Drug & Alcohol Intervention Help - We Get Them In to Treatment : NYC Intervention Specialists

She said she was surprised that she didn’t remember anything from the night before. Where her clothes went. Who was in her home; her bed. She told the police she wasn’t even sure she had sex with the man who had been found in her car, in a ditch about a mile from her home. The video that showed up in the in-box of her iPhone was evidence now of what had happened. She picked up the phone, hands trembling and dialed her parents. “I’m in a spot,” she told them, crying.

Her father rushed to her house, and then dad called me. Mom was at work so joined us on a conference call. Mom said it was like God had spared her daughter something worse, and perhaps this was their wake-up call, their SOS. I agreed.

Blackout behavior means you get loaded, and the recorder turns off. It’s like it didn’t happen…except it did for this young woman, her name is Val, like it does for so many of my clients – myself included. I used to wake up and wonder, what happened? Who happened? And what to do now!?

If someone you love struggles with alcohol or drugs, or other junk that’s gumming up their ability to live life, click around and read up on what we do and how we do it.

You needn’t wait for the next crisis or SOS.

That moment of clarity when you know what you know – that it’s out of control and something’s gotta be done – is the moment from which loving, appropriate action can begin.

I’m talking about no less than helping you help your loved one accept help and begin change. This is what I share about in my book “How to Change Someone You Love” and already I’ve had calls from folks who have read the book, and helped someone they love. Amazing!

2009 nearly behind us. 2010 straight ahead. Step out in faith. Lead with love. Let us show you how.

- Brad Lamm, BR-I

Board-Registered Interventionist
www.InterventionSpecialists.org
www.BradLamm.com

It arrived yesterday by messenger from my publisher – a box. A cardboard box, with my name on the label, and a word written on the front in felt-tip pen: BOOKS.

My books. In hardcover. Like the ones that will hit the bookstore shelves in January and ship from online retailers December 22. It’s beautiful. I opened the box up and the fam huddled around the box. Scott, and Oliver, and Bandit. And the books. Was a pretty cool feeling I must say holding that pretty red book in my hands for the very first time. I ran up to have lunch with my friend Dean Sicoli and handed him one. “Send it to me! I want you to write something in it.”

Cool!

I gave the first inscribed copy of HOW TO CHANGE SOMEONE YOU LOVE to Cathay Che. At Cafe Grumpy. It was anything but.

So, cannot wait to hit the road, Jack, and inscribe one for you and yours.

Here’s to new chapters, and books and such. Powerful punch.

x
Brad

As important as the headline, is that this study is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse – a gov body that’s not interested in the stock price of anyone.

It’s good research and encouraging how Rx might help with cravings. Keep an eye out! – Brad

____

CHICAGO (AP) —
Vaccine-like shots to keep cocaine abusers from getting high also helped them fight their addiction in the first successful rigorous study of this approach to treating illicit drug use

The shots didn’t work perfectly, but the researchers say their limited success is promising enough to suggest the intriguing vaccine approach could be widely used to treat addiction within several years.

“It is such an important study. It clearly demonstrates … that it is possible to generate vaccine that could interfere with cocaine actions in the brain,” said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which funded the study.

The results come just days after that government agency announced plans for the first late-stage study of an experimental nicotine vaccine designed to help people quit smoking. The NicVAX vaccine has been fast-tracked by the Food and Drug Administration, and the research will be paid for with federal stimulus money.

The cocaine and nicotine vaccines both use the same approach, stimulating the immune system to produce antibodies that attach to molecules of the drugs and block them from reaching the brain.

In the new study, cocaine-fighting antibodies helped prevent users from getting a euphoric high and led nearly 40% of them to substantially cut back or stop cocaine use at least temporarily.

With more than 2 million cocaine abusers nationwide and no federally approved treatment, the results “are good enough — better than having nothing,” said lead author Dr. Thomas Kosten of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. He developed the vaccine used in the study.

The study appears in October’s Archives of General Psychiatry, released Monday.

Volkow said the research exemplifies a “transformative” perspective on drug addiction.

“By targeting it as a medical disease as opposed to a moral dilemma, we’re likely to come up with solutions that have a much longer impact,” she said.

The research involved 115 cocaine abusers also addicted to heroin who sought methadone treatment at a New Haven, Connecticut clinic. Methadone treats heroin addiction, not cocaine, but it requires repeat clinic visits. That made it easier for the researchers to work with and track the cocaine abusers, Kosten said.

Over 12 weeks, nearly all participants got five shots of cocaine vaccine or a dummy substance. They were followed for an additional 12 weeks. All participants also attended weekly relapse-prevention therapy sessions, had their blood tested for antibodies and their urine tested for cocaine and heroin.

Overall, 21 vaccine patients — 38% — developed cocaine antibody levels high enough to prevent a cocaine high. In this group, 53% stopped using cocaine more than half the time during the study, versus 23% of those with lower antibody levels.

Despite the limited success, the results are exciting and show that the vaccine approach is a good one, said Dr. Kyle Kampman, a University of Pennsylvania addiction researcher who was not involved in the study.

I started smoking when I was fifteen years old. Couldn’t inhale regular without hacking, so tried clove cigarettes. Bing bing bing!

There’s a reason they’re flavored. The clove helps suppress the gag reflex. The taste helps attract young new smokers.

No more.

The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act was introduced in the US Congress and signed into law by President Obama, giving the FDA significantly more regulatory power over tobacco; one of the provisions in the law includes a ban on the use of flavors in tobacco, other than menthol. As of today, flavored cigarettes are outlawed in the US.

A good step, but I believe we can all bring up the topic of health costs to our friends who still smoke. There’s no upside. Smoking kills. Shaves life off the body.

Change begins. – Brad

Brad Lamm / Founder and President of Intervention Specialists
Posted: August 25, 2009 12:55 PM
MJ’s Story Highlights Ease of Getting Prescriptions

As the world is learning of the facts surrounding the cause of Michael Jackson’s death, I watch with a combination of frustration and hope. I am frustrated by the shock and fascination on the part of the media and viewing public at the role his physician played in administering a lethal dose of Diprivan (propophyl). I am hopeful because Michael Jackson’s sad and untimely death is an opportunity to raise awareness of the role negligent physicians play in people’s lives.

My street cred on this topic stems from times like last week when I stormed a clinic in Idaho to put on notice a doctor who had been misprescribing Xanax for a woman on methadone therapy. Her family had asked for my help. They had watched their daughter spiral deeper and deeper into the depths of prescription medication addiction. The methadone she was hooked on was supposed to help her get off street drugs, and it did, for a while. But her “dealer” prescribed her Xanax, a popular benzodiazopene used to treat anxiety and insomnia. Xanax is the same type of drug as Valium, and if you take it while you are on methadone therapy, you’ll get high as a kite. Physicians know this, but most don’t pay attention, and some prescribe with reckless abandon.

If a physician does not take a detailed addiction history from ANY patient to whom they prescribe a drug like Xanax, Valium or Oxycontin, they are abandoning their Hippocratic Oath and essentially becoming a dealer. They should be treated by law enforcement as such. These prescriptions have enormous medical value for a variety of ailments, but without proper screening of patients they are as deadly as cyanide and as disruptive as a loaded gun on a playground.

In a few cases, a physician genuinely may not have known what role they played in putting a patient at risk and would react with concern. Other physicians have actually said it was the patient’s job to act responsibility — demonstrating a profound and gross misunderstanding of the disease of addiction, our country’s third leading killer. Still other physicians I have seen are almost sociopathic in their disinterest and seemed to have no conscience about their patients or their families after being paid for an office visit.

While I felt a sense of accomplishment in taking action against these practitioners and notifying the state medical board of their abuse, I think any real impact comes when someone loses their life and headlines grab the public’s attention.

In watching the Michael Jackson news this week, that same sense of frustration returns. The greatest pop icon of our age died on the cusp of a comeback, while his devastated family tearfully provides testimonials about how his insular network of doctors never had his best interests at heart. His now fatherless children serve as living proof that Jackson’s family members were right in their exasperation. In this drawn-out drama, they are far from unique.

As extraordinary as Michael Jackson’s life story was, the story of his death is shockingly ordinary.

My frustration is that it’s harder to buy a pre-paid cell phone in this country than it is to secure multiple legal prescriptions from different doctors to feed a deadly disease that hurts everyone surrounding the addicted patient. My frustration is that it takes a high-profile, headline-making event like the death of the King of Pop for us to examine accountability among the medical profession concerning contraindicated health risks for people struggling with addiction. My further frustration is that Michael Jackson’s story is being perceived as unique while it’s happening in living rooms across this nation daily, with real loved ones left behind crying real tears and sharing similar bewilderment that a “real doctor” was involved. But as I have learned as a person in recovery from my own drug addiction, frustration is an emotion we cannot afford. It must be turned into hope.

So my hope is that this coroner’s ruling is a wake-up call for more checks and balances in the pharmacy system to prevent abuse of potentially dangerous prescriptions. My hope is that addiction be managed by physicians and the medical establishment in the same way diabetic patients are managed, with their chronic deadly condition at the heart of ALL treatment decisions. And my greatest hope is that I never have to fill out another police report or watch another news story about a doctor who provided a legal, physician directed regimen of a pharmaceutical that amounts to a potential death sentence for one of the 20 million Americans that suffer with addiction.

|diˈnīəl| (noun) The action of declaring something to be untrue : she shook her head in denial.
• the refusal of something requested or desired : the denial of insurance to people with certain medical conditions.
• Psychology failure to acknowledge an unacceptable truth or emotion or to admit it into consciousness, used as a defense mechanism : you’re living in denial.
______

The Schuler crash: Dispelling the shock and disbelief
Brad Lamm

Like everyone else, I have been reading the coverage of the Diane Schuler case and the tragic loss of eight lives and trying to make sense of the tragedy. Most reading the coverage mourn the lost Hance family children and the unsuspecting victims in the other vehicle struck by wrong-direction driver Schuler, but I see it through a different lens and with a different empathy. In no way do I minimize the profound tragedy – but I see a larger and more dangerous story: That Schuler may have had an alcohol problem that no one saw and that it was on such a grand and deadly scale.

We need to replace the shock and disbelief with a teaching opportunity, in the hope that some meaning might emerge from our collective lament. My lens is different because each day I deal with families that have a living, breathing Diane Schuler in their midst, one that hasn’t had a horrible automobile crash, yet. These families are doing one of two things: enabling and nurturing a vicious cycle of addiction pathology through inaction and fear, or crying out for solutions while at their wits’ end. I feel uniquely poised to direct traffic at these crossroads as I was once very much like Diane Schuler, driving out of control on the wrong side of the highway of life.

My family (like the Hances and the Schulers) was largely unaware of the severity of my addiction to crystal meth, alcohol, cocaine and anything I could drink, snort, smoke or swallow. For 20 years I was the upwardly mobile life of the party, good friend and listener. At home I was a closeted addict and alcoholic, hiding in plain sight with secrets most of my loved ones, family and friends had no idea about. I went to tremendous lengths to keep the truth of my addictions away from those who loved me. I would explain my increasingly off-kilter behavior as “I have a fever . . .” or “My blood sugar must have gotten too low . . . ” or “I have a seizure disorder . . . .” I had the resume of a model citizen, not a common drunk. I was a nice person, from a decent middle-class family. And, yet, I couldn’t beat my addictions. I tried and failed many times.

Fate brought an intervention, rehab and finally recovery. I have since devoted my life to helping families that have a person like me among them, or a person like Diane Schuler – an alcoholic hiding in plain sight. Some of us are enabled. Some of us are obstructed. All of us are equally deadly, and we walk and drive among you.

The real sadness for me in this story is that it’s not at all shocking but completely routine. It’s my story and it’s the story of the family I met last night, and last Saturday and a year ago, and the family I will meet next week. It’s the quintessential addiction tome. The collateral damage one collects as addiction flourishes seems to be the luck of the draw, so a tragedy like the Schuler crash appears unusual to us. But that perspective, until changed, will serve to enflame the pandemic and periodically provide news stories like the Taconic crash.

So I argue that the greater horror is the reality of how many mothers make it home each night as their chronic disease state goes untreated. These afflicted people wreak a slow havoc on the children that make it out of the back seat. They are a catalyst for a lifetime of alienation, and their deterioration is nurtured by those closest to them who are too fearful to take action. They are ticking time bombs driving the wrong way in life . . . only we don’t sober up until someone crashes. I know because I see it every day in my professional capacity, but I really know because I am them and they are me.

Addiction is the only medical disease with its own social support system – friends, spouses and family actually assist the pathology through self-interest or fear. No other ailment enjoys this embrace. No other ailment is as abrupt and unforgiving and actually kills innocent bystanders while hiding in plain sight. And none, as typified by the Shuler story, is as preventable through brutal honesty, invitation and loving engagement for change. If Diane Schuler’s alcoholism was acknowledged for what it was and treated, would eight people be dead today? The answer is no. I know because I was that person.

The writer is a board-registered interventionist who does work in the Lower Hudson Valley. Learn more at ChangeSomeoneYouLove.com.

www.InterventionSpecialists.org

Posted in Alcohol, Alcohol Abuse, Alcohol Intervention, Alcoholism, Brad Lamm, Change, Change Seminar, ChangeBegins Training, Drug Addiction, Drug Intervention, How to Change Someone You Love, Nature vs. Nurture, News of Day, Press, headline | No Comments »