Tag: opioids
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Is ‘California Sober’ a Real Path to Recovery?
There’s much debate about what recovery looks like. In fact, in some fun videos on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/mikeandguida/) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/MikeAndGuida) that I do with my friend, the renowned trainer Mike McGowan, we recently talked about “California Sober,” and sheesh, did we get pushback! For the unfamiliar, “California Sober,” according to one source, means “when a…
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The Overlooked Impact of Alcohol in Drug Policy
On April 1, 2025, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy from the Executive Office of the President issued its Statement of Drug Policy Priorities. Sadly, as expected, the most abused drug in the nation, alcohol, was left out. Again. The document opens with this statement, but the emphasis is mine, “The Trump…
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The Dangers of Ignoring Addiction Facts
If you’re looking for me, I’m over here banging my head on my desk. Why, you ask? I’m happy to explain! In the last week I’ve been discouraged at every turn where it comes to my expertise around substance use disorders. First, a person who may or may not have been pregnant was drinking wine.…
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Alcohol: The Deadliest Drug
Alcohol is STILL killing more people annually than opioids ever did….alcohol kills slowly. Heroin kills fast. Fentanyl kills faster. Opioids can and do kill with a first use, but alcohol rarely does. Alcohol takes its sweet time…first destroying relationships, then entire families, and then actual lives.
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Silos Help No One
When NARCAN first started being supplied due to grant dollars, there was a lot of pushback about it. “Why should insulin be so expensive and NARCAN be free?” The truth is that NARCAN isn’t free; it’s paid for by our tax dollars, so that question should be “Why do we provide NARCAN but not insulin…
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That Deadly Drink
Just because it’s legal – and just because the government sold us out to the deep pockets of the alcohol industry – doesn’t mean that it’s safe.
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Knowledge Is Power, and More Is Readily Available through Neonate Screening for Drugs of Abuse
Every single baby born in the US is required to be screened for phenylketonuria (PKU), which is “a rare condition in which a baby is born without the ability to properly break down an amino acid called phenylalanine” (Medline). Annually in the US, 1 in every 10,000 to 15,000 babies born is diagnosed with PKU…
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The Ketamine Kure Or “Here We Go Again!”
Just as opioids weren’t a cure all, ketamine isn’t a cure all. In 2019, s-ketamine was approved for treatment-resistant depression (FDA)…and a huge warning flag should have been flown. Ketamine had already been approved in 1970, but that was for its original use for humans: an anesthetic. And in its original form it has already…
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How Do YOU Define “Party”?
For the last fourteen years or so, I’ve been doing assessments to determine whether or not people have substance use disorders (SUDs). We all know that the younger a person starts using substances, the more likely that a SUD will develop, so my assessments always include a version of the following questions: “How old were…
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Getting Us Out of This Mess
Because of what I listened to from the first 2024 Republican Presidential primary debate, I Googled “How is fentanyl coming to the US?” And here’s what I found from the January 2020 DEA Intelligence Report: “The flow of fentanyl into the United States in 2019 is more diverse compared to the start of the fentanyl crisis…
Guided by Guida 