As a therapist of people in distress, I have been frequently exposed to the harsh reality of addicts (substance abusers), their circumstances and their families. Their pain and suffering has deeply troubled me. The overwhelming anguish and helplessness of good and well-intended parents, spouses and children has as a result, become clearly evident to me.
Why has this wave of addiction to substances increased as greatly as it has, only to impact our world with fearsome long term consequences when it not only costs a fortune and serves only to wreck the lives of the addict and its closest loved ones? How does this shocking epidemic breed and always expand when in fact, it should reduce by its very negative reality? We are all aware of the hazards of drug addiction, are we not? Everything about addiction is unconstructive for those of us who are not addicts. The recorded ‘benefits’ for the addict do not impress us and do not make any sense to the non-addicted population. Yet, for the addict, addiction’s apparent advantage is to launch one of the most powerful and destructive bonds that replace and defy all logic.
Addiction grows like a virus within the addict while it marches imposingly into our cities and coerces our children, stealing their lives and damaging their families. The addict’s meaningful lifestyle, social interactions and career are usually diminished with addiction. The addict’s values, morals and ethics disappear from its world. Unfamiliar mental states, altered perceptions, alien personas and new chemically linked relationships develop for the addict in lieu of all else, ensuring the set up of a ’safe’ crowd for a constant supply of the addictive chemical. Hence, the addictive persona arrives uninvited. This persona, by its sheer intensity to control all else, rules the addict’s natural personality, IQ and EQ. (more…)
Life is a precious gift and all through our growing years parents lovingly tend and nurture life, giving us strong healthy bodies that are bursting with vitality. Then we grow up and go off to do our own thing that includes being hell bent on destroying the health and fitness we enjoy. Alcohol is a killer, make no mistake about that! It is wonderful to party and get drunk and we tell ourselves that we are young and life is to be enjoyed. This article covers the repercussions of serious drinking on well being.
Medical research has indicated that a glass of wine or beer or one hard alcohol drink every day is good for the body. Who really stops with one drink? The reason being, alcohol is extremely addictive and once you get caught in its grip, getting out takes some serious effort. Society is plagued by alcoholism, even the young and the saddest part is that the numbers are on the rise, even among pre-teenagers. (more…)
A home drug test is a scientific piece of equipment that allows you to conduct an experiment at home that tells you whether the person from whom the sample is taken has been taking drugs or not. While home drug testing is becoming extremely popular among parents of teens, the drug testing kits are also being used in schools, offices and small businesses.
These home tests can be used to detect harmful drugs like THC (called marijuana, weed, pot or hash), opiates (heroin, morphine or codeine), cocaine (crack or snow), MDMA (ecstasy or X), Amphetamines (speed or uppers) and Benzodiazepines (Valium or Xanax).
A home drug test has various advantages over a test that is done in the laboratory. The top 5 advantages of testing drugs at home are listed below:
1. Faster results – This test can be done within minutes. You do not have to collect the sample, deliver it to the laboratory and then wait patiently for the results to come in. With a drug test kit, you can take a sample and use a disposable drug test to know the answer to the question that has been plaguing you for some time. (more…)
People have been enjoying alcohol for thousands of years. In fact, some archaeological evidence has pointed to the existence of purposely fermented beverages in the Neolithic period at about 10,000 B.C. While alcohol now serves mainly as a social lubricant, it once provided people with the only source of clean, sterilized drinking because water was usually tainted with sewage or other wastes, carrying a number of diseases. Over the thousands of years of drinking, we are learning more and more about the factors that affect our alcohol tolerance.
First, it is important to realize the genetic implications of alcohol tolerance. Some studies have shown that the ability to tolerate alcohol can be passed down genetically. Researchers believe this because descendants from ethnic groups who have long participated in alcohol consumption, such as Europeans, have higher tolerance than groups who have not had alcohol present in their culture for very long, such as Native Americans. (more…)
None by itself provides complete understanding of the world of drug use and abuse. It is useful to understand the following models.
1) The moral – legal model
2) The disease or public model
3) The psychosocial model
4) The socio – cultural model
The first two models of drug use operate on the premise that the answer to drug abuse problems is to keep drugs away from man. In these two models drugs are classified as either safe or dangerous. ‘Dangerous’ includes not only drugs that are physically dangerous but also those that are not socially or legally sanctioned. Drugs are the active ingredient; people are the deviant victims who must be protected. Protection comes in the form of legal controls on cultivation, manufacture, distribution, or possession. The deterrents are punishment or fear of harm. The major difference between the legal – moral and the disease or public health model is that the latter dwells less on legality of the substance and more on its potential harm. (more…)
