Counselors at Narconon often see college binge drinking as an early issue with alcoholics.  Alcohol abuse, beginning in college, can be the start of alcoholism for many people. What begins as a seemingly social activity can spiral into an isolated pattern of drinking alone, in excess, over years and even decades.  Addicts often have to relearn how to socialize without alcohol after years of abuse.

Survey data show notable drops in student binge drinking at several colleges and universities, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Feb. 16. For example:

• Alcohol-related violations dropped 3.7 percent at North Dakota State University in Fargo, N.D. over two years.
• Between 2007 and 2009, “problem drinking” fell 12 percent at the University of Pittsburgh.
• The number of Purdue students who engaged in binge drinking sank from 48 percent in 2006 to 37.3 percent in 2009.
• Frostburg State University in Maryland saw binge drinking plummet 27% over the past decade.

Prevention advocates say the drop in risky drinking is no accident. Students and administrators are making concerted efforts to provide students with fun, late-night activities that are alcohol-free – and offered regularly.

What could possibly compete with a beer keg? The Wall Street Journal lists a dizzying array of activities, including alcohol-free tailgate parties, carnivals, movie showings, simulated sumo wrestling, bowling, arcade games, and contests.

http://www.jointogether.org/blog/posts/2011/activities-key-to-cutting.html

Narconon sees these significant drops in binge drinking as real progress in the effort to fight addiction.  Although these studies are fairly new, in time, other statistics will surely show increased GPAs and higher graduation rates for those schools offering more alcohol-free activities.

Narconon Drug Rehabilitation hopes to see less cases of alcoholism beginning with binge drinking as more schools adopt these practices.

Residents of treatment facilities will undoubtedly fall back into the correctional system and addiction related deaths will increase if the state reduces or eliminates residential treatment.  Although outpatient treatment helps some, many addicts require being removed from their environment and placed into a structured residential facility in order to initially get off drugs and alcohol. The state should redirect budget cuts or, at least, reduce the cuts to residential treatment. It costs taxpayers twice as much for an individual to be in the corrections system than in state funded treatment.

Even though the state of Maine has a rate of alcohol and drug addiction eight times higher than the rest of the nation, budget cuts there may soon force the closure of 10 out of 13 residential treatment centers, the Maine Public Broadcasting Network reported March 9.

Maine governor Paul Le Page is proposing to cut $5.6 million from the state’s substance abuse treatment programs. Most treatment providers say the cuts will be so deep that they will have to stop operating.

“It’s the classic pennywise-pound foolish, because we treat people at less than half the cost of the corrections community,” said Roger Prince of Serenity House, a substance abuse treatment program that is over 40 years old.

“So what do we want to do? Do we want to close this place down and send [our clients] back to jail or to the emergency room? It makes no sense to me,” he said.

According to a March 9 story in the Bangor Daily News, 40 percent of the Wellspring treatment program’s budget, or over $500,000, will vanish with the cuts. “There is no way I can make that up from other sources,” said Pat Kimball, the agency’s executive director.

http://www.jointogether.org/news/headlines/inthenews/2011/maine-eliminates-residential.html

Narconon hopes that Maine will reconsider their enormous cuts to residential treatment funding.

Narconon Drug Rehabilitation will continue to treat addicts residentially with high rates of success in Georgia, Michigan, California and Oklahoma.

It will take society as a whole because that’s how big the problem is.   Now days, almost everyone knows someone who is taking prescription drugs, even if they don’t pick up that there is an abuse problem.

This is an excellent article and well worth reading in its entirety:

“BECKLEY — Perhaps the trigger was an acrimonious divorce.

Possibly, the fuse was lit when a financial setback unleashed an avalanche of unpaid bills that made day-to-day living expenses too difficult to handle.

Maybe the proverbial straw on the camel’s back was a sudden illness that hurled the person into a deep fugue.

Whatever the underlying cause for depression, someone came along with some poor advice:

Sniff this. Swallow that. Inhale here.

What ensued was euphoria, with an unseen hook the friend never mentioned.

Once is not enough. So to maintain that good feeling, the hurting individual needs more of what took him into dreamland. Now, he’s hooked. From there, the path is treacherous, fraught with faking pain in “doctor shopping,” or buying from a back-alley supplier, and possibly ending with the slamming of a steel door.

And there’s a good reason for dependency, says Dr. Hassan Jafary, a practitioner of internal medicine at Stanaford Medical Clinic, outside Beckley.

Simply, the brain never forgets.
Jafary experimented on a reporter to illustrate. Eyes closed, the reporter opened his left hand and Jafary dropped in it an object.

“Now, as I start to count, tell me what it is,” he said.

“A dime,” the object of his experiment replied, correctly.

And that is why one shackled to drugs cannot readily overcome an addiction. The brain just won’t let go of him.

Jafary applauds West Virginia lawmakers for moving to set aside $60 million in a proposed cigarette tax increase to treat addicts.

But society as a whole needs to get involved, he says.”

http://www.register-herald.com/todaysfrontpage/x186202800/Doctor-believes-all-society-must-combat-drug-addiction

Narconon will work as long as necessary to get the word out – we are the middle of a bad situation with these drugs and unless we do something quickly, the ramifications may be severe for the world as we know it.

For those who are already addicted – Narconon drug rehab is here to help.

Besides taking an interesting view on Charlie Sheen, the article cleverly ties in the American addictive personality when it comes to debt.  Seems like enough people aren’t practicing moderation with their drugs or their money.   Here is the article:

“Watching Charlie Sheen’s outbursts is a great entertainment for Americans. Here is a guy who has it all, fame, fortune, a great career and it is all crashing in on him because of addiction.

We all know that Charlie Sheen is one 911 call from the morgue. He has made the ambulance trip before, and he doesn’t see it coming. Denial is a classic symptom of drug addiction.

Here is Charlie in his own words responding to a question about his drug and alcohol problems, “I’m different. I have a different constitution, I have a different brain, I have a different heart. I got tiger blood, man.”

Sheen is not dealing with reality and the concern of others around him doesn’t seem to register, “I’m dealing with fools and trolls. I’m dealing with soft targets, and it’s just strafing runs in my underwear before my first cup of coffee.”

Addiction does strange things to the mind. The same is true of America’s addiction to debt.

Americans have been warned many times about excessive debt. The latest warning in Warren Buffett’s annual letter to shareholders is a prime example. Here is what Buffett concludes: “But leverage is addictive. Once having profited from its wonders, very few people retreat to more conservative practices….

http://townhall.com/columnists/floydandmarybethbrown/2011/03/05/charlie_sheen,_obama,_republicans_and_addiction

Narconon addresses many facets of life that contribute to what can appear to be an addictive personality.   Learning self-discipline and ethical behavior can keep a person off drugs and also help them make good decisions about money.

In fact, many who attend Narconon drug rehab become very successful in life, using the skills they have learned.

And guess what?  Drug addiction has taken a new face lately.  With so many doctors busy prescribing pain pills more athletes, housewives and just normal people are getting addicted every day.  If there is stigma to addiction and a stigma to treatment what are they supposed to do?    The potential consequences are not pretty.  This article makes some good points:

A Sensible Way to Deal with Addiction

“My first exposure to “White Rabbit” when it was the theme song to a mid 1970′s television movie called “Go Ask Alice.“

The movie about a high school drug abuser was a haunting description of many of my friends. Some of experimented with drugs.

They needed treatment but treatment wasn’t a popular concept then.

I made it through college, graduate school and the rest of my life isolated from the drug culture. I’ve never seen cocaine or harder drugs and wouldn’t know how to find them. Drugs are not a part of my world.

I was lucky. As it turns out, my friends were too. Few were ever arrested and most overcame their addictions.

As we got older, my friends settled down, raised families, went to college and lead productive lives. I follow them on Facebook. They seem to be doing well.

The key phrase is that they developed productive lives.

Those productive lives would not have happened if they had spent a few years in the slammer.

Charlie Sheen and others are bashing AA and other forms of treatment. I don’t really see Charlie as a role model but maybe I am wrong.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/don-mcnay/a-sensible-way-to-deal-wi_b_831854.html

Narconon works hard to make treatment available and so should the rest of society.  This includes not bashing the addict or the treatment, but coming to grips with the fact that an awful lot of people are having a hard time right now.

Narconon drug rehab is an answer for anyone – even the AA bashers.

The facts are that marijuana gets people high and it is a gateway drug for more potent and dangerous drugs.  Though states are acting confused, down deep most people have a sense that spreading the use of marijuana is not going to help society.  Even the temporary revenues will be eaten up down the line by the additional future burden of more drug addicts.  Here is the article:

“A broad range of marijuana-related legislation is pending in at least 13 states. The flurry of new bills includes efforts to legalize, expand, or repeal medical marijuana; protect workers using prescription marijuana; restrict the sale of medical marijuana in food; make driving under the influence of marijuana a crime; decriminalize small amounts of marijuana; or legalize, tax, and regulate its sale.

Proposals to Legalize Medical Marijuana

Hawaii is considering legalizing medical marijuana distributed through “compassion centers” under a proposal that would create three classes of licenses and make the drug subject to income, sales, and excise taxes.

Similar proposals are also being considered in Delaware, Idaho,Kansas, and Maryland. The sponsor of the Kansas bill said it was not likely to pass; in Maryland, a state delegate proposed amending the medical marijuana bill to disallow smoking marijuana for medical purposes – all other methods of ingestion would be legal

Indiana took a step closer toward proposing to legalize medical marijuana when a state senate panel backed a bill that would assign a state commission the task of studying and making policy recommendations on the issue. The panel made its decision after hearing testimony from a state senator with multiple sclerosis who said he wished he could legally use the drug to alleviate his pain.”

Plans to Change or Repeal Medical Marijuana Laws

A number of states that had previously legalized medical marijuana are considering changes.”

Narconon maintains that medication is indeed necessary in many circumstances.  However, this does not mean that we need to be moving towards having an entire nation on drugs.

Narconon drug rehab is the best solution for those who started on the path of abuse through marijuana and got addicted to marijuana or harder stuff.

A new study led by a researcher at Indiana University suggests that drinking problems in teens is not “just a phase,” but strongly predicts they will be alcohol dependent in their twenties, CNN Health reported Feb. 15.

Researchers assessed the drinking problems of 597 Finnish twins at age 18 by giving them the Rutgers Alcohol Problem Index (RAPI), a self-administered questionnaire. They followed up with in-person interviews when the twins reached age 25.

They found that 52 percent of the study participants showed problem drinking at 18 based on their RAPI scores. Those scores held at age 25, when nearly half of the participants were assessed as dependent on alcohol (46.2 percent) or met criteria for alcohol abuse (1.5 percent).

“The key finding was that the more drinking-related problems experienced by an adolescent at age 18, the greater the likelihood that adolescent would be diagnosed with alcoholism seven years later, at age 25,” said Richard R. Rose of Indiana University, who led the study. “The analysis of co-twins ruled out factors such as parental drinking and household atmosphere as the source of the association, because twins jointly experience these.”

http://www.jointogether.org/news/research/summaries/2011/teen-problem-drinking-not.html

Narconon works with people to come off of alcohol, drugs and teaches life skills. There are many difficulties that people face when they have become dependent on drugs and alcohol. People that seek treatment are likely to be successful but a big factor is the environment they return to after treatment is completed.

Narconon drug rehab teaches a different approach to alcohol and drug treatment. When someone enters the doors at Narconon they are educated about the drugs and their lifestyles. Many people are blinded by their addiction until one sinks very low and eventually realizes they need help. Narconon sees the ongoing problems alcohol and drugs bring to peoples lives and sees there is hope for those in need of treatment. Alcohol is a very powerful drug for the simple fact it is virtually everywhere in society.

The caveat here is that long term the price of this decision could be much higher than the money saved now.  It’s unfortunate and unfair for those of us who keep our heads straight and go to work every day – unfortunate but true.

The only real solution is to face the fact that we have a mess on our hands and it is going to cost money to straighten it out.  If the money is spent wisely on effective treatment and prevention, then we will reap the benefits and eventually the costs will go down.

Funding for research as to effective rehab needs to be part of any budget. Otherwise money will be wasted – and there is not enough around now to waste.  Here is an interesting article on the topic:

Ill. Gov. Eliminates Funding for Treatment and Prevention

“The state of Illinois will cease to fund alcohol and drug treatment and prevention programs as of March 15, the News-Gazette reported Feb. 19. The cuts are part of Governor Pat Quinn’s proposed 2012 budget.

The cuts are scheduled to take effect March 15, not on July 1, when the 2012 fiscal year begins. If they are implemented, advocates say, many treatment providers will have to close their doors.

“It’s the most devastating picture possible,” said Sara Howe, CEO of the Illinois Alcoholism and Drug Dependence Association. “There’s real concern about the entire system being shut down because providers will close.”

Howe said that about 55,000 people, or “80 percent of our clients on March 15 would be thrown out of care.” The remaining twenty percent qualify for Medicaid, a federally-funded program, and would still be eligible for treatment services.

Bruce Suardini, of Prairie Health Systems, said that Medicaid only covered women, not men, and that the state planned to cut the rate at which it would reimburse providers for Medicaid-covered services by six percent.

Stacey Solano of the state Department of Human Services said in an email that the department’s budget deficit was due to “increased demand for services during the economic recession.”

Solano went on to say, “The department is now faced with the difficult but necessary decision of reducing services in order to pay our bills for the remainder of the fiscal year while preserving core services.”

http://www.jointogether.org/news/headlines/inthenews/2011/ill-eliminates-funding-for.html

Narconon understands that it’s a tough world right now economically.  We do our best to keep our costs down, while still providing an effective program.

Narconon drug rehab is still one of the best investments.  Long term money is saved and most importantly, a life.

The Narconon program helps address these issues and many more.  Here is a most recent success story from a student who just completed the sauna and exercise program:

“Before I began the sauna and exercise program, I felt miserable every day and I let everyone know it.   I was getting maybe 6 hours of sleep a night. My eating habits where horrible – I would only eat one big meal a day.   My general attitude was that life was a big joke to me.

Within 5 days on the sauna program, I started sleeping like a bear in hibernation. I also started to awake hungry and I re-introduced my body to breakfast. I started to see the effects of the nutrients I was eating every day. Instead of dreading exercise, I was craving it. I started to notice my sense of smell wasn’t gone for good.

One big change I immediately noticed was how clear my skin looks. I used to have a dry face but I haven’t had a problem with dry skin since I’ve started sauna, which is amazing. My nails have been growing like crazy.

The best thing that I got out of sauna was the way my body feels overall. I used to never leave the couch because my legs were always aching with pain. Now I feel like a kid again.  I can skateboard; play football, soccer, etc. without any soreness or pain. I really couldn’t ask for anything more.

I assess situations and think about past situations much differently.  I even realize the emotional stress that I’ve caused my loved ones. I think much more rationally. I’m ready to repair the bridges I’ve burned. I feel fully aware and now exist in present time.

I didn’t think it was possible for me to change. I always thought most of the programs graduates were exaggerating about the way they felt. They would say at some point during the program something would just click. For me, something just clicked in sauna. I had a lot of time to think. It’s hard to think about the things I’ve done in the past and the darkness that lingers. Looking towards the future and the infinite possibilities I can’t help but to feel happy. I know that with the way I feel now in combination with the tools I will need to live a happy life, there’s no way I can fail.”

The Narconon program addresses biophysical, social and behavioral components of addiction.  We cover many areas of life.  With all these areas addressed, the graduate can create a new life.

Narconon drug rehab does much more than get people off drugs.  It gives hope for a better future.

The decision to go public and share his story not only gives other addicts hope as they follow his struggle, it also sheds light on the use of addictive drugs in the NFL. As football players often sustain injuries on the field they are then treated by the league medical staff to get them back in the game as quickly as possible.  Oftentimes the treatment methods are not the best choice for long term health but a quick fix to get them playing again.

Former Jets QB Ray Lucas, who has taken the extraordinary step of sharing his experiences in drug rehab on Facebook, provided another entry late Thursday night. For those who aren’t familiar with his situation, Lucas developed an addiction to pain killers during his career and checked into Behavioral Health of the Palm Beaches in Palm Beach, Fla., last Friday.

“The last 2 days have been days of transition. I was moved from detox into the Seaside condos. They are beautiful. I am still going through detox, it’s not easy. My body hurts all over as they work to unwind the years of pain killer use dating back to my playing days & then medicating my significant injuries in my retirement. I am feeling lot’s of anxiety. It has been a few tough days but I will get myself back.”

http://espn.go.com/blog/new-york/jets/post?id=4595

Narconon has seen a huge increase in prescription drug abuse in the past decade.  The physical symptoms Mr. Lucas describes are very effectively handled with the Sauna and Exercise Program that clients participate in during the Narconon program. It is unfortunate that the NFL doesn’t seek healthier treatment methods for the pain their players endure.  Hopefully as more players share their stories the league will be forced to look at their policies and introduce alternative and holistic treatment plans for NFL players.

Narconon Drug Rehab has a 70% success rate treating prescription drug addiction and offers a drug-free alternative to assist with pain management.