Even the most difficult things in life can be great opportunities for personal growth and learning. For anyone with a drug or alcohol addiction, going to drug rehab can be just that kind of thing. But you’ve gotta do more than just show up. Making it really personal will help you get the most from your experience.

Choose A Drug Rehab To Fit Your Needs

Just going to the closest drug rehab in town may not be your best option. By no means should you discount the drug treatment options in your area. However, no drug rehab is exactly the same. You need to know what you are getting into so you can get the maximum benefit. It pays to do your homework.

Do you have a drug addiction and a significant mental health issue like bipolar or PTSD? Then a specific dual diagnosis drug rehab may be the best move for you. You can count on a high level of professional knowledge and expertise to handle your challenging drug addiction situation.

Maybe you’d be more comfortable in a drug rehab with only women. Or consider a drug rehab physically close to a major hospital if you have recurring or chronic health issues. No matter what your situation, you can find a drug rehab that will target your specific needs.

Personal Committment To Drug Rehab Makes A Difference

OK – drug rehab isn’t magic. Each person who attends needs to bring a level of personal committment with them. Does that mean you can’t have a wavering thought about relapse or wondering if you are ready? No – there is no perfection standard here.

More than anything, a stronger personal committment often comes when the person hits a point where they are just ready for things to get better. It hurts too much to continue the way it has been, and even the uncertainty of working towards sobriety is less painful and seems worth the effort. They have just “had it” and know that it’s time to make things better.

How Do You Know You Are Ready For Drug Rehab

No one can guarantee when a person will get to that point, and it can’t be forced either. It is a personal reckoning that happens in its own time. When the last straw comes on to the camel’s back, that can bring about more openness to drug treatment.

You do not need to be at absolute rock bottom of your life to know it’s time for drug rehab. Perhaps you can see the writing on the wall, and you know yourself well enough to see how things are likely to go down. If you have already lost more than you can stand, but not everything, that may be plenty to stir your committment to drug treatment.

Drug Rehab Is A Personal Situation

Your most beneficial drug rehab experience truly depends on your personal situation. The point is that you are ready to make life better and you are willing to go the tough road of drug treatment rather than sink deeper into your addiction.

This doesn’t guarantee that you will never need drug treatment again. Willpower and committment are not enough to prevent relapse forever. However, making a personal investment into your treatment process will help you make the most of it.

When drug addiction is in effect, crime is always an issue. In fact, one of the many reasons why the court system offers drug rehab as an alternative to prison time in many states is because they recognize that if not for the need to feed their habit, many would never have appeared before the court in the first place. The cost of fighting the crime due to drug addiction is so much higher than the cost of drug rehab that it’s a fiscally smart decision, as well.

Here are a few items of interest related to drug addiction and crime this week:

The Drug Trafficker, The Hells Angels and the Hit that Failed

Kim Bolan at Global TV Maritimes writes: “Former Langley trucker Robert Shannon, who bragged that he earned between $6 million and $7 million from drugs, ordered a hit on another co-conspirator in the case, but the trigger man missed his target, according to just-released U.S. court documents.”

Russell Simmons: Dumping the Rockefeller Drug Laws for a New Direction in New York

Russell Simmons writes for Huffington Post: “Today, there are approximately 12,000 people in New York prisons under the Rockefeller Drug Laws, more than 90 percent of who are Black and Latino. There is no excuse for this disparity — whites and people of color use and sell illegal drugs at approximately equal rates.”

Riney Tapped by Office of National Drug Control Policy to Create Anti-Methamphetamine Campaign

Says Yahoo! Finance: “Publicis & Hal Riney today announced that it has been selected to create an anti-meth campaign in conjunction with The Partnership for a Drug-Free America (PDFA) on behalf of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP). This assignment will include creative development and execution of a campaign primarily focused around television and out-of-home components.”

Woman Remembers Friends Found on West Mesa

According to KOB.com in New Mexico: “A former drug user and prostitute who was a friend of two women found buried on Albuquerque’s West Mesa says the burial site should serve as a warning to all women who live her former lifestyle. The woman, who did not want to be identified, said she was a friend of both Victoria Chavez and Michelle Valdez. Their bodies have been the only ones identified in a crime scene where 11 others have been discovered.”

Alcohol in the News

About.com has a nifty little collection of news updates focusing on alcohol addiction and crime: “Charles Barkley serves time in Tent City… Actor Brian Bosworth arrested for DUI… Super Bowl MVP waives marijuana hearing… Jaguars Receiver Reggie Williams arrested… Woman a bit too eager to get to liquor store… Teen Turns in mom for smoking pot.”

What have you been reading about this week?

There’s an ongoing issue that has plaguing pharmacists, doctors and patients alike: the problem of monitoring drug prescriptions for safety. In most places, making sure that patients are not abusing prescriptions, that doctors are not over-prescribing medications and that pharmacists are not incorrectly filling prescriptions or allowing a patient to walk away with conflicting prescriptions from different doctors is a problem that goes unchecked. But slowly, that has started to change.

Problems with Drug Prescription

There are a number of problems that could occur with prescription drugs. If you are prescribed more than one drug and especially if you get prescriptions from more than one doctor, a specialist or an emergency room doctor, for example, as well as a primary care physician, then there is a risk that the medications will interact negatively.

Another issue is when people have a prescription for an opiate painkiller to which they are addicted and try to supplement that prescription with more of the same or equivalent opiates by going through another doctor and pharmacist. Without monitoring, you could take a deadly overdose of opiate prescription drugs.

A New Prescription Drug Monitoring System in Vermont

According to the Burlington Free Press, the new Vermont Prescription Drug Monitoring System is the state’s latest way of tackling this nationwide problem. It is the 38th state to enact this kind of legislature and monitoring. Specifically, the new prescription drug monitoring system tracks the prescription and dispersion of controlled substances like opiate painkillers. Why these? Because though you may mix other drugs with a harmful result, the problem of abuse of prescriptions to sell to others or to feed a personal addiction is so dangerous and rampant a practice that it was the necessary first step in prescription drug monitoring.

How Prescription Drug Monitoring Works

Well, the Vermont Department of Health has come up with a prescription drug monitoring system that, according to Burlington Free Press, “collects a standard set of information on each prescription of a controlled substance.” Of course, a controlled substance is any prescription regulated by the government, like Vicodin, OxyContin, Percocet and Percodan, Lortab and Lorcet, Fentanyl, et cetera. With the information, they create a database that doctors and pharmacists can access statewide so that those who are abusing their prescriptions can be easily identified.

How It’s Working So Far

So far, so good. Every seven days, pharmacies in Vermont are required to upload all their data on controlled prescriptions and since the middle of January, there have been about 350,000 records uploaded to the system.

Is there a system like this in your state? Have you been affected by it in any way? Do you think it will work?

When the subject of drug addiction or alcoholism comes up, you often hear people saying it’s just a matter of “will power” to quit or control their use. Well what is will power anyway, really? Is this actually strong enough to overcome a powerful physical and psychological addiction?

No More Drug and Alcohol Addiction

Before I go too far here, I need to preface my post with this thought. If you look at problems and successes there are always always exceptions to the rule. There are always individuals who have the right mix of characteristics and abilities to do things different from the great majority of people.

What’s important to understand is that these exceptions are just that – exceptions. With that said, there are certainly people who have just said one day, “Enough, I’m done with drugs and alcohol and there will be no more.” And there was no more, no relapse, and no professional help – just the human will and dedication.

Drug Rehab Brings People Together To Change Lives

What I’m musing about is the greater reality that most people need much more than just their own selves to overcome something as huge as a drug and alcohol addiction. Going with the idea that “no man is an island”, drug and alcohol rehabs bring people together to support each other and get things out in the open.

Will power is something kind of funny. When you are inspired, it can carry you through the roughest of times, push you through your greatest triumph, transform you into a stronger person than you ever thought you were. The flip side of this is that will power can sometimes fly out the door as quickly as it can get fired up. Relying on just your emotions is often unreliable.

Are You Trying To Drive A Broken Down Car

Do you have the “mental fuel” to carry out your goal and weather the storms? Do you have the guts to gut it out when it seems pointless and futile? Sometimes this is enough. But for many, the use of sheer will power can be exhausting and disappointing. Without challenging the core beliefs and patterns that got them into an addiction in the first place, it may be like trying to drive around in a broken down car on a nearly empty tank with a low battery. Lots of effort but a poor setup for success from the start.

The car needs a great deal of tuning up and rebuilding. It might get you where you want to go once in a while, but most of the time you might want to just kick it. And if you aren’t a mechanic, the frustration of not even knowing where to start can be enough to make you give up on driving altogether.

Hope, enthusiasm, and willpower to keep going against the odds can make you sour on the whole experience and keep you frustrated. Get some good help with some direction, and you can have real hope. You won’t have to keep hating your car, wondering why you always have such lousy luck, wondering if it’s even worth trying anymore.

Drug Treatment Equips You For Healthy Life

So if you have a drug addiction and you are trying to match your willpower against the addiction, more than likely you will come out the loser. Drug treatment helps equip you to deal with it effectively and in healthy ways. If you have an addiction mind, how enlightening and transforming will your narrow band of knowledge really be? Again, you might have some luck and a tremendous opportunity. But the odds greatly favor you if you go to alcohol and drug rehab.

What do you think? Knowing that sheer willpower is a longshot as a recovery method, what do you think when people say that? Or, have you said that as a way to avoid asking for help?

A drug counseling center in upstate New York has been the focus of investigation recently. According to Rocco LaDuca at the Utica Observer-Dispatch, former executive director of a Clinton counseling center, Ole Pettersen, is undergoing investigation for charges of Medicaid fraud.

The Charges

According to LaDuca, Ole Pettersen, 57, is charged with “second-degree grand larceny as well as multiple charges of falsifying business records and offering a false instrument for filing. The charges are in relation to more than $500,000 in questionable Medicaid benefits.”

Basically, he was claiming that he had more patients on methadone or addicted to drugs than he did in order to get more funding from the state that had been earmarked for drug addiction treatment. The counseling center received funds between 2003 and 2006 from Medicaid for this purpose that it, apparently, was not entitled to.

The Evidence of Fraud

Two employees have testified to falsifying documents, but it’s the purpose of these documents that is under debate currently at the Oneida County Courthouse. One of these employees, formerly his personal assistant, Alicia Roman, testified that she had been the one to create some of the falsified documents but under the direction of Pettersen who misled her by saying that their patients would need a second form created in order to enroll in another drug addiction treatment program.

She said that she did falsify the date by predating it rather than dating it accurately when she filled out the form, and that she did not reassess the patients when she created the second document to make sure that they still needed drug addiction treatment services.

The Defense Against Fraud

Well, for starters, the defense is saying that these forms were never meant to be used fraudulently, that instead, they were actually for the purpose of enrolling the patients in another drug addiction treatment facility. The fact that they made the numbers add up in such a way that there were enough patients at Pettersen’s facility to qualify for state funding? Well….

And as for the backdating, which in and of itself is illegal, the defense says that the dates on the form were not meant to denote the day that the forms were filled out. So what date were they meant to reflect? Uh….

Also, there’s the implication that perhaps Roman is a bit bitter about being fired by Pettersen because the two disagreed about the types of treatment that patients should receive and is not telling whole truths, an implication that Roman denies.

The defense applies the same theory to the second employee who testified to filling out documents fraudulently, former drug abuse counselor Leslie Milazzo, saying that she, too, is bitter after being fired after only several months of employment at Pettersen’s clinic. Her claim? She was told to “clean up” some files on patients who were taking methadone and change some of the dates so that Pettersen’s clinic would be in compliance with state regulations.

Testimony will continue. We’ll see how it turns out.

Courtney Love has had some serious ups and downs in the last three decades. She’s developed a music career, an acting career, been widowed by her troubled rockstar husband, and been to drug rehab. Right now, she seems to be floating somewhere between a true low point and getting herself back on track. Where will she go from here and will she go to drug rehab again? I’m not sure even Courtney knows the answer to that.

Courtneys Early Drug Use

It’s difficult to find lots of information about Courtney Love’s drug use. But her heroin use while pregnant was widely publicized. She admitted to using heroin, but said she didn’t know she was pregnant at the time. Courtney and Kurt lost custody of their daughter for a few months while the state of California investigated their situation. Also, she shared that she and Kurt Cobain used drugs and alcohol while they were dating in 1990 and 1991.

Drug Use and Drug Rehab In The Last Decade

In 2003, Courtney was arrested for breaking and entering, but eventually charged with drug possession (medication without a prescription). A few hours later, she had an accidental overdose of oxycontin. She was supposed to go to drug rehab but apparently never showed up. Later, she used drugs again and violated her probation. She was sent to drug rehab once more, but didn’t finish the program. She was allegedly sent to a locked drug rehab facility. Courtney has said this period of financial trouble and cocaine use was very difficult.

There has been continued speculation about current drug use. The celebrity gossip magazines and websites seem to catch her looking disheveled, in strange mismatched outfits, and looking “out of it” on a regular basis. She has also appeared quite thin and claimed having an eating disorder. Some believe she has gone back to drug use, which resulted in her dramatic weight loss.

Could Drug Rehab Be In Courtney Loves Future

After Kurt’s death, her film career seemed on the rise. Maybe life imitated art, but she gave an outstanding performance as Larry Flint’s wife Althea in The People vs Larry Flint. Fittingly, her character was sexual, unapologetic, and a drug user. Her portrayal of a woman dying from too much hard living was very moving.

If Courtney is indeed back into her drug addiction, let’s hope she gives drug rehab another try. It’s a little hard to find that spunky passionate spirit inside the Courtney we see today. Let’s hope her life doesn’t end the way her character Althea’s did.

There’s a lot of buzz and interest in rapid detox because it offers a dreamy proposition: come in addicted to opiates like prescription painkillers or heroin and walk out a day later completely addiction free. Considering that an opiate detox is usually synonymous with a myriad of overwhelmingly uncomfortable, even painful withdrawal symptoms, you’d be right to be skeptical. How exactly does rapid detox and, more importantly, does it work?

How Rapid Opiate Detox Works

My understanding is this: there is a five to seven operation or procedure you undergo in which you are anesthetized. What exactly they do during this procedure is a bit mysterious. Is it just to knock you out while your body suffers through the withdrawal symptoms? Do they actually do anything to mitigate the symptoms? Some programs say that they follow up with medications like buprenorphine or methadone to bind to the opiate receptors, Naltrexone to combat cravings and more meds to knock out symptoms like nausea and diarrhea, so I’m not exactly sure what good the “procedure” would be in this case. Except to make money, and a lot of it: they go for anywhere between $6000 and $15000 a pop.

The Dangers of Rapid Opiate Detox

I found a study called “Ultra-rapid opiate detoxification: from clinical applications to basic science” and they mentioned just how few animal studies there are on this process. That’s a little worrisome. But then they go on to clarify something:

“Many discussions and arguments about the techniques seem to underscore their true purpose, which is not “simply to detoxify” opiate-addicted patients but to initiate long-term management with naltrexone. For this reason, it may be better to conceptualize these techniques not as ‘rapid detoxification’ but as ‘rapid antagonist induction.’”

So it’s not really a complete detox, meaning when you wake up or leave the next day, you won’t necessarily be opiate addiction free. So maybe the real danger aside from the unnecessary or hardly helpful sedation is the lost money and hope spent on a procedure that doesn’t really work.

Safe Alternatives to Rapid Opiate Detox

Just like any medical treatment, it is rare to find an overnight fix. There’s no pill you can pop to get over an addiction. You aren’t going to be magically better simply because you want to or because you pay a lot of money to someone who says they have the quick fix. Treatment takes time and especially with a medical issue that is both physical and mental in nature, it takes effort and work, persistence and a fair amount of professional and consistent support from medical and psychological professionals.

Have You Undergone Rapid Opiate Detox?

What was it like? Did it work for you? Do you know anyone who has tried it? Have you found any more informative or more recent studies that speak to the rapid opiate detox? What do you think?