. (Only 27% of the articles included actual data.) Ley recognizes that many people have trouble controlling how much porn they watch, but he says slapping the “addict” label on them isn’t the best solution. Pointing out that porn addiction has no official diagnosis in the American Psychiatric Association's mental health bible, the DSM-5, Ley wrote: “We need better methods to help people who struggle with the high frequency use of visual sexual stimuli, without pathologizing them or their use thereof.”
Ley went on to suggest that watching pornography can actually have benefits for adults such as increasing sexual enjoyment within long term relationships, improving attitudes toward sex and reducing the incidence of sex crimes, particularly crimes against children.
Case Western researcher Joshua Grubbs thinks the startling self-reported figures from the Barna Group survey have more to do with shame than with legitimate addiction. Grubbs says that many Christians who have watched porn believe they are addicts because of their "pathological interpretation of a behavior (that is) deemed a transgression or a desecration of sexual purity."
David Ley concurs and accuses church-based therapists of promoting religious morality instead of mental health. “Religious groups are framing this as a medical disease and obscuring their religious agenda. (They) are using porn addiction pseudo-science labels to mask their moral attacks on porn and sexual behavior,” Ley told The Daily Banter.
Grubbs argues that clarifying why certain people incorrectly perceive themselves as pornography addicts will empower them to live more fulfilling religious lives. "We can help the individual understand what is driving this perception, and help individuals better enjoy their faith," stated Grubbs.
Cameron Turner is a writer based in Los Angeles. He last wrote about sobriety and hip hop and how our veterans are being destroyed by painkiller prescriptions.
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