"The mind of a heroin addict: the struggle to get clean and stay sober" on The Guardian is a collection of comments by recovering sober addicts and some using addicts on how they struggle and how Philip Seymour Hoffman's death from heroin overdose after 23 years of sobriety affected them.
As I read this post, I was not only shocked and troubled by the very truthful and blatantly honest responses but also got a better understanding of how they struggle or relapse and how terribly hard it is to fight the addict inside them. I am not totally unaware of what goes into rehabilitation, I worked with addicts during my one year psychiatry job. Yet I found these comments revealing and poignant.
One of the comments which stood out to me was by Danny from Ireland, who has been ten years sober; "My father died from addiction, we lost a cousin, I myself had numerous
overdoses and helped prevent siblings from OD-ing (all of who are now
clean thanks to the process of one addict helping another that Russell Brand spoke of).
Hearing about Hoffman affects me the same way as if it were a friend. I
didnt know he was an addict untill he died, but when I heard of his
story and addiction I immediatly identified with him. We work the same
way in our minds. I know what happened to him before he picked up. I
know how he felt. I'm pretty sure it started the same way most relapses
do. "
Some drug facts in the US:
According to NIDA ( National Institute on Drug Abuse) "Illicit drug use in America has been increasing. In
2012, an estimated 23.9 million Americans aged 12 or older—or 9.2
percent of the population—had used an illicit drug or abused a
psychotherapeutic medication (such as a pain reliever, stimulant, or
tranquilizer) in the past month. This is up from 8.3 percent in 2002.
The increase mostly reflects a recent rise in the use of marijuana, the
most commonly used illicit drug."
More than half of new illicit drug users begin with marijuana. Next most common are prescription pain relievers, followed by inhalants (which is most common among younger teens).
In 2009, there were nearly 4.6 million drug-related Hospital Emergency Department (ED) visits nationwide. These visits included reports of drug abuse, adverse reactions to drugs, or other drug-related consequences. Almost 50 percent were attributed to adverse reactions to pharmaceuticals taken as prescribed, and 45 percent involved drug abuse.
The majority of drug-related ED visits were made by patients 21 or older (80.9 percent, or 3,717,030 visits). Of these, slightly less than half involved drug abuse. Patients aged 20 or younger accounted for 19.1 percent (877,802 visits) of all drug-related visits in 2009; about half of these visits involved drug abuse.
In 2009, almost one million visits involved an illicit drug, either alone or in combination with other types of drugs. The rates of ED visits involving cocaine, marijuana, and heroin were higher for males than for females. Rates for cocaine were highest among individuals aged 35–44, rates for heroin were highest among individuals aged 21–24, stimulant use was highest among those 25–29, and marijuana use was highest for those aged 18–20.
Illicit drug use among teenagers remains high, largely due to increasing popularity of marijuana. Marijuana use by adolescents declined from the late 1990s until the mid-to-late 2000s, but has been on the increase since then. In 2013, 7.0 percent of 8th graders, 18.0 percent of 10th graders, and 22.7 percent of 12th graders used marijuana in the past month, up from 5.8 percent, 13.8 percent, and 19.4 percent in 2008. Daily use has also increased; 6.5 percent of 12th graders now use marijuana every day, compared to 5 percent in the mid-2000s.
P.S:
No comments:
Post a Comment