Oh-Crap Sunday: Addiction, Family, and the Holidays

The treatment discussion revs up between Thanksgiving Thursday and Cyber Monday

Real talk: If you put off the substance use discussion until the New Year, you might not have a chance to have the discussion. Addiction is a disease. People die. And they only can dig themselves deeper into destruction during the Holidays without help.

That's news as ice cold as Wausau, Wisconsin or the turkey leftovers you stuffed into the back of the freezer. By the way, you're never going to eat that. It tasted dry on Thanksgiving... it won't get better by March by itself. Likewise, a drug user won't get better by March (or Christmas) by himself.

Oh-Crap Sunday means more than you blew through your entire holiday budget on Black Friday and Small Business Saturday. It's more relevant than your favorite NCAA team getting crushed on Rivalry Saturday, or your NFL team being worse than the Bears on any given Sunday at the twilight of the calendar. Oh-Crap Sunday is the pause at the start of the Holiday Gauntlet where you have an a-ha moment after the first of the season's socializing, realizing that a loved one is in over his or her head with alcohol or other drugs. Oh. Crap.

Help starts at home

What does 'in over their head' mean? Noticing someone's drug use – alcohol is a drug – means it is a problem. You don't notice someone's consumption otherwise. The nodding off is more than turkey's tryptophan. The slurred speech telling the same joke loudly for the third time isn't just because Uncle Dan is mixing the drinks. The fragrance in the bathroom isn't potpourri. Wise up. Trust your instinct. You're probably right about a drug use problem. If you're wrong, what does it cost you?

We've normalized drug use in the U.S. as pointed out in Look What Dragged the Cat In. With it being normalized, the tendency is to blow it off until it gets obvious. Then it's time to get help.

In looking for help, there is no substitute for intervention at home. You can go to every slick treatment website Google throws at you. Nobody's going for an evaluation until the personal, charged conversation takes place at home. Work with your M.D. or a treatment professional to find the right path toward 'clean and sober' after the Oh-Crap conversation. The first step is the conversation.

Drugs alter the mind, talk to the heart

Consider that all drugs of abuse licit and illicit alter the mind. An altered mind isn't going to decide for itself that it needs help. People don't take drugs to feel good, they take drugs to feel less bad. If the brain's user is going to feel more bad, he or she is going to be messaged by that brain that the drug isn't a problem. A person first needs to hear from family and friends that the drug use is concerning.

The talk is harder than you think. But not harder than talking to a corpse. Alcohologist.com has resources like videos (see the New Year, New You series opener here) that help ease into the conversation. The three-question AUDIT is also an ice-breaker/resolve-breaker.

Quick: What's the next holiday? Will you spend it without him or her in your life?

Image by Roman Stetsyk, used with permission.

Drugging, drinking, and grasping at straw

The real power drugs hold is how they make the user accept magical thinking as real

In the 16th century, Sir Thomas More originated the idiom ‘grasping at straws’.  In actuality, the lawyer, philosopher, and Roman Catholic saint was referring to straw – cattle bedding – and that a drowning man will grasp at anything floating, even straw, to try to stay afloat (paraphrasing). It’s a perfect idiom 483 years later to illuminate how drug use is rationalized by the user and by American society.

Any drug use. Any time.

Every rational man and woman knows the risk of addiction – and death – from using opiates and opioids, for example. There is a well-documented history of addiction and death from this class of drug, dating to it’s first cultivation and use 3,400 years BCE. Why is it still around? Because people will use it. That’s why.

One of the first affects of any mind-altering drug is that it convinces the user it is somehow safe and the consequences are for the other guys. Magical thinking. Like a drowning man believing a single stalk of dried grass in an ocean will buoy him and float him to safety. Once the drug of choice takes over that human, the magical thinking gives way entirely to chemical dependence.

Even when the drug use doesn’t escalate to dependence – or I should say ‘especially’ when it doesn’t – magical thinking trumps intellect every and any time a person is under the influence.

A recovery pioneer and modern-day anti-alcohol trailblazer in the 1970’s, Father Martin, put it succinctly in his Chalk Talk. He said the human mind works best when it operates as Intellect over Emotion, or I/E. Add a mind-altering drug, any of them, and the equation flips to Emotion over Intellect, E/I. That’s a good explanation to why we say and do incredibly stupid stuff while impaired. Your grandmother was right when she said, “That’s not your Rhodes Scholar Grandpa, it’s the booze talking,” right after he declared he was going to shave the cat.

We do dumb stuff, and believe dumb stuff

A lot of recovery professionals, especially in court-ordered programs, see the aftermath of the dumb stuff followed by some more magical thinking. Every single person charged with DUI or other drug-related crime believes in magic. He or she will be sentenced lightly because of their unique situation, or get off on a technicality, or the evidence will be lost because it happened to his ‘guy’ ‘a couple years ago’ and the ‘law is muddy on this issue.’

When a drug tells the same brain it’s poisoning that the stuff isn’t so dumb, we do the dumb stuff. Including rationalizing the use of the drug. Two common examples are the well-funded oversimplifications of marijuana benefits, and the widespread acceptance of alcohol risks.

A medical user of marijuana dislikes the getting stoned part. Just like a medical user of Oxycontin doesn’t care for the high. When a recreational pot smoker wants to rationalize use, however, out comes the Emotion. Drinkers… well, there isn’t medical use and there aren’t any health benefits. It’s all about the buzz.

Send life rafts, not more straw

They’ll trot out the ‘medical benefits’ to support their continued consumption of a drug… when the medical benefits are far from their reason for smoking dope. They’ll roll out the frequently misquoted safety argument in favor of the drug. It sounds like ‘nobody ever died from smoking weed’.  True, nobody overdosed on weed, put the drug is linked to more deaths and health consequences than can be dismissed as coincidence. They’ll spout the long history of smoking herb, embraced by cultures vastly older than ours. Drowning… grasping at any fleck of straw that will keep them afloat.

The scientific evidence on alcohol as a toxin and carcinogen is even more concrete than the evidence of health damage from marijuana use. The drug can change DNA! It begins damaging otherwise healthy tissue from sip one. It’s so poisonous that if the liver had pain nerve endings, none of us would take sip two. Very scientifically sound and highly intellectual. However, even moderate use of the drug alcohol flips the I/E equation to E/I.

The grasping for straw sounds something like: ‘It’s legal’… ‘It relaxes me’… ‘Moderation is safe, the ad said so’… ‘It’s good for the heart’.  That last point has been discredited for more than a decade, by the way.  Rationalizations… buoying a drug-altered brain modified to E/I by the same drug that’s killing it. When someone is drowning, they want to believe in the straw. What if you drift to them a life raft of factsinstead? We have to deliver them back safely to the boat off which they jumped. That boat  – society and social behavior  – may not be Utopia (Sir More’s more famous work), but it beats drowning.

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.

Photo by Dusan Petrovic, used with permission.

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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.