Resurrected: Five addiction recovery tips from the original millennial

It isn’t out of reach to consider recovery from addiction as a sort of ‘rebirth’ or ‘resurrection’ of life within the man or woman challenged by substance abuse. No, we didn’t die. Some of us came gruesomely close – a lot closer than most acknowledge – as a result of dependence on chemicals human tissues don’t favor much.

Each Spring, Christians around the world commemorate the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth around 33 A.D. The man was executed in the Roman tradition of the time: Crucifixion. Christians believe Jesus rose from the dead three days later when the tomb was found empty. He then ascended into heaven 40 days after being put to death. By all historical accounts, he (He) really lived and really was put to a gruesome death.

Whether you fancy yourself to be a non-believer or just choose to believe something else, the Biblical story of Jesus’s resurrection carries a few lessons about the metaphoric resurrection addicts in recovery experience.

Don’t be afraid to come back

Jesus was slain. Martyred. The man’s body was nailed to a cross and pierced. The Romans at the time were a brutal cast of characters and this was their method of public infliction of pain for those who dared cross Rome, and creating stigma by terrorizing and shaming those who would ever think to run afoul of Caesar. Those crucified are nailed or roped to an elevated cross beam and left for dead. In reality, they died agonizing deaths from bleeding out, exhaustion, suffocation, exposure, or any combination of the four. The Romans did this for centuries. They got it from the Greeks: Alexander the Great humiliated his conquests with public crucifixions 300 years before Jesus lived.

When the Romans did it in Jerusalem it was because the Romans had the city within their empire. They lived there. Jesus came back to the same land where people KILLED him.

When we come back from our addictions, home awaits. Regardless of what transpired or who we hurt. Go back. You have a new life. Live it where you want.

Be humble

Look, nobody is going to build a shrine to any of us just because we got sober or got off the pipe. Recovery doesn’t work that way.

Jesus wasn’t revered and shrines weren’t built in his honor because he came back from the dead either. He embodied humility. Most martyrs throughout history are known for decent, humble lives of service, not for miracles. The lesson of Jesus life was simple: Although revered as the Son of God, he washed the feet of peasants and common folk. He helped others out of a willingness to do so, not for reward. Jesus saw a need and filled it without consideration of money or notoriety.

Be prepared to prove yourself

One great Biblical account of Jesus and his rising from the dead in the Christian New Testament is his encounter with one of his followers. His friend Thomas was notably absent when the resurrected Jesus first appeared to other followers. Thomas – throughout history known as Doubting Thomas – would not believe Jesus was for real unless he got to probe the crucifixion wounds. He needed proof.

There are people who will require proof from you of your sobriety or abstinence. Some people will require years of it. Some people will never be satisfied with your recovery no matter what evidence you present. Nobody says you have to prove them wrong. It’s not their lives you’re living, it is your new one. However, the worst possible scenario for your new life, is to prove the doubters right.

Even if you relapse, you’ve proven only that you have a chronic, relapsing, progressive, fatal disease. Go back to bullet point one. Face them another day.

Be visible

The main reason Jesus’s followers believed in the resurrection is that they saw Him alive after He was dead. Jesus hung around for 40 days after his come back. He presented Himself alive on a number of different occasions to His followers. This firsthand evidence is a powerful argument for the believers in Christ. It’s going to be a part of people believing in you once again once you’re done with your drug of choice.

Take your time in recovery. There isn’t a need to rush back out to every social event. However, the hard work of rebuilding your life means nothing if you don’t leave your living room.

In my third book, I wrote about becoming a PANonymous alcoholic: One who doesn’t hide the disease and is visible in recovery. It helps others to see that recovery is possible. And it helps reduce the ridiculous public stigma attached to addiction that all in its grip are forever hopeless degenerates.

Know when to leave

Jesus was visible for more than a month after dying. So isn’t it conceivable that He could’ve just gone back to what he was doing? Or stayed and lived a resurrected life indefinitely? Theologians will argue that because there is a huge worldwide following and an addiction recovery article mentioning him two millennia later, Jesus in fact lives today. Converting you to that mindset isn’t the point. The point is that Jesus knew when to leave.

You don’t need to show up for every event to which you’re invited. You never have to stay. Nobody has to participate in every argument brought to your doorstep. In fact, the greatest gift we learn from our walking away from a drug that once controlled us is that we can walk away. From anything.

Scott Stevens is the author of four alcohol books including the December 2016 release, I Can’t See The Forest With All These Damn Trees In The Way: The Health Consequences of Alcohol. Get the new BookLocker title now on Amazon (viewbook.at/prehab), alcohologist.com, and everywhere you buy books.  Click Alcopocalypse for the author’s 2017 Alcohol Awareness Month whitepaper. Image by Kevin Carden, used with permission.

Addiction recovery’s low, low admission price: Own your $#1+!

(originally posted to Addicted Minds)

Admission. Great noun. It means two related things when it comes to addiction recovery:  A) The right to enter, and B) a voluntary acknowledgment/concession of a fact or truth. There is no A) without B) in our family.

Caveat: Most normies – so called ‘normal’ people – have no clue how great we have it so they don’t bother with admission. Either definition.

Drug of choice doesn’t matter. Pills, weed, alcohol, meth, fill-in-the-blank. While active with a drug of choice addicts concede very few facts about their own condition. The reason, the drug alters the function of the same organ responsible for the voluntary acknowledgment of fact. The result, as expected, is the continued use of the same drug of choice until death. Sometimes it is the drug actually causing the death. Other times it just hastens the journey. Addiction is that way when it comes to choices. Addiction means lack of choices and you have exactly two: Admission. Or shorter life expectancy.

Owning your addiction begins to slam the door on the less desirable of the two choices.

Slam the door

You begin to admit other things on the path back to society once you’ve crossed addiction’s Rubicon by admitting your problem is your problem. “I did really crummy things when I drank. I’m sorry.” “I stole from you to get more because I am addicted to more. Let me make it right.”

Sounds quite 12-steppish (ninth, to be precise), so how about a history lesson. Stepping back to admit so you can move forward is much older. There’s a Latin phrase, ‘mea culpa.’ The literal translation from the Latin is ‘through my own fault.’ Yes, the Roman Catholics use it in their Mass, but don’t get your shorts in a knot over the AA connotation or the religious affiliation: Geoffrey Chaucer used it in Troilus and Criseyde, a poem, in 1374.  Six-hundred-plus years later, we just say, ‘My bad.’

In doing so an addict isn’t saying he or she is a bad person. Just flawed. (Guess what? Normies are flawed, too.) It’s a liberating moment. No longer does an addict blame his buddies or a crummy childhood or her despotic husband. He or she takes responsibility for his addiction being nobody else’s. We own our $#1+. We move on from that point. We become people in (or aspiring to) long-term recovery.

Own your $#1+. Admit it. Your admission gains admission to the prestigious and graciously welcoming recovery family. It beats the other choice. And you have only two.

Addicted Minds’ Editor-in-Chief, Scott Stevens, is the author of four alcohol books including the December 2016 release, I Can’t See The Forest With All These Damn Trees In The Way: The Health Consequences of Alcohol. Get the new BookLocker title now on Amazon (viewbook.at/prehab), alcohologist.com, and everywhere you buy books. Image by Ivan Zamurovic, used with permission.

Alcohol: America’s elephant in the room

America's myopic view on alcohol, its unanimous drug of choice, unravels all efforts to make healthcare affordable. The view creates drug crises, like the opioid one the country is mired in. It shortens life expectancy, smothers productivity, and snuffs out lives.

The very problem originates with the last effort to rid the nation of alcohol harms: The failed American experiment of Prohibition. Once the country was back on the sauce and legit merchants replaced mobsters as the distributors, we gained a taxable commodity. Drunk on alcohol tax revenue and woozy from the Prohibition drama, no politician would throw his neck into the drug policy noose ever again when it comes to this drug. Laissez-faire defines our drug policy when it comes to alcohol.

The closest we came to reframing the view on the toxin was in the Lyndon Johnson administration. President Johnson declared the drug 'America's leading health and economic problem.' Then he went about talking to the paintings in the White House and was voted out. We didn't talk about this elephant in the room again until the U.S. Surgeon General's 2016 Report on Alcohol, Drugs and Health. This was the first time the office ever addressed the $250 billion in annual economic harm caused by alcohol. Not a hard thing to do when your party is getting voted out, but still a landmark moment in U.S. drug policy.

Changing the alcohol dialogue

Where society fears to tread is moving the dialogue beyond car wrecks and the disease of alcoholism. We know these are 'bad,' but generally, the alcohol business and our own experimentation tell us the drug is otherwise safe and it's capitol-F FUN. Reality – in the form of evidence-based science – has a funny way of changing that perspective.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) convinced America that alcohol-related car wrecks were going to be our legacy if we continued to pave our roads with the bodies of young motorists and pedestrians. And they were right. Their laudable movement recently reached its maximum potential, reducing alcohol-related road fatalities to 30 percent of all road fatalities. Eliminating the last 30 percent is possible with technology, but politically unacceptable. America loves alcohol. So we're stuck at around 10-11,000 alcohol-related traffic fatalities year in, year out.

There are 89,000 alcohol-related deaths every year. That's the elephant. Drinking and driving carves away on one in eight of those fatalities. Alcoholics die of cirrhosis, right? About 4,000 do. Yep, that's it. So we eliminate the alcoholics and the drunks behind the wheel and there are still more than 70,000 alcohol-related deaths every year because alcohol is 'safe in moderation.'

The numbers game

The numbers say otherwise. Twenty-to-forty percent of general-use hospital beds go to treating alcohol-related complications. Wounds heal more slowly under the influence. Blood pressure increases. Stroke risk doubles. Prediabetes throws blood levels out of whack. Alcohol causes heart disease. Alcohol causes cancer. Eight types to be precise. Drownings. Suicides. Household accidents. All of these consequences stem from even moderate use of the drug.

It's a toxin. Destructive to the point of altering DNA. And you're not alone for not hearing about that: Presently the alcohol industry directs the alcohol dialogue. They can get behind MADD because the product they make just got in the hands of all the wrong people. They can't very well go out and advertise that they are making a toxic drug with no health benefit. Nobody would ask the mom-in-law to come in and help resolve a marital dispute. So don't expect the industry creating the problem to highlight it.

Remember smoking? So glamorous. Some MadMen-era clown even professed smoking was healthy. Smoking used to be a numbers game. In 1964, 72 percent of adult men smoked. Profits tumbled in by the bale. The Surgeon General came out with a report on the health impact of tobacco smoke. Today, 72 percent of adult men don't smoke. What happened in between is that the big numbers of smoking related costs and deaths became more of a priority than tobacco profits. Tobacco companies even tried to dismiss their own data on the health hazards. 

They ran into a tide of education that turned Americans from dumb smoking sheep into informed consumers.

The takeaway here is that tobacco is still profitable today. And fewer people are killing themselves over its drug nicotine, but they still can choose to do so.

Starting from the start

The status quo with this drug has reached unsustainability. The $250 billion is half of U.S. military spending. It's the equivalent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the 40^th largest economy on the globe. The 89,000 deaths rank it third in preventable causes of death. The toxin, even in moderation, is clinically linked to more than 60 diseases. No alcoholic – and there are 20 million of them in the U.S. – ever became alcoholic without first taking a drink.

Reinventing the the alcohol dialogue begins before use. Would anyone take a swig of perfume or down a bottle of cologne? No. Not even the worst parent would model that for their kid. No TV commercial would tell them it's safe. No primary grade teacher would profess it to be ok so long as you didn't get behind the wheel on perfume or get hammered on it.

What's perfume got to do with it? The body breaks down alcohol by metabolizing first into acetaldehyde: A colorless flammable liquid used to manufacture... perfume. Acetaldehyde is too volatile to use straight-up in perfume or cologne so it is mixed with other ingredients in everything from cheap stinks like Hai Karate to whatever high-buck Euroscents the Kardashian clan pimps. Your body turns alcohol into the same rapid-evaporating fragrance carrier the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) lists as a group one carcinogen.

Get the picture? Your body can't not make acetaldehyde from alcohol. Alcohol intoxication just makes you do stupid stuff by lowering inhibitions, intelligence, and rational thought. Acetaldehyde. Damages. Tissue. It permanently alters DNA. You don't see that in a wine commercial, or many classrooms or doctor offices for that matter. When educating about alcohol, we need to get back to the basics on what it is we're drinking and point that out early and often.

Changing alcohol education solves several problems

Whether the approach to alcohol is laissez-faire, or just plain lazy, the vast and unwavering worship of the mind-altering, mood-altering elixir has become the proving ground for what we have in our treatment facilities today. Alcohol is a gateway drug, meaning people get their appetites for other drugs by experimenting with with this drug first. If, culture-wide, we're embracing a gateway drug as socially acceptable and 'safe,' we cannot realistically expect to keep any kid off drugs, especially other depressants like our current crisis-du-jour, opioids.

If we change the dialogue on this drug, do we cease creating more addicts or alcoholics-in-training faster than we create alcoholics-in-recovery? Nothing will stop a person who wants to use a drug from using that drug. Period. So we keep it legal, like tobacco… tax the hell out of it… and educate (or re-educate) America that what causes problems, is one.

Scott Stevens, is the author of four alcohol books including the December 2016 release, I Can’t See The Forest With All These Damn Trees In The Way: The Health Consequences of Alcohol. Buy the new BookLocker title now on Amazon (viewbook.at/prehab), alcohologist.com, and everywhere books are sold. Stevens also heads up BlogTender LLC, a content marketing firm headquartered in Lake Geneva, Wis. Image by Luis Chumpitaz, used with permission.

Barney, participation trophies, and Nintendo: We didn’t see an opioid crisis coming?

(Originally posted on AddictedMinds.com)

Overdose deaths involving opiates and opioids have quadrupled since 1999, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Using information from death certificates compiled for the CDC’s Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research (WONDER) database, almost half of the 13,000 heroin overdose deaths in 2015 (5,941) were to people born between 1981 and 2000. Prescription opioid drug overdose deaths match the same age bubble.

Clearly, a single generation or demographic isn’t involved in the crisis. If half of the deaths occur to one age band, half don’t. However one half is a statistically significant batch of dope deaths.

There are those who would direct the anger about this at pharmaceutical companies. They made stronger opioids and aggressively marketed them by the truckload to every doc with a prescription pad. There would be no supply, however, without demand. Economics. So what spiked the demand? A purple dinosaur, a medal for everyone, and constant entertainment with a reset button. They could be as much to blame as overzealous Rx writers and an uninterrupted flow of street smack.

An entire generation programmed for susceptibility

Barney, the purple dinosaur, became a phenom with the Pack-n-Play set in 1992. It was geared toward kids aged 1 to 8 years with sometimes educational value. Barney had kids singing, “I love you, you love me” etc. until the runaway hit was canned in 2009. It lives on today in syndication.

One specific rub on Barney is that the show didn’t help kids learn how to deal with negative feelings and emotions. As one commentatorput it, the real danger from Barney was, “denial: the refusal to recognize the existence of unpleasant realities. For along with his steady diet of giggles and unconditional love, Barney offers our children a one-dimensional world. Everyone must be happy. Everything must be resolved right away.'” Ouch.

On the topic of not dealing with unpleasant realities is that there is, in the real world, a concept of winning and losing. They are not two separate and unrelated concepts: You cannot have all winners and no non-winners. We used to call them ‘losers,’ a la racer Dale Earnhardt once proclaiming ‘second place is the first place loser.’

It’s hard to peg an exact year when the everyone-gets-a-trophy movement began but a 2015 episode of the HBO Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel documentary points to the late 1980’s or early 90’s as well. It was initially a California phenomenon. It was to boost the self-esteem of inner city youth. “We thought, especially for kids in struggling communities, if we just told them they were great they would believe it. Then they’ll achieve more because they were certain they were great,” researcher Ashley Merryman told HBO.

The first gaming system to reach mega-saturation in American households was the 8-bit Nintendo. It launched in October 1985 and Mario Bros. could be spotted babysitting millions of kids by the next fall. In fact, the entire gaming industry was $100 million in 1985: In 1986 it was $430 million, $310 million of it was Nintendo’s share.

Not blaming the opioid victim

Sociologists are big on generational cohorts like GenX or Millennials or Baby Boomers and enjoy painting with a broad brush the ills or successes of each cohort. The ones turning to the relief they find in opiates and opioids are not the ones to find fault with. Who gave them Barney, participation trophies, and gaming systems?

The Recession stymied economic growth, halted job creation, kept older Americans in the workforce longer, and encouraged younger American couples to have two wage earners. That Recession was 1982, NOT the most recent one of 2008. The opioid tragedy of those born 1981-2000 was written before many of them had even learned to read. GenX and Baby Boomer parents and grandparents who authentically loved and cared for kids, hobbled the same kids. How? By setting up an unrealistic world of expectations that all things are resolved in an hour, everyone gets an award and we must all be entertained all the time.

The grave consequences of an opioid crisis for this generation were entirely foreseeable – in hindsight. It’s like when the world first heard that Queen’s Freddie Mercury was gay. When we went back and watched the old videos we collectively said, ‘Well, that makes sense.”

Addicted Minds’ Editor-in-Chief, Scott Stevens, is the author of four alcohol books including the December 2016 release, I Can’t See The Forest With All These Damn Trees In The Way: The Health Consequences of Alcohol. Buy the new BookLocker title now on Amazon (viewbook.at/prehab), alcohologist.com, and everywhere books are sold. Stevens also heads up BlogTender LLC, a content marketing firm headquartered in Lake Geneva, Wis.

Dope 101: Opioids, opiates… six of one isn’t a half-dozen of the other

(Originally posted on AddictedMinds.com)

The terms opioids and opiates are frequently – and mistakenly – used as interchangeable words for the same drug when they really mean two related drug classes. The media doesn’t get that. Nor do they have to when they ring the ‘epidemic’ bell to get more viewers. For the record, we have a drug crisis, not just an opioid or opiate crisis.

An opiate is a natural narcotic analgesic (e.g. painkiller) derived from the opium poppy. Think opium, morphine, and heroin.

An opioid is a synthetic narcotic analgesic created in a lab to mimic or intensify or attempt to remove undesired inconsistencies of the natural product. Think Oxies.

Physicians used to prescribe the former. They now prescribe the latter when other pain meds like ibuprofen or acetaminophen aren’t strong enough. Street dope used to be only the former. Now street dope can be purely the former, impurely the former, or even mixed with the latter with usually disastrous outcomes.

From a dependency treatment standpoint, both classes are essentially equal in their abilities alter neurochemical processes in the body and change how the brain and body work over time. With the opioids, the carnage is often quicker. To explain the reason for that, I’m tossing out two words that will slay your opponent is Scrabble: Dolorimetry and pharmacopeia.

Big words, bigger problems

It all starts with pain. Dolorimetry (dolor is Latin for pain) is the measurement of pain in animals and, notably, humans are animals. If humans can measure it, they next want to fix it. There’s a long human history of not tolerating pain and seeking a remedy for it. And from that we get the ancient Greek word pharmacopeia, the science or study of drugs, their preparation, properties, uses, and effects.

For thousands of years, opium was used to treat the pain. In the 1500’s, laudanum (opium dissolved in alcohol) became the next generation. In the early 1800’s, the most active part of opium, morphine, was extracted. A less active part – codeine, about two percent of opium – was also extracted. Merck went commercial with morephine in 1827. Tens of thousands of Civil War soldiers became addicts. In 1874, heroin was first made by boiling down morphine in an attempt to find something twice as strong but less addictive. They got it half right… and by most accounts a century and a half later: ALL wrong.

Opioids speeding the way to ruin

Opium was banned in the U.S. in 1905 and set in the opioid lab race, which really took off later that decade when Bayer (yes, THAT Bayer) stopped mass production of heroin because of its dangers. Oxycodone was born in the lab in 1916. It was hoped that oxycodone would retain the analgesic effects of morphine and heroin with less dependence. Nope. But it still lives on today as OxyContin and Percocet. Hydrocodone was first synthesized in 1920, approved in the U.S. in 1943 and became Vicodin in 1984. Hydromorphone (Dilaudid) was first synthesized in 1924. Methadone was created in a lab in 1937 to find something, again, less addictive than morphine and heroin in surgery. Epic fail. Janssen Pharmaceuticals gave us fentanyl in 1959.

Which leads us to the latest trend is mixing into cheap street heroin even cheaper, illegal modifications of fentanyl (like carfentanyl) thousands of times more powerful than morphine or heroin.

By the way, that old opiate, morphine, is still among the World Health Organization’s List of Essential Medicines because of its relative safety in comparison to the misbegotten offspring. However, we can’t put the pharmacopeia toothpaste back in the tube and we have a drug crisis today.

Addicted Minds’ Editor-in-Chief, Scott Stevens, is the author of four alcohol books including the December 2016 release, I Can’t See The Forest With All These Damn Trees In The Way: The Health Consequences of Alcohol. Buy the new BookLocker title now on Amazon (viewbook.at/prehab), alcohologist.com, and everywhere books are sold. Stevens also heads up BlogTender LLC, a content marketing firm headquartered in Lake Geneva, Wis.

Alcohol Awareness Month resources available at alcohologist website

The free Alcohol Awareness Month Alcopocalypse whitepaper is available for download at www.alcohologist.com. Paper copies for mailing to U.S. addresses are available for $1 each (includes postage) or $6 per 10 to a single address. 

Stevens's four books on alcohol and health are available on the website and everywhere books are sold. Of note for the 31st Alcohol Awareness month is the newest title, I can't see the forest with all these damn trees in the way.  His 2016 Alcohol Awareness Month educational DVD series, The A-Files: Alcohol A-Z is available on Amazon in a limited-stock re-release. In  2015, the author released the Alcohology app still available for Android devices.

Founded and sponsored by The National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence (NCADD), Alcohol Awareness Month is recognized every April. It was established in 1987 to help reduce the stigma so often associated with alcoholism by encouraging communities to reach out to the American public each April with information about alcohol, alcoholism and recovery. Stevens points out the effort is great on informing the public about alcohol-related car wrecks and the disease of alcoholism, but "there is far more to this drug. It's a toxin and known carcinogen with no health benefit, for either gender, at any age, in any amount."


Addicted Minds’ Editor-in-Chief, Scott Stevens, is the author of four alcohol books including the December 2016 release, I Can’t See The Forest With All These Damn Trees In The Way: The Health Consequences of Alcohol. Buy the new BookLocker title now on Amazon (viewbook.at/prehab), alcohologist.com, and everywhere books are sold. Stevens also heads up BlogTender LLC, a content marketing firm headquartered in Lake Geneva, Wis.

Alcohol Awareness Month whitepaper foretells sea change for alcohol industry

A whitepaper called Alcopocalypse: Six signs the next 10 years for alcohol will look like the last 20 for tobacco is available for free download during Alcohol Awareness Month this April. The paper looks at how American opinion toward alcohol as a drug and the $250 billion it costs the economy each year signal a shifting future for the beverage alcohol business. “Don't worry,” says author Scott Stevens, “there isn't a second coming of Prohibition. Alcohol is going to remain a profitable industry the same way the tobacco industry remains solvent. The tide is turning however.”

April 2017's thirty-first observance of Alcohol Awareness Month is the first since the U.S. Surgeon General signaled a shift in alcohol policy. The Surgeon General's Nov. 2016 Report on Alcohol, Drugs, and Health was the first time the office took on the health impact of alcohol use in a manner similar to the way the same office took on tobacco smoke in 1964.

Stevens, an award-winning author of four alcohol/health best-sellers, says, “All alcohol use impacts health, healthcare costs, and the economy. Just like smoking does. With alcohol, it's no longer a dialogue exclusively concerning impaired driving or the disease of alcoholism. The dialogue on this drug is changing from what it does for the drinker, to what it does to the drinker.”

Immediately after the Surgeon General's “unprecedented” report Stevens released I can't see the forest with all these damn trees in the way: The health consequences of alcohol. Alcopocalypse also appears as an appendix in the book. “Alcohol use is a cost driver for the health system because more long-term health consequences from moderate drinking are coming to light… while more ‘benefits’ of 'responsible' drinking are being debunked.” The cost and the health impact are two of his six topics in Alcopocalypse. “I was born in 1967. Then, 72 percent of adult men smoked. Today, 72 percent don't, because America changed that dialogue following the Surgeon General's direction.”

Among the other 'signs' in the whitepaper is the prevalence of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASDs). They carry a lifetime cost of $2 million for each individual and FASDs are now more common in the U.S. than autism. “Autism isn't preventable. FASD is 100 percent preventable. People have been Madison-Avenued into a way of thinking that tells them this is a 'safe' drug. It's anything but safe, even in moderation, especially for the unborn.”

Stevens also notes data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that indicates 20-40 percent of hospital resources go to treating alcohol-related complications. “It's easy to see what causes the problem, is the problem. It's not just about alcoholism or drinking and driving. It's about taking a drug, a toxin and carcinogen in any amount. People routinely complain about healthcare costs and sagging productivity… over a beer or a shot. They’re not seeing the forest. Just the trees.”

The free whitepaper is available for download at the author's website www.alcohologist.com. An option to order printed copies is also available, as is ordering information for the four books from Stevens and his 2016 Alcohol Awareness Month educational DVD series, The A-Files: Alcohol A-Z. For 2015, the author released the Alcohology app still available on Android devices.

Stevens says “Alcopocalypse encourages informed decisions about using alcohol based on evidence-based science. Informed decisions don't come from advertising, observational studies and wishful thinking.”

Alcohol Awareness Month whitepaper foretells alcohol industry challenges news release on PRBuzz.

Addicted Minds’ Editor-in-Chief, Scott Stevens, is the author of four alcohol books including the December 2016 release, I Can’t See The Forest With All These Damn Trees In The Way: The Health Consequences of Alcohol. Buy the new BookLocker title now on Amazon (viewbook.at/prehab), alcohologist.com, and everywhere books are sold. Stevens also heads up BlogTender LLC, a content marketing firm headquartered in Lake Geneva, Wis.