Drug Free America

I received this email today from the Partnership for a Drug Free America and I’d like to pass it on to you as a resource. Many of you have emailed me over the past year trying to figure out how to help your spouse, your children or your parents to stop using drugs.

The organization A Partnership for a Drug Free America has some excellent resources that may help you to get your loved ones off of drugs and/or alcohol.

This year alone the Partnership has:

Built and Released Time To Act: A first-of-its kind science-based, online resource for parents and care-givers that suspect or know their child is experimenting, using or has a problem with alcohol or drugs.

Introduced Time To Talk Tools for Military Families: Launched a suite of new tools to assist military families and teens through difficult periods of transition, such as a deployment, major injury of a parent, or when moving frequently to new neighborhoods and schools.

Launched Habla Con Tus Hijos: A new Spanish language resource for parents looking to talk with their kids about the risks of drugs and alcohol.

Since they started in 1987, teen drug use has fallen by half, overall illicit drug use is down by 32%, and in this decade, cocaine, LSD, Ecstasy, meth and marijuana use continues to decline.

If you’d like to contact them please go to
Contact DrugFree.org

or visit their home page at
Drugfree.org

and there are tons of resources for you to use.

For more about Drug Free America link to Books

I think my wife is at it AGAIN!

Question: My wife and I are fine; than she runs to the corner store. When she comes back with tons of stuff we don’t need, she is out of it for the next 10 hours.

I think my wife is at it again with heroin.

What can I do? I mean out of it; eyes in the back of her head!

Answer: I don’t have a lot of information about your wife and your situation but I’ll do the best I can to answer your question.

Your wife likely has an opiate addiction that probably started with her using pain pills. People get VERY strong pain pills for almost everything now and MANY of them get addicted to them. Once addicted they switch to heroin because it is MUCH cheaper to get on the street.

Heroin addiction is a disease of the brain, which means the drug has completely taken over your wife’s brain and she will do anything to get the drug her brain has convinced her she needs.

Almost everyone who tries to stop using heroin relapses because the brain’s need for the drug is SO strong.

Relapse on heroin can often lead to overdose because the body’s tolerance for the drug lowers so quickly. Your wife has a VERY serious problem that if left untreated is likely to be deadly because of overdose.

She likely needs inpatient treatment to go through detox and to go through treatment. She also should be attending NA or AA meetings daily to begin the process of learning how to avoid using and build a new sober life for herself.

It sounds like you may have been through this before, making this all the more difficult for you. You should start attending Al-anon meetings in your area ASAP to learn what resources are available to you and to understand the demon you are fighting.

Your wife is still in there if you can figure out how to help her to stop using.

You should also make her go with you to a doctor for a complete medical checkup and ask the doctor for a referral to a GOOD opiate treatment center that he/she would recommend.

Many opiate addicts have used Methadone or Suboxone successfully to end their addiction and treatment centers can help your wife get proper access to these transitional drugs. She MUST stop using heroin to survive and these drugs my help her to do that.

Good luck and I hope you can figure out the best way to help your wife to end this terrible disease.