Tag: substance use disorder

  • Where’s the Rx?

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    GuidaBrown
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    Over the last few days I’ve been confronted – again – with the realization that far too many people don’t believe addiction is a disease, no matter what they actually say about it. First, the municipality where I live, one where no cannabis use is legal, decided to drop the first possession ticket to a…

  • Our Next New Drug Crisis

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    GuidaBrown
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    Ketamine has a long and storied history. Developed in the early 1960s as an anesthesia, it was deemed too dangerous for people due to its “intense, prolonged emergence delirium that ultimately made it undesirable for human use.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5126726/ More studies; more testing; and the end result — well, maybe not the END result, but the…

  • Death by Degrees?

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    GuidaBrown
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    “Harm reduction” has been defined myriad ways. The “Godfather of Harm Reduction,” Dan Bigg, referred to it as “the principle of reducing the negative consequences associated with drug use.” The organization he co-founded, the Chicago Recovery Alliance (CRA), uses the phrase “any positive change.” (https://www.thechicagoschool.edu/insight/news/any-positive-change/) The National Harm Reduction Coalition says that “harm reduction is a…

  • We Can’t Treat It If We Don’t Test For It

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    GuidaBrown
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    The Federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA), is designed to “address the needs of infants born with and identified as being affected by substance abuse or withdrawal symptoms resulting from prenatal drug exposure, or a Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder.” The Act is an effort to, in part, address the health and substance use…

  • Weed in the NBA

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    GuidaBrown
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    Big news before 4/20 was that the new NBA collective-bargaining contract will not require testing for THC. This new contract comes on the heels of the NBA having temporarily suspended testing of THC over the last three seasons, in part as a response to the COVID pandemic. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has gone on record…

  • My Friend Michael Is Dying

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    GuidaBrown
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    To be honest, I’m not even sure what he’s dying from, which makes helping him that much more difficult. It may be cancer, or it may be that his disease of addiction has finally sped up his demise…from cirrhosis or whatever else a body does when it’s had enough. And, given the fragmented systems of…

  • Gabapentin: A New Way to Die

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    GuidaBrown
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    In 2012, at the height of the opioid epidemic in this country, the US had 95% of the hydrocodone prescriptions in the world, despite having only 5% of the world’s population. The shocking fact that was thrown around was that “health care providers wrote 259 million prescriptions for opioid pain medication, enough for every adult…

  • Helping the Tiniest Victims

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    GuidaBrown
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    The tiniest victims of the opioid crisis are the babies born with neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS), and, specifically, neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome (NOWS). Overall in the US, the number of babies born with NAS is considered to be 6.7 per 1,000. However, those numbers increase based on different factors: American Indian/Alaska Natives have babies with…

  • The “Marty Mann Test for Alcoholism”

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    GuidaBrown
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    I recently watched a TikTok from jennabobenna9 who BRILLIANTLY said, “It’s not the number; it’s the fact that you’re doing the math in the first place. That’s a red flag,” explaining to viewers that the number of drinks or sips (or, if I may, lines or hits or pills) doesn’t matter. What matters is if…

  • We Can’t Incarcerate Nor IGNORE Our Way Out

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    GuidaBrown
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    To be clear, addiction is a chronic, progressive, lethal brain disease. We don’t criminalize other diseases by virtue of having the disease. That is, if someone with type 2 diabetes is under supervision through the criminal justice system for a crime, he doesn’t get sanctioned for having a diabetic episode – because society recognizes that…