The lines are blurring all over the place; the lines between personal and business on social networking sites, the lines between who is calling on your cell phone, and the lines between addictions at meetings. This morning I went to a meeting where several people identified themselves as “addicts.” Their drug of choice was crack. They were at the wrong fellowship. The base line for recovery is that we can identify with other people with the same experiences.
When the man on the bed, the third man to get sober, was approached by Bill & Dr. Bob, they spoke to him and he could identify with them, with their experiences, feelings and the insanity of the way they drank. If you can’t identify with the person you are talking to you will continue to be lost and available for picking by the nearest shark.
I spend about three dollars at the penny slots when I am on a cruise. I can’t identify with gamblers who sacrifice their homes and families for another run at the gambling games. I don’t do that. During bad times, I can certainly eat a pint of Hagan Daz or Breyers all by myself. I can’t identify with people who eat three pints, vomit it and eat some more at the peril of evenually throwing up enough bits and pieces of their organs that they die. And I can’t identify in the least with crack addicts because I can’t understand why you would want to do something that takes you away from reality for such a short time! But I do know what it’s like to wake up at 7:00 am and swear to God that I will never drink like that again and by 7:00 pm there I am at a bar doing it again wondering how I got there. Dying doesn’t scare me…however, waking up on a Sunday morning when the liquor stores are closed is terrifying!
I understand people like to go to meetings where they feel all warm and fuzzy, but that is not the purpose of meetings. It’s not a club where you tell war stories (you can do that on a bar stool) or a sick sorority that you strive to belong to and be the coolest one. I had to release my psychedelic years to become one of many. Meetings are a place to find the 12 steps and a God to help you with total abstinence so you don’t wind up dead. If you sit at the wrong meeting, your disease is winning. It already has put you in a place where has you are believing that you are different and unique. The only starting place for ego reduction and humility is a knowledge that there is really only one thing we have in common. We are completely and utterly different in all other respects. We have to find that one thing, accept it and move forward. People need to find the right 12 step fellowship meetings or perish.

Young Timer Rant IV

(old timer 40 years or more of sobriety)

By Snow P.

I listened to a recovery radio program on my way up to Port Canaveral several weeks ago. Dr. Drew was being interviewed, the host of “Celebrity Rehab” a TV show about watching celebrities getting sober. I called in when he was there and was put on hold. I was in the car geared up for the 3 hour ride and had free minutes on my phone, so I stayed on hold and listened.

After Dr. Drew left, another man who owned a treatment center and was the sponsor of the show came on for an interview, and the topic was “Relapse.”  The people running the show had the authority to speak on it because addiction had taken them all places no precious human being should go, but airwaves cost money so they had a sponsor. The sponsor happened to be in the billion-dollar treatment industry, which is presented as one of the perfect solutions to relapse. They were even giving away a 30-day treatment gift to some lucky winner like it was a basket of fruit. Who do you give that to if you win it?  Do you really need to enter a contest to save your life?

By the time they got me on the wire live, I asked the first question on my mind, which was more or less this; When you wake up in the morning with the hangover from hell and look at yourself in the mirror you can hardly be honest with yourself  and no one else is in the room. How can you possibly do it on camera? The response was bluster and billowing that I did not expect when the host said that these people are used to being on camera and that Dr. Draw’s show has helped a lot of people and more importantly “Dr. Drew does not need the money!” He went into big time defense of his sponsor, and it was not his recovery sponsor.

I didn’t care whether Dr. Drew needed the money or not, all I was wondered  was how could even one human being possibly be helped on a stage? If we loose one alcoholic because of a convoluted TV show whether they are famous or not, isn’t that one alcoholic too many? Should we endorse someone’s need for fame, money glory by watching such a show and applauding its producer?  Will even one of those celebrities be sober a year from now, three years from now, five years from now? Does anyone actually believe they will? Isn’t it just a good premise for a new reality TV show?

They cut to a commercial quickly and when they returned went to the topic of relapse. They were interviewing the man who owned the treatment center and he said they had 100% success…. if you count when the people were in treatment.  He was a little flip about it, knowing that no one in any treatment center at any price can guarantee long term sobriety at all.  Then the host got me back and asked if I ever had a relapse. I said no, I haven’t had a relapse yet. He asked how long I had been sober. I said 33 years and 8 days, but who’s counting?   He asked why I thought I didn’t have a relapse. I told him I ask myself that all the time and wish I knew. I always think back to the beginning and said I think mostly because I went through cold turkey in the rooms and could not ever go through that again.

This was in direct conflict with the sponsor who is pushing an expensive treatment center. The host went immediately to the sponsor and as if to trump me with authority, said “You are in the treatment business for 40 years, tell us…blah, blah, blah” Was he in recovery? I don’t know and I don’t care.  Sobriety is not a contest. No one wins anything more than today.  All I know is that TV shows, treatment centers, waving a black cat over you head may work for a day, 30 days or a season, but what about next year? What about three years from now? Where will all those people on TV and in the treatment centers be? Will even one of them stay sober? If you rob people of the excruciating pain of sobering up, is sobriety worth keeping? I know I almost died from the alcohol and drugs I was coming off of, but ignorance and God kept me safe from convulsions and death.  I believed I could shake through it because the people in the rooms kept telling me I could do it. My arms and legs flayed uncontrollable for many months. It was not a pretty site. I didn’t have a lovely room surrounded by faux nurses making it easy for me.  I did not get a white chip; I got a cup of coffee and a smile and people telling me I only had to do this once. I did a funny thing… I believed them. I had the gift of desperation. 

 This treatment industry has people believing you have to go to treatment in order to get sober. If you don’t have the money, you don’t have a chance. Then after one treatment experience, it seems to get in people’s minds that they can just go check their disease at the door and let someone else handle it for them and medicate them until it goes away. And if they drink, well, they can always just go check in again and get into that costly revolving door of false hope. It’s a negative badge of honor and a club amongst some young people as I hear them trading stories and proud about how many treatment centers they have been in. The more treatment centers you’ve been to, the worse you are than the next guy. Terminal uniqueness strikes again. If we don’t find the one thing we have in common, we’re all dead.

What’s sad is that I see people in the treatment industry playing the “Emperor’s New Clothes” because they just don’t want to jeopardize their income. Staff members are dying from untreated alcoholism in the middle of treatment centers and desperately need intervention. They are just like the celebrities on TV being robbed of their chances for recovery because it’s not good for business.  

I pray for all those who are lost in the pain of addiction. I pray that they can break through for a moment and reach for the solution Bill and Bob found in 1935 after all the “treatment centers” in the world did not work for them. The God they found will still meet any of us anywhere.

Looks like the manufacturer of Paxil may have failed to disclose that an early Paxil found that the drug was associated with increased risk of suicide:

An inappropriate analysis of clinical trial data by researchers at GlaxoSmithKline obscured suicide risks associated with paroxetine, a profitable antidepressant, for 15 years, suggest court documents (897kb, requires Acrobat Reader) released last month. Not until 2006 did GSK alert people to raised suicide risks associated with the drug, marketed as Paxil and Seroxat.

An analysis of internal GSK memos and reports, which were released to US lawyers seeking damages, suggests that the company had trial data demonstrating an eightfold increase in suicide risk as early as 1989. Harvard University psychiatrist Joseph Glenmullen, who studied the papers for the lawyers, says it's "virtually impossible" that GSK simply misunderstood the data - a claim the company describes as "absolutely false".