Macleans has an interesting column making the case for the role of politics in decisions about programs like Insite:

As far as I can tell, we are not having the kind of debate that would force such a person to say “I…

Philosophy bites has an interview with Thomas Pink on free will that I think touches on points important to thinking about addiction.

Here and Now has a good, brief interview with A. Thomas McLellan.Hea

Doctors criticise ‘reckless’ drug abuse guidance

Short answer, “no!”

• Guidelines for working with batterers
• Guidelines for working with survivors
• Barriers Preventing Effective Communication Between Domestic Violence and Addiction Professionals
• But I was drunk!

Another study finding that coerced treatment is just as effective as voluntary treatment.

Responses to this will be interesting to watch. I’m certain that people who object will be accused of moral panic or something like it.

Jacob Sullum enjoys a gotcha moment with Mark Willenbring.

Yesterday Lou heard this Al-Anon promo on the radio (video after the break). Like her, I appreciate the pro-active approach. Especially with alcohol abuse on the rise since the recession hit more than a year ago. The comments on her post range and I, too, am wondering your thoughts about this. Blogger Indigo’s comment appealed most to me–that the ads are a good approach, noting that we have more tools available now than when meetings originally began. Why not use them to promote a message that could help people get into recovery–and dissolve the taboos surrounding the disease?

Support for twelve-step programs’ emphasis on powerlessness?

It doesn’t end there. In a third study, the researchers contrived to influence beliefs about self-control by giving student smokers a bogus implicit test of impulse control. Later, the students were challenged to watch the film “Coffee and Cigarettes” whilst abstaining from smoking. They were promised a greater cash reward the more difficult they made the challenge for themselves. In this case, students given bogus test feedback indicating they had high self-control were more likely to opt for greater temptation - holding the cigarette in their hand rather than having it on the desk…

A lack of perceived need for treatment is still a key reason for the low rate of treatment in people with alcohol-use disorder and for the lack of progress in reducing the scale of this problem, according to an analysis of recent large surveys in the United States.

In the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) dataset, 7,009 respondents met the diagnostic criteria for an alcohol-use disorder (dependence or abuse), among whom 89.6 percent said they did not perceive a need for treatment or counseling for their alcohol use in the…

Early returns from a Massachusetts initiative offering free smoking cessation treatment:

When Massachusetts began offering virtually free treatments to help poor residents of the state stop smoking in 2006, proponents hoped the new Medicaid program would someday reap benefits.

But state officials never expected it would happen so soon.

New state data show a steep drop in the smoking rate among poor people. When the program started, about 38 percent of poor Massachusetts residents smoked. By 2008, the smoking rate for poor residents had dropped to about 28 percent, a decrease of about 30,000 people in two and a half years, or one…

• Costs associated with parity were in line with, or even below, the projections.
• Most health plans responded to the parity law by lifting limits on the annual number of days allowed for inpatient treatments and the number of visits allowed for outpatient treatment.
• Concerns arose over the use of “medical necessity” clauses to authorize treatments and control costs. Medical necessity is typically defined as the need to supply a service for a condition that could endanger life or cause significant illness, suffering or disability and for which there is no adequate, less costly…

In a jail recently, I watched a slow, shuffling queue of men in the rain. The sight of these addicts lining up outside the dispensary for their drugs must be one of the saddest and most shameful in our prison estate, yet giving them drugs is now the cornerstone of policy throughout western Europe – the argument being that we should accept that the addicted…

The Boston Globe offers a good summary of the recent U.K. row over drug classification:

In the long and tortured debate over drug policy, one of the strangest episodes has been playing out this fall in the United Kingdom, where the country’s top drug adviser was recently fired for publicly criticizing his own government’s drug laws.

…

The list, printed as a chart with the unassuming title “Mean Harm Scores for 20 Substances,” ranked a set of common drugs, both legal and illegal, in order of their harmfulness - how addictive they were, how physically damaging, and how much they threatened society. Many drug…

I had no idea that McLellan has been so personally affected by addiction:

But the loss of his younger son, who overdosed on anti-anxiety medication and Scotch last year at age 30 while his older son was in residential treatment for alcoholism and cocaine addiction, changed his perspective.

“That’s why I took this job,” said Dr. McLellan, who was sworn in as the deputy director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy in August. “I thought it was some kind of sign, you know. I would never have done it. I loved all the people I’ve worked with, I loved my life. But I…

Addiction Professional shines a light on Scott Kellogg and his Gradualism model. I’ve mentioned him several times in this blog and he has been kind enough to link to me on his website.

Two months ago Kellogg established a website (http://gradualismandaddiction.org) that he hopes will serve as a vehicle for discussion around a more nuanced approach to treatment. He says that after he began using the term “gradualism,” he noticed that practitioners in non-abstinence based initiatives in Europe in the 1970s had used the term “gradual change” to describe what they were trying to instill in persons with substance use problems.

A Gestalt-trained…

So here we are, in the 21st century, plugging into online recovery. Most Americans spend a fair portion of the day docked at their computers, for various reasons. Work, facebook, email, recovery blogging, facebook, more facebook.  Trust me. I study this stuff.

I found a couple of  articles today that discuss how easily we share private matters through online social networks. And how that can come back to haunt us. Over here in our sphere of the world, recovery bloggers try to maintain anonymity while discussing life shattering, personal matters. Matters that involve ugliness, taboos, crime, love, divorce, loss, addiction and…

We know that “We are everywhere.” New technology from Ann-e helps addicts utilize, support and connect with the recovery network.

From About.com:

You are in recovery, but you have a sudden urge to pick up. You are away from your home base and your 12-step contacts, but you need to talk to someone, anyone who understands. You feel isolated and you need to connect with someone else in recovery.

Now, there’s a app for that.

Annie’s idea for a peer-to-peer phone application was inspired from a shopping encounter where she recognized an addict’s need for help and the loneliness many addicts feel when…

I read this Ta-Nehisi Coates post yesterday on domestic violence, responsibility, individual agency, community, shame, isolation and empowerment. It’s really stuck with me. Very heavy, heady stuff in a very short post.

It got me thinking about some of the mechanisms of addiction and stigma, and the healing mechanisms of the recovering community. He points out the empowering aspects of a community of oppressed people and the responsibility this community confers upon its members.

Further along these lines, Bill White has a new paper on stigma, addiction and methadone. It poses some interesting challenges to the recovering community. How do we reduce the…

Creative Commons, image by "lapolab"

An interesting explanation of dopamine’s function–distinguishing drive and motivation from pleasure and reward:

In the emerging view, discussed in part at the Society for Neuroscience meeting last week in Chicago, dopamine is less about pleasure and reward than about drive and motivation, about figuring out what you have to do to survive and then doing it. “When you can’t breathe, and you’re gasping for air, would you call that pleasurable?” said Nora D. Volkow, a dopamine researcher and director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “Or when you’re so hungry that you eat something disgusting, is…

Creative Commons, by isabel bloedwater

Encouraging findings for people trying to quit smoking:

Smokers are more than twice as likely to quit if they use the nicotine patch along with nicotine lozenges—compared to lozenges or patches alone, buproprion (Xyban), buproprion plus the lozenges or placebo.  The trial was the largest study ever to compare these approaches head to head, and included 1,504 smokers.

All of the treatment groups did better than placebo—but the effect was strongest for the patch/lozenge combination, 40% of whom successfully kicked the habit.  Smokers using this combo were not only more likely to quit, but also less likely to have…

A mini pot tab dump:

• Baby Boomers and retirees are plunging into the medical marijuana business
• A short history of Gemini Dream

holy cow, it’s happening to you too.

Androcles writes a nice post on the infectious nature of recovery and hope.