Drug and alcohol addiction in the workplace costs businesses and consumers millions of dollars each year. The lost productivity due to mistakes made under the influence, missed days at work, and missed deadlines costs everyone money. Learning how to handle drug addiction in the workplace and addressing the issue with the addict as well as other employees is imperative to stopping the addict from hurting your company and themselves any further.

Handling Drug Addiction in the Workplace

While firing the offending party may seem like the most straightforward solution, it won’t save you any money. Depending upon the position that the addict currently fills, finding, training and acclimating a new employee will cost more than rehabilitating the person who previously did good work for you and knows the company well. While you cannot sit idly by and watch your employee or co-worker hurt themselves and damage the company, you can address the situation proactively, mitigating the damage and helping both yourself and them at the same time.

Prepare Yourself For Confronting Your Employee or Co-Worker About Drug Addiction

If a co-worker or employee is struggling with drug and alcohol addiction at your workplace, you first have to confront them with the situation. You should go into this knowing that even though you recognize that your employee or co-worker is an addict, he or she may not. Also, even though you are being more than generous by offering drug addiction treatment—especially if your company pays for that treatment and takes the time to confront them on the issue—they may not accept your proposal. They may, in fact, respond with hostility.

Know That Your Employee is a Drug Addict

If you are higher up on the totem pole and are working off of rumors and stories that have all happened when you were not present, you need to ascertain the truthfulness to these tales before proceeding. Spend a little time in the office or on the floor. If there are security or surveillance tapes, watch them. Look into specific incidents and watch to see if these behaviors continue. Look into missed deadlines and missed days at work. Ask the employee about these incidents before mentioning the rumors or addiction and get their side of the story. If you are certain that drug addiction is a contributing factor, then it’s time to move forward.

How to Get Your Employee or Co-Worker Into Drug Rehab

Staging a drug addiction intervention is generally the first line of defense when it comes to approaching the sensitive subject of drug addiction in the workplace. You may opt to take the employee or co-worker aside personally and have a one-on-one conversation first to better gauge the situation and handle it more covertly. If this doesn’t work because your employee denies the presence of drug addiction or if you are a co-worker and they simply blow you off because you aren’t an authority figure, then it’s time to take it to the next level. A drug addiction intervention will allow you and others in the office who have been affected by the employee’s addictive behavior to be included in the process, vent their feelings and know that their productivity and contribution are valid and essential.

If you would like assistance staging an intervention at your workplace, The Canyon can help. Call us today for more information.

People do so many things to escape emotional pain. Unfortunately, some methods of avoidance and escape can create many more problems than solutions. Sexual abuse is something that frequently gets tangled up with drug and alcohol addiction. Drinking to cover up emotional suffering, using drugs to avoid the truth about incest in the family – these situations are more common than many people want to believe.

Deep Emotional Pain With Sexual Abuse

Sexual Trauma Drug Addiction

A person who’s been abused like this can have so many mixed messages and feelings. Is this what you do with your mother? How can I say no without being rejected by my grandpa, who I love? What if everyone in the family thinks I wanted this? What do I do with this awful secret? I must have asked for it somehow. I feel special and different, but not normal.

Shame is one of the most destructive lingering aspects of sexual abuse. Some part of them has an idea that it isn’t right, but the abuser has power over them. The victims often think that they didn’t do enough to stop it so it’s their fault it continued. If they had been stronger, not so scared, been more brave, then it wouldn’t have even started. They often see themselves as weak, powerless, hopeless to overcome the emotional turmoil inside. And it’s not just what they did or didn’t do about the abuse, it’s because of who they are they it kept happening. Their identity can become intertwined with shame, believing they may simply be damaged goods.

Drugs and Alcohol to Escape Pain

So imagine this kind of emotional burden lingering on for years, affecting practically every relationship in your life. If you had been introduced to drugs or alcohol, you might decide that intoxication is a go-to way to escape that relentless shame and raw pain. Whenever you feel it getting too bad, or even to keep it from getting bad, just pop a pill or drink down a bottle of alcohol. Can you see how this quick-fix solution has the potential to create bigger problems?

People usually become addicted to drugs and alcohol because they are trying to cope with deep pain. Not surprisingly, sexual abuse and trauma is a common thread among many alcoholics and drug addicts. Drug rehab and alcohol treatment centers will do a thorough personal history with someone to determine whether hey have sexual trauma in their past. Knowing this makes drug treatment much more effective. If treatment only focuses on the drugs or alcohol, then the underlying source of pain still exists and relapse is likely. Only when sexual abuse or trauma is treated along with the addiction can the person finally have a good chance at a healthy recovery.

Drug Rehab Can Help You Deal With Sexual Abuse Pain

If you have been through sexual abuse and are addicted to drugs or alcohol, you can make things better. You can make the pain better, live with it and not hurt yourself in the process. Drug rehab is the place to start. Don’t let another day go by before you call your local drug treatment center to find out more about getting help.

Drug addiction recovery is a lifelong process. Just like many parts of life, things don’t always stay the same. Your recovery will change and transform as you learn more, get more life experience and wisdom, and go through the aging process. If you look forward to a healthier life, you will need to pay attention to addiction relapse.

Once you’ve been through drug rehab, you may hope you never have to do that again. No matter how strongly you want that experience behind you, relapse can be just around the corner if you don’t work to prevent it. This and another post this week will describe several things you can do to keep yourself healthy and reduce your addiction relapse risk.

Do Good Personal Care Routines Consistently

Routines may seem boring and repetitive, but their gentle rhythm can help you stay on track with your personal care. Your small habits will add up to a good routine but only if you are consistent. Do you bathe every day? Brush your teeth twice a day? Eat fairly healthy meals on a regular basis? Take care of your sleep needs each night?

If you were used to staying up at all hours during your binges, you may think going to bed before midnight sounds dull as a post. You may not be used to buying fresh fruit and vegetables. These new habits may sound almost too simple, but for a recovering alcoholic or drug addict, these self care tasks are essential. You can keep your body from getting burned out and vulnerable to cravings.

Keep Up With Support Group Meetings

If it’s been a while since you first became sober, you may have drifted away from your AA or NA support group meetings a bit. If you have had a good recovery so far, you may have thought you didn’t need your meeting like you did in the beginning. While it’s good that you are feeling more confident about your sobriety, it’s no time to get lazy.

Overconfidence can quickly lead to relapse risk. You don’t hear the words of recovery quite so much from the group, you miss a few get-togethers with your sponsor, you don’t make as much room in your life for learning about yourself and your addiction. That’s exactly when relapse can strike. While there may be a time for you to reduce your meeting attendance, don’t let it go that way because you were careless about your recovery.

More Help Reducing Drug Addiction Relapse

Come back soon to read about more ways to keep your addiction relapse low. Learn how drug rehab, your addiction triggers, and your relapse plan can keep you sober for longer.

It’s well known that regular and continued use of prescription painkillers like Vicodin, oxycodone, codeine, Percocet and others ultimately lead to prescription drug addiction if it continues unchecked. But a new focus for the medical and substance abuse treatment community is how the presence of prescription painkiller use, abuse and addiction can actually lead to the increase in the experience of pain.

Painkillers and the Increased Experience of Pain

The Behavioral Health Central website says: “Some pain medications can actually cause or increase the pain that they are using the medication to manage.”

Some doctors have even named the phenomenon: opiate-induced hyperalgesia. Basically, this condition means that you are more sensitive to pain after a long period of taking pain management medications. In some cases, this can even mean that things that didn’t cause pain before you started taking painkillers are now painful for you. In studies, this response occurs in some animals after just one high dose of an opiate painkiller.

How Do You Identify Opiate Induced Hyperalgesia?

This condition is generally identified when you are on painkiller medications and yet continue to experience pain despite consistently increasing the amount of your dose.

It has also been identified in people who actively used opiates like heroin and prescription painkillers for years before getting treatment. After treatment, it is sometimes difficult to get effective relief from pain, especially for chronic pain.

Treating Opiate Induced Hyperalgesia

For those who are currently on high doses of prescription painkillers and are having difficulty getting any relief from pain, prescription drug rehab and immediate detox are usually recommended. The idea is that through reducing your tolerance, opiate painkillers in more moderate doses may again work for you. In some cases, non-opioid based painkillers are preferred so as to avoid the risk of opiate painkiller addiction.

Prescription Painkiller Addiction Treatment

Treating prescription painkiller addiction can be scary to those who are worried about the withdrawal symptoms associated with painkiller detox. When you stop taking a drug upon which your body has come to depend, you will experience different symptoms of illness that will vary in type and intensity based on a number of factors. For example, those addicted to high doses of opiate painkillers like Vicodin, oxycodone, hydrocodone and others may begin to feel nauseous, get a headache, start to sweat, get stomach cramps or feel nauseous, and experience bone and muscle pain within the first few hours after their missed dose. The best way to combat this is with a medical detox at a certified substance abuse treatment center that understands opiate addiction.

When you have completed painkiller detox, you can begin addiction counseling and alternative treatments to help you further cement yourself in sobriety before returning home. A big focus of prescription painkiller addiction treatment is relapse prevention, which provides you with the tools you need to fend off the urge to pop a pain pill when you feel stressed. For those with chronic pain, it can also include learning more holistic ways to address pain management without addictive drugs.

If you would like more information about our painkiller rehab here at The Canyon, contact us today.

A person’s heart suffers when they have a drug addiction. Their emotional heart and their physical heart can both be damaged significantly. This post will focus on the physical harm drug addiction can do to a person’s heart and how that harm affects their overall health. It’s another reason anyone addicted to drugs may need to consider drug rehab.

How Hard Drugs Affect The Heart

Heart damage is a dangerous effect of drug use, but it’s not usually noticed until it’s severe or too late. Many drugs do a lot so slow or speed up heart rate as part of the desired physical effect. But this irregularity can overload and stress the heart to the point that it functions less effectively or even stops

Cocaine constricts the blood vessels, which limits the flow of oxygen through the body. Stroke, aneurysms, and irregular heartbeats can develop after long term use. However, some heart damage is possible whether a person uses cocaine for a short or long period of time including heart attacks.

Heroin can cause damage to the heart valves. Methamphetamine use causes similar problems to the heart as cocaine including heart tissue damage, heart attacks, irregular heartbeats, high blood pressure, aneurysms, and stroke.

Alcohol Addiction and Heart Damage

Excessive alcohol in a person’s blood stressed the entire circulatory system. One or two drinks can provide some benefit to your heart. Much beyond that and you are causing your heart to work harder than it should to do the same job when you have no blood alcohol level. When a person drinks excessively over time, this leads to high blood pressure.

If you look at an alcoholic person’s face, you may notice a constant rosy blush to their skin. Alcohol use causes capillaries to become more dialated while the alcohol is present. When a person drinks heavily and constantly, their capillaries eventually stay expanded and show through the skin. This not only looks somewhat unsightly, it’s clear visible evidence that their circulatory system is suffering. Oxygen and nutrients can no longer be effectively circulated to those tissues. This could potentially have accumulating effects on a person’s general health.

Drug Rehab Can Help Stop Or Reverse Heart Damage

Going to drug rehab has never been a more urgent need if you’ve been told you have a heart problem due to drug or alcohol use. Stopping your addiction in its tracks may save your life. Your addiction will only continue to make problems for your heart if you allow it to continue. Although some severe damage may not be reversible, some heart and circulatory damage can be slowed, stopped, or even reversed if it is caught early enough. If this is your situation, get to drug or alcohol rehab immediately and give your heart a chance.

Drug rehab is no quick fix, and that’s a problem for some people with addiction. They are so used to immediate gratification that they push away from drug rehab because it takes time. Also, people can be so afraid of change that they can’t get past the first step to even get started. Let’s take a look at two important aspects of working through drug rehab, courage and patience.

Drug Rehab Takes Courage

Just getting to drug rehab can be tough. So many unknowns, a lot of discomfort over other people knowing your personal business, uncertainty over making a huge change, doubt that you can keep up a sober life. It’s natural to be wary of such a huge commitment. And that’s when just a little courage can make all the difference.

Courage is sometimes thought to be something only heroes and firefighters have. If you seem like a brave person willing to take some risk for the good of others, then you have courage. Another misconception is that courage means a person has no fear. Both of these assumptions are wrong.

First of all, anyone can stir up courage within themselves. Anyone facing the prospect of drug rehab would likely be afraid and doubtful. An unfortunate side effect of drug and alcohol addiction is heightened emotions. Even understandable anxiety can get overblown to the point that they avoid moving forward on sound decisions. Fear about the unknown paralyzes them.

At this moment, courage can set them free. Well-advised action and fear can exist at the same moment. Fear about drug rehab is not a sign that the person shouldn’t do it. It simply means the person is afraid. After they do drug rehab for a while, this fear will likely disappear because they become more familiar with everything.

Drug Rehab Takes Patience

Drug addiction trains a person to demand and pursue instant gratification. Have a disturbing emotion? Take a hit or a pint of alcohol and blur it away. Can’t stand to deal with your ex-spouse today? Get drunk or high and forget about them. Problem identified, problem solved. Only problem is that’s not how problems are really solved. It’s just a shortcut to avoid consequences.

Even when a person is ready to face their addiction at drug rehab, the habit of impatience is likely to remain. Notice it is worded a “habit of impatience”. Developing patience is a habit just like certain aspects of drug addiction, just like your daily morning routine, just like the way you tie your shoes, and just like the way you drive. Everyone’s life is full of habits, and each person’s level of patience is one of them.

In drug rehab, a person getting sober will learn how to distract themselves when faced with cravings or frustration. Mental health therapy, yoga, meditation, and group therapy can all teach a person various ways to deal with impatience. When they can learn how to endure their destructive urges, they can learn how to take more control over their life.

Drug Rehab Worth The Challenge

Patience and courage are two characteristics that many people struggle to develop. It’s an ongoing challenge for most, and people with addiction usually struggle more. However, just a little courage and patience can go a long way. You need just enough to get started at drug rehab. Once you begin, you’ll keep learning more about bringing forth your courage when you need it and staying patient when you get ansty. When it’s all said and done, a sober lifestyle is worth the struggle to get through drug rehab and beyond.

A petition has been going around in Scioto County in Ohio to fight drug addiction. The drug of focus is prescription painkillers and Scioto County residents and residents of surrounding counties are hoping to fight off the rising problem of prescription drug addiction in their state by asking Governor Ted Strickland to help them better control the distribution of prescription drugs.

They are called the Citizens Against Prescription Abuse and they are working hard to stop prescription drug abuse and addiction in their state.

Bob Walton is a Porter Township trustee and a community organizer for Citizens Against Prescription Abuse. He says: “It’s sad. It’s frustrating. It’s an uphill battle. But it’s a battle we’ve got to fight or we will lose a generation.”

Their plan of attack on local prescription drug abuse is mainly focused on pain clinics that provide prescriptions for opiate painkillers and fill them. Their petition requests that Governor Strickland better regulate the pain clinics that they believe hand out prescriptions far too easily and often, leading to a high rate of prescription drug addiction and abuse as well as increased hospitalization due to overdose. They want an investigation into the local prescription drug addiction problem opened by everyone: the Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, state medical and pharmacy boards, the DEA, the IRS and the FBI.

They also want changes in Ohio law that further restricts new clinics from opening and regulates the operation of current painkiller clinics.

About 700 signatures had been gathered by the time of this posting, but Walton is hoping for about 2000 signatures total by the end of the month.

Walton cites the numbers for support of his proposition: Scioto County has nine pain clinics.

Lisa Roberts is a registered nurse and an injury prevention specialist for the Portsmouth City Health Department. She backs up Walton’s plan, stating that the county has the second highest rate of prescription drug overdose in Ohio and that Southern Ohio distributes four times as many prescription drugs as Northern Ohio.

Says Roberts: “We have a very high addiction rates in addition to the death rates. A lot of young people are addicted. Our treatment facilities are overwhelmed. The court systems are overwhelmed.”

She also says that many of these prescription pain clinics are owned by people with past convictions for drug trafficking and staffed by doctors with medical licensing issues.

Dr. Robert Mullins is a local emergency room doctor who is also interested in fighting against the prescription pain clinics and resulting prescription drug addiction.

He says: “This is a problem that, once it’s created, it’s very hard to get out from under. Maybe [the petition] will actually help and maybe it won’t but if we stand by and do nothing, I assure you it will escalate.”

If you would like more information about Scioto County’s fight against prescription drug addiction or if you would like to sign the petition, you can do so online.

If you would like to learn more about prescription drug addiction treatment at The Canyon, contact us today.