Sober N Clean

The Honourable Tony Clement, Minister of Health, accompanied by Stockwell Day, Minister of Public Safety, and Rob Nicholson, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada today announced the Government's support for the Drug Prevention Strategy for Canada's Youth, which is an initiative that will help to steer youth away from using illicit drugs and is part of the Government's new National Anti-Drug Strategy.

The strategy, which is supported by a Government of Canada investment of $10 million, will be developed and implemented by the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse (CCSA).

“The Government of Canada is very concerned about the damage and pain that illicit drugs cause families and our communities,” said Minister Clement. “We take this issue seriously and are proud to partner with the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse to take action in discouraging youth from using illicit drugs and informing them of the harmful effects of illicit drug use.”

The goal of the CCSA's project is to reduce illicit drug use among Canadian youth between the ages of 10 and 24, including high-risk youth, focusing on risk and protective factors before drug use begins. The project will initiate the development of national standards for drug prevention programs and will support families, schools, communities, and individuals across Canada with the tools and information they need when confronted with illicit drugs.

“Our Government recognizes that illegal drugs destroy lives, rob young people of their futures and endanger our communities,” said the Honourable Stockwell Day, Minister of Public Safety. “This is why we are firmly determined to help people overcome addictions, prevent others from falling prey to this terrible problem and crack down on those who profit from this suffering through the production and sale of drugs.”

Also in attendance was Michel Perron, Chief Executive Officer of the CCSA: “The National Anti-Drug Strategy has allowed the CCSA to launch a new national drug prevention partnership for youth, to initiate the development of national standards for drug prevention programs in schools and communities across Canada, and to create a communication platform through a newly formed media consortium aimed at capitalizing on public and private sector expertise to reach youth across Canada," said Mr. Perron. "This work, aimed at supporting families, schools, communities and individuals across Canada, will equip young people and their parents with the tools and information they need when confronted with illicit drugs."

“I am pleased that our Government is working with partners like the Canadian Centre for Substance Abuse,” said Minister Nicholson. “Through this collaboration, we will discourage youth from using illicit drugs and inform them of the harmful effects of illicit drug use.”

Minister Clement also took the opportunity to remind Canadians of the upcoming deadline for the call for proposals under the Drug Strategy Community Initiatives Fund. The Government has invested over $7 million to fund important initiatives that will address illicit drug use among youth and the underlying factors that contribute to the use of illicit drugs. The Community Initiatives Fund will enable communities to develop the tools they need to tackle the increasing challenge of drug use among our young people. The deadline for proposals is February 29, 2008.

The new National Anti-Drug Strategy focuses on preventing illegal drug use in young people, treating people who have drug addictions and fighting illegal drug crime.

source: Health Canada

In a search for what could be the ultimate cure for drug addiction, scientists have developed a vaccine which prevents the body from getting high.

The hope is that it can stop people from falling back into a spiral of addiction if they have a relapse.

The most promising results so far have been with cocaine, but researchers hope it could also one day be used to cure addiction to methamphetamine, heroin and even cigarettes.

"The vaccine slowly decreases the amount of cocaine that reaches the brain," said Thomas Kosten, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, who has been working on the vaccine since 1995.

"It's a slow process, and patients do not go through any significant withdrawal symptoms."

The vaccine works by getting the body's immune system to recognize the drug as foreign and attack it in the blood stream.

It does so by injecting an altered version of the drug into the body which has been attached to a protein that the body will recognize as a threat.

"The body then says, 'This is a foreign article. I should start making antibodies to it,'" Kosten said in a telephone interview.

The cocaine molecules eventually pass through the kidneys and are excreted through the urine.

That stops the drug from reaching the brain and producing a sought-after high.

Use of the vaccine would lead to a gradual tapering of dependence, Kosten said.

"Gradually, antibody levels would rise. If you kept using (cocaine), you'd get less and less of an effect."

Of all the drugs tested, cocaine is the easiest one for which to develop a vaccine because of an enzyme in the bloodstream, cholinesterase, that helps break it down, Kosten said.

He has also begun to test vaccines for methamphetamine and heroin in animal studies, and hopes to eventually add nicotine to the list.

"That's going to be the moneymaker," he said.

The injections are designed for therapeutic -- not for preventative -- use, and are meant for those already suffering from addiction.

That, however, does not rule out other possible future uses, Kosten said.

"You could potentially inject pregnant cocaine users with the vaccine to prevent their fetuses from becoming contaminated," he explained.

Other uses could include administering the vaccine to high-risk adolescents in order to prevent them from becoming addicted early on, he said, while acknowledging that this would raise serious ethical and legal questions.

Testing for the cocaine vaccine has included a series of five injections over a period of three months, Kosten said.

The vaccine has one more large scale human study scheduled before it is ready for the federal Food and Drug Administration approval process.

A similar nicotine vaccine is also in the early stages of testing by several groups of European researchers. Kosten hopes to have the vaccine on the market in two to three years.

Copyright © 2008 AFP. All rights reserved.

Why do women drink themselves to death? Twice as many do, compared to 15 years ago. They vomit alone in their bathrooms, throwing up their self-disgust. In 1991, 7.2 women aged 35-54 per 100,000 died of alcohol-related diseases; today it is 14.8. Some will die of cirrhosis of the liver, or of the drugs they take when they are drunk. Some will die in alcohol-related accidents and some of despair - they will simply kill themselves. The question is, why are more women becoming alcoholics today?

As a recovering alcoholic, I know why I tried to drink myself to death. I was lonely and angry, and I felt worthless. I started drinking when I was 13, a middle-class teenager from the most suburban of suburbs, who came home from school for a quick nip of vodka from an old blue mug. Alcohol was a lover who changed my feelings - I became less angry, and less lonely. Then he swallowed me back, and took everything. By the time that I knew I was an alcoholic, it seemed too late to do anything about it. I washed up in AA at 27, with everything broken.

Nobody knows exactly what causes alcoholism. I believe it is genetic, but triggered by trauma. A person born with an inbred disposition to alcoholism may never develop it if they grow up in a healthy and stable environment. All the recovering alcoholics I know say the same thing - they felt different, even as children. They didn't feel safe.

Alcoholism has little to do with alcohol, just as bulimia has nothing to do with food; it is a disease of the soul, a system of self-harming thought, which the alcoholic treats with alcohol. The drinking is merely the final, fatal symptom. And what matters for binge-drinking girls is this - not everyone who drinks heavily will develop alcoholism. But to develop alcoholism you have to drink heavily. You have to put the hours in at the pub.

The modern childhood is a kindergarten for alcoholics. All the external criteria are in place to ease the maybe-baby alcoholic into full-blown unto-the-gates-of-hell drunk. Alcohol has never been so cheap. The supermarkets and the happy hours and the clubs can't stuff it down our throats cheaply enough or fast enough or long enough; some supermarkets sell it at less than cost, to draw the shoppers in. They don't treat it as a dangerous drug, but as a commodity that is great for business. The more units they sell, the more alcoholics there will be. And the more alcoholics there are, the more units they will sell. Sainsbury's is now selling cider, the drink of choice for 13-year-olds, for 26 pence a pint.

There are wonderful new ways to make young women feel worthless. Sparkling advertisements and whispering editorials encourage them to aspire to an ever-receding fantasy. You can never be beautiful or thin enough for the fashion magazines of 2008. You can never be sexy enough for MTV, or pornography. You can never be famous enough for Heat. The message is clear and simple and lucrative - be someone else. And that is the tiny voice inside every alcoholic's head.

But now it is a shriek from a billboard, and young women respond with bulimia and anorexia and compulsive eating and chronic debt - and booze. If Cinderella were rewritten for the 21st century, the prince would say: "Have your pubic hair waxed off. And starve down to size zero. Perhaps some breast implants? Don't you feel like a better woman now, Cinders?"

Alcoholism is a disease of unreality, and of fantasy. That is why so few recover - you cannot see the gutter to crawl out. The alcoholic lies to herself on a daily basis. And when society lies too - be Britney Spears! Be Posh Spice! You too can be thin and happy! - more will fall. Alcoholism used to be called a "family disease", in which every family member played a part. The alcoholic was the bad child, the mother or father the caretaker or abuser, the sibling the good child. Now it has become a social disease, and there are "bad children" everywhere.

And how do we respond to this burgeoning mental illness in young women? We treat it with a disgust that will send the alcoholic spiralling ever downwards, or as a comedy, which is almost worse. We watch Britney Spears shaving her hair off and running around Los Angeles, half-dressed or strapped to a stretcher, and wait for her to die. We watch Amy Winehouse crawling on the ground towards her front door. We mouth "Isn't it terrible?" with a terrible smile and what we really think is, What is the end of the story? Will Princess Britney, the most Googled woman on the planet, be buried in a pink coffin with a Disney Channel logo, before the credits roll? Will Amy pay for her talent with her life, and be immortalised in death, Janis Joplin part two?

Denial is the best friend of alcoholism - and now we all collude. These women are punching themselves in the face, and dying, not dancing, in the streets. And that's entertainment. As for what's really going on inside her - who cares?
___
author: Tanya Gold, tanyagold2002@yahoo.co.uk
source: The Guardian

It’s very hard to gauge the scale of unregulated
therapies being offered for addiction issues, but
a quick trawl of the internet will throw up endless
options. Those in the field may know almost at a
glance which are reliable, respectable and
effective but members of the public may well not.

They may also be in a desperate situation and willing
to try anything for themselves or their loved ones.
‘There needs to be some kind of mechanism for
a member of the general public to look at a website
and know whether something has safeguards and
guarantees,’ says Kevin Flemen of KFx. ‘The wider
public don’t know the differences between all the
different organisations and treatments. Compare a
new age clinic and a hypnotherapist both doing
smoking cessation, for example. It may be a very
good and responsible hypnotherapist, and regulated
by various industry bodies, but how does a member
of the public differentiate between those two
practitioners, neither of whom are doing nicotine
replacement therapy or NHS work? They’re both
private. If I’m not offering a regulated therapy then
there is simply no governance.’

At the moment, private clinics are regulated by
the Healthcare Commission under the Care
Standards Act 2000, but only when they are GP-led
and issuing prescriptions. A nurse-led clinic is not
subject to regulation. ‘Anybody who wants to set up
a service that’s not GP-led can do so,’ says chief
executive of FDAP, Simon Shepherd. ‘Private
healthcare services are regulated by the Healthcare
Commission, but what constitutes a healthcare
service is quite interesting – you would assume it
was anything that offers healthcare, including
clinics, but it’s not. You can run a nurse-led clinic for
drugs and alcohol in the private sector and there’s
no way of quality-assuring it. There’s no way of
knowing the scale of the problem, but it’s big
enough that something needs to be done. The
alternative to regulation is whistle blowing – as a
field, we draw attention to things we’re concerned
with – but the problem with that is it doesn’t get out
to the wider public.’

Residential services are regulated, as, clearly,
are NHS services, while day care and non-residential
services run by the voluntary sector are effectively
quality assured by the commissioning teams. ‘If
they don’t think the services are good enough they
can put them out to tender again, so mainstream
drug and alcohol treatment provision is broadly
overseen to make sure that the system on offer is
appropriate and offered at a reasonable level of
quality,’ says Shepherd. ‘Some of these systems
are by no means perfect but at least if you know
there’s something absolutely outrageous going on
there’s a way of pulling the plug on it. If a street
agency is offering a below par service, ultimately the
commissioners of the service will pick that up. The
bit that falls through the gap is any service that
doesn’t seek government funding.’

One lever is that trading standards departments
and the Advertising Standards Authority (AAA) can
investigate to make sure spurious claims are not
being made about the services on offer. ‘This only
provides limited protection for the public,’ says
Shepherd. ‘Trading standards are local authority
departments, so if you’re offering a national service
who’s responsible for that? And you have to convince
advertising standards that it’s worth investigating
because they get thousands of complaints. At the
end of the day, they’re not experts in this field and not
really in a position to make effective judgements.’
Counselling, meanwhile, is unregulated but
counsellors should be accredited, and the AAA does
not allow addiction counsellors to advertise their
services in directories such as the Yellow Pages and
yell.com, on the basis that there is no recognised
body quality-assuring their work. ‘There are really tight
restrictions on what counsellors can claim to offer,
particularly around drugs and alcohol,’ says
Shepherd. ‘Yet if you set up a nurse-led private clinic
and say you’re offering quasi-medical care then that
appears to be OK. We would want to see only
counsellors who have had proper training around
substance misuse being able to provide private
counselling services around these issues, but there
are counsellors who are not accredited by a
recognised body providing services.’

But isn’t there an argument that there may be
lots of new, innovative and exciting treatments out
there and they should be given an opportunity? ‘We
cannot allow people providing services that fly in the
face of available evidence to continue to operate
unchallenged,’ he says. ‘We can allow free innovation
and services that don’t have an evidence base
to underpin them, provided there’s a strong
theoretical base or rationale and that they are then
subject to thorough examination. They should only
be offered for a trial period while they’re being
investigated, and offered as unproven services, not
treatments. You can allow for innovation through that
process – you can trial stuff but the public needs to
be aware it’s a trial.’

The danger, of course, is not just that people are
fleeced by perhaps unscrupulous and unqualified
practitioners; it is also the very real health risks
associated with such a vulnerable clientele. If people
withdraw from opiates or alcohol without the
prescription of any substitutes in order to rely on an
‘alternative’ therapy, then they could be at great risk.
‘The cost of getting it wrong for this client group is
immense,’ says Simon Shepherd, ‘for the client, their
family and for wider society. And there are very real
dangers with this client group of getting it
catastrophically wrong – if you try and encourage
someone with a long history of alcohol dependency
to stop drinking overnight, they will die, simple as
that. Nobody should be working with alcoholics
unless they’re fully aware of the medical realities, so
it’s critical that we have some form of control.’
‘The biggest thing in all of this is that if there’s an
evidence base then you can prove it, and if you can
prove it then that’s fine,’ says Sharon Carson, chief
executive of EATA. ‘But if there’s no evidence base
then it’s a big problem. The question is around what
we are doing in the sector to regulate what is
happening and make sure that people accessing the
treatment are getting treatment of the best quality.

We have an accreditation programme which we
encourage our members to apply for because we can
guarantee a level of quality in service delivery that
way, but we’re not a regulatory body. At the moment
there are a few things in place but there’s no
regulated collective checklist and nothing that all
types of treatment organisations have to
demonstrate that they’ve complied with. It definitely
needs to be raised on the agenda.
‘What we do as an organisation is to try work
with central bodies to say we need to improve the
quality of treatment,’ she continues. ‘There are
things that can be done as a sector to ensure we
have the appropriate treatment and we need to start
working on those – it’s been on the agenda but it’s
not been particularly high on the agenda and that’s
got to change. In any treatment sector, you have
huge amounts of regulation and standards, and
drugs and alcohol is falling behind.’
‘Encouraging membership of voluntary schemes
is not a solution,’ says Kevin Flemen. ‘As long as
other practitioners can practise regardless of these
schemes, then the voluntary system is meaningless.
Rather than just having a competency framework,
there should be some benchmarking for the general
public which allows them to establish if the service
meets basic minimum standards. This would allow
any member of the public to visit a website and see,
via some simple authentication system, that it is a
legitimate service with, say, a bronze, silver or gold
status or something like that. We need a threshold to
say that basic minimum standards are being met by
this organisation, which doesn’t necessarily vouch for
the effectiveness of the therapy but works on the
basis that it’s a therapy that is at least recognised by
the drugs field rather than being some Mickey Mouse
quackery, and that criminal record checks and things
like that have been carried out.

‘If I want to be FDAP approved there’s a regulatory
framework in place, but if I don’t want to be approved
then there’s no strategy for stopping me practising
and I find that astonishing,’ he continues. ‘It’s a
bigger issue than just drugs, it’s the huge
unregulated alternative practices market, everything
from allergies to cancer treatment. But I think
ultimately the Department of Health should regulate
the field – I don’t think it should be up to the field
itself to regulate, and I don’t think it’s about DANOS
competencies. I do think there needs to be a clear
licensing system, but it’s a huge thing to take on, and
the Department of Health doesn’t see it as their role
– I find it amazing that no one sees it as their role.
We can spend five years lobbying for strategic
change, but during that time thousands of people are
going to be ripped off by rogue traders.’

source: Drink and Drug News U.K

It is not uncommon to see a person with depression struggling with an addiction to drugs or alcohol. Such a co-occurring problem can actually magnify the difficulties with both depression and addiction.To counter this, the Cirque Lodge drug rehab program has instituted a dual diagnosis service to address both problems at hand. Therapy services are engineered to look at the disorder and address the problem as it presents itself.

Depression can be the reason behind the addiction. People who develop depression are often times more recluse and can turn to drugs and alcohol to satisfy their condition. Depression can also present itself in forms of pain throughout the body. With this condition, an individual can turn to narcotic prescription drugs to end the pain, and develop an addiction to these drugs. These addictive substances are taken to suppress the depression. The development is an addiction and a greatly compounded depression issue.

Depression increases the risk of developing addiction. The central nervous system of someone struggling with depression is more susceptible to the influences of drugs and alcohol. Recent studies have shown that within people who have been diagnosed with depression that over 50% were dependent on drugs, 37% abused alcohol, and 25% were struggling with both drugs and alcohol abuse. Some therapy officials feel that the very same thing that causes depression is the thing that increases the risk of addiction.

Adversely, alcohol and drug addiction can be the cause of the depression. The make up of some drugs can create a sense of depression within the individual. This can depend on the extent, the amount, and type of drug or alcohol that is abused. Drug rehab programs will usually stop the abuse of alcohol and drugs to see if the depression begins to fade. If the symptoms of depression begin to disappear, most likely it was brought on by the addiction itself.

Depression, Addiction Treatment and Diagnosis

In looking for a drug rehab program for you or a loved one, it is advantageous to seek an addiction treatment center that offers a dual diagnosis service. Dual diagnosis works with many types of psychiatric disorder, beyond depression. An effective dual diagnosis drug rehab can bring a halt to addiction and then address the issue of depression. This provides a proper recovery for both of the problems at hand.

source: Information provided by Cirque Lodge a private alcohol and drug rehab program in Sundance Utah.

I am 19 and I am a heroin addict. I’ve been through drug programs four times and have been clean since October.

I’m very together at the moment, so these are not just the ramblings of a doped-up junkie.

Firstly, heroin has been a big problem in Cape Town for a long time. I cannot imagine that people are only starting to notice it now. It has been targeted at people a lot younger than in their twenties. In fact, my friends and I have been doing drugs from about the ages of 12 – 15.

Detox not for the fainthearted
Getting off the stuff is not easy - detox plans in South Africa are revolting. During my first detox in a treatment centre, I was simply locked in a room for three days. After a while, I started having epileptic fits and foaming at the mouth. This happens to many people who are mainliners (those who inject drugs intravenously). The staff held me down on a bed and told me to think happy thoughts. There was no appropriate detoxification medication available.

I was clean for 9 months before I relapsed and overdosed. My sister found me dying and took me to hospital.

Hospital care not very caring
I must say that I don’t think the hospitals have any time for people like us. The next day the doctor came and just looked at me and without saying a word, signed my release forms. I had to spend the night, because my heart had stopped. I was in withdrawal, but that didn’t stop them from simply kicking me out of the hospital.

Is it my own fault that I am this way? Would anyone choose this willingly? Many people don’t seem to understand that we cannot help who we are and that we never asked to be like this. Yes, we do know that we made a choice, the consequences of which we live with every day, but that doesn’t mean we are any less human.

The places in South Africa that are equipped to deal with heroin addiction are few and far between. And some of them are very expensive. So what happens if you’re not a member of a medical scheme? But wherever you go, the sacrifice is worth it. After all, you get your life back.

source: http://www.health24.com/

A study in a Wiley-Blackwell journal - Respirology - finds that the development of bullous lung disease occurs in marijuana smokers approximately 20 years earlier than tobacco smokers.

A condition often caused by exposure to toxic chemicals or long-term exposure to tobacco smoke, bullous lung disease (also known as bullae) is a condition where air trapped in the lungs causes obstruction to breathing and eventual destruction of the lungs.

At present, about 10% of young adults and 1% of the adult population smoke marijuana regularly. Researchers find that the mean age of marijuana-smoking patients with lung problems was 41, as opposed to the average age of 65 years for tobacco-smoking patients.

The study "Bullous Lung Disease due to Marijuana" also finds that the bullous lung disease can easily go undetected as patients suffering from the disease may show normal chest X-rays and lung functions. High-resolution CT scans revealed severe asymmetrical, variably sized bullae in the patients studied. However, chest X-rays and lung functions were normal in half of them.

Lead author Dr. Matthew Naughton says, "What is outstanding about this study is the relatively young ages of the lung disease patients, as well as the lack of abnormality on chest X-rays and lung functions in nearly half of the patients we tested."

He added, "Marijuana is inhaled as extremely hot fumes to the peak inspiration and held for as long as possible before slow exhalation. This predisposes to greater damage to the lungs and makes marijuana smokers are more prone to bullous disease as compared to cigarette smokers."

Patients who smoke marijuana inhale more and hold their breath four times longer than cigarette smokers. It is the breathing manoeuvres of marijuana smokers that serve to increase the concentration and pulmonary deposition of inhaled particulate matter - resulting in greater and more rapid lung destruction.

This paper is published in the January 2008 issue of Respirology.

source: medilexicon.com