Denial Part III

Posted on Wednesday, June 19th, 2013: by

The UNDOPED CUT by Jim Recktenwald, CADC, MSW 33

Denial: Part III

Addiction becomes a phenomenon whose definition is “worked out” by whatever group is contemplating the mess in its midst. Member X is the identified addict because he or she demonstrates 1) some easily recognized odd behaviors 2) that other members agree are not “ok.” Addiction’s definition becomes the property of persons who have common beliefs about it. Those beliefs are as varied from one group or family to the next group or family as there are shared sets of experience about it. Unfortunately, the dominant variants defining addiction, belonging as they do to segments of society, also allow those segments to define denial, when the whole of society is to some extent or another “in denial.”

In our culture, the difficulty this poses has been expressed in the “war on drugs.” Some 12-year old from the wrong side of the tracks smoking dope in the school bathroom will get sent to “Juvie.” A 12-year old across town will be referred for counseling—because s/he is known to be a “good kid.” In that community, a key element in the definition of aberrant behavior is where the tracks ran through town and where one lives in relation to the tracks. Since this “agreement” varies from one community to the next and from one segment of each community to another segment of the same community—it is really hard to know where to start, with whom to start, in order to reduce the demand for drugs that exists. That is the difficulty caused by varied perceptions of “addiction, ” “denial,” and “drug problems” within any community of people.

A better example of this has played out in the sentencing disparities between penalties set for cocaine use and those meted out for crack use. According to the Drug Policy Alliance’s fact sheet for “Cocaine and Crack,” (downloaded from http://www.drugpolicy.org/drug-facts/cocaine-and-crack-facts , on June 14, 2013, at 10:13am).
• “Many myths surround cocaine and crack cocaine use. Despite media reports claiming crack to be addictive with a single use, the best data, from government-sponsored surveys, have consistently shown that less than one out of four people who ever tried the drug used it more than once. Media stories of a “crack baby” epidemic, which began to appear in the late 1980s, are now considered greatly exaggerated. Research now indicates that other factors, such as poverty, are responsible for many of the ills previously thought to be associated with cocaine and crack cocaine use.
• “Criminal penalties for possession and sale of powder and crack cocaine are severe. Despite recent federal reforms of crack sentencing laws, much higher penalties still exist for possession and sale of crack, despite the fact that, pharmacologically, it is the same drug as cocaine. Possession of 28 grams of crack cocaine yields a five-year mandatory minimum sentence for a first offense; it takes 500 grams of powder cocaine to prompt the same sentence.”

Just two days ago, a friend of mine told another associate that cocaine is addictive on the first use, and crack babies continue to be the most serious newborn health issue facing society. Neither was open to any other presentation of the facts. Probably, neither realizes that their misperceptions about Crack/Cocaine—and those of the public at large—are largely responsible for extreme racial disparity problems in the enforcement of laws governing this one substance.

After this series on Denial, we may look at the price many of us are paying for the real problems our denial as a country (it’s US) is costing. Til next time: Peace!

 

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Denial: Part II

Posted on Saturday, June 15th, 2013: by

The UNDOPED CUT by Jim Recktenwald, CADC, MSW 32
Denial: Part II
When someone gets mugged, hit from behind and the wallet or purse stolen, police always ask if s/he got a look at the assailant. And it is pretty rare for the answer to be “yes.” Even if it is “yes,” it is rarer still for the victim to give an accurate description of the mugger. There is an awareness deficit, a lack of vital information, that occurs under those kinds of stressful situations. Very often, the victim feels embarrassment about not being able to help in solving the crime, adding to the maelstrom of emotion that accompanies victimization. The awareness deficit in addiction denial works about the same way as the awareness of a person knocked in the head by a mugger.

With minor differences, persons suffering from addiction face the same perception problems. Denial so effectively blocks perception about the causes of growing emotional conflict and consequences of drug affected behavior that the person suffering from addiction is nearly always the last in his or her circle to see what is going on. Unfortunately, friends and acquaintances only rarely accord the person with addiction the same gentle reassurances and social support that the person who was mugged can expect. Rather, the person with addiction must also fend off angry accusations, loss of respect, and increased isolation while s/he tries to figure out what is happening to him or her. To put it differently, simply because an addict has eyes and ears open does not mean that s/he is able to access the information available to those sensory organs–if there is a disconnect between the organ and the place where awareness is formed. And that is what happens. Denial is that disconnect. It is amazing in its completeness.

We would not think of blaming a mugger’s victim. More to the point, we would never shame the victim of a mugging for being mugged. Why then, do we blame and shame the person with addiction for his or her unfortunate circumstances caused by addictive behavior, who has no working awareness that s/he has addiction. Denial is not an intentional action. The brain simply shuts off or nullifies certain information. When it occurs, it happens with such intensity and thoroughness that the relationship between cause and effect ceases to be noticed by the person with addiction. Everyone else can see. A person with addiction can even see addictive behavior in another. However, the ego does not receive valid input on his or her own behavior, and so, accurate self-appraisal is not possible. Persons with addiction will commonly observe another’s behavior and assert: “If I ever get that bad, I will quit.” In point of fact, the speaker is already that bad and has drawn points of reference without actually being able to see them for what they are.

In families, the consequences of addictive behavior stop being discussed. Family members begin to realize that the person with addiction does not connect the dots, or cannot connect the dots. Having a real discussion about how dad embarrassed the rest of the family by getting falling-down-drunk during the block party is not going to happen. First, dad has to get over the cranky mood that his hangover left behind. Then, everyone is relieved that the cloud over the family has passed with the waning of dad’s hangover. No one wants to rock the boat during the fragile bit of good weather before dad starts to drink again. Hope runs high that maybe, just maybe, he has finally seen what the problem is.

Because of the desire to avoid guilt by association, family members may blame each other or blame someone outside the family for dad’s drunk and subsequent behavior. How often do we hear, “My family member would never have become addicted to pain pills if the doctor had just not prescribed them—or had given something else.” “Pass the Blame” becomes a favorite game of family members who naturally desire to absolve themselves of “guilt by association,” and their family member of responsibility for his or her condition. This magical thinking is actually the family members practicing addiction denial, without having addiction. In children, this natural attempt to “rehabilitate” the family image leaves them completely defenseless when addiction later sets up shop in their bodies. They cannot imagine becoming persons who have addiction. Thus, the family illness perpetuates itself.

Til next time: Peace!

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DENIAL, PART 1

Posted on Friday, May 24th, 2013: by

The UNDOPED CUT by Jim Recktenwald, CADC, MSW
As the disease of addiction becomes more prevalent in our culture, the problems it causes become magnified…supersized. One would think we would learn from our mistakes and there would be some hope that current trends might be reversed and fewer folk might be affected in the future. I believe Fr. Martin, a well known spokesperson for addiction treatment, who said something to the effect that ‘conditions are such today that anyone who can become addicted will become addicted.’ Nothing, it seems, can impede its progress. For example: recent changes in the laws governing prescription medication have dried up some of the supply of oxycontin and other popular pain pills. However, persons whose illness eludes them turn to cheaper and more plentiful “heroin” to meet their cravings. The Mickey Recktenwald Drug-Death Survey showed only one heroin-related death in the years 2006-2011. That number is already on the increase in 2012 and will grow even more in 2013.

What causes this seeming blindness? It is rooted in thinking that ‘if s/he really loved me, s/he’d stop.’ Or “What’s wrong with those people? Why can’t they see what they are doing to themselves and their families?” Notice that thoughts like this do not rise out of addiction. They arise out of the natural defense of denial that all people have, a defense that allows one to avoid all response to, and responsibility for, an event or circumstance beyond one’s control. Some of the best examples of this are temperance stumpers whose prescriptions for addictive drugs keep them fit enough to preach against the horrors of addiction and vice as they travel the country doing revivals. Addiction will not go away on demand. Addiction does not need an invitation to come on board. Never have I met anyone who has seen, fully appreciated the extent of, and owned all of his or her addiction. Rather, the changes it produces in one—sometimes years after active drug use is over—are always unwelcome phenomena, something like coming downstairs in the morning to find a drunken buddy from 20 years ago has used the key he had back then to come in and crash on your couch, help himself to leftovers, track mud all over and sleep off the booze. The sense of violation is tangible. You have only you to “blame.” The immediate future, at least, looks bleak.

Denial blocks access to vital information. We are, all of us, dying. I daresay you don’t feel very worried about it—nor do I. Our denial about that fact is functioning flawlessly. I’m 65, and I am no more worried than I was at 18—though I think about dying a bit more. The reality of my death is much less present to me than the reality of my addiction—though it has been 33 years since I’ve used anything—other than for medical emergencies, and there have been a few of those. I fight the denial about my addiction on a daily basis. Its tools are self-pity, regret, anger and hatred, resentment, war stories (about the glory years of my past using exploits/foibles, near escapes, etc.), and depression. If I don’t fight those, I’m a goner. I fight them with gratitude, acceptance, prayer, truth, and more gratitude, as well as the other tools of recovery. If you want to know if I am any better, follow me home and ask my family.

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Yeah! Legalize all of it: marijuana to heroin!

Posted on Wednesday, May 8th, 2013: by

I know. That sounds dangerous. How much more dangerous can it be? Ten year olds have access to heroin in some of our schools, right now. I am not being sensational. I am telling the truth! Heck, they just busted a teacher in Magoffin county who’s been dealing to the kids for nearly ten years, maybe more–with his uncle’s knowledge. His uncle is the principle or the superintendent, I forget which. Or he was, ten years ago.

Y’all need to wake up out there and remember what you already know. I don’t have to tell you who runs drugs in Floyd County. Any school kid not afraid of getting hurt will tell you. And that has been going on for over ten years. You all know it. So I am saying, “Tell your kids that they will be seeing a lot of dope on the street in a short time and when they use it, no one will be able to save them. They will probably just die. Not a joke, It is the real thing.” And then let’s pass a state law agreeing that we will license all pharmacists to sell anything to persons age 21 and over–a one month supply at a time. Register all buyers, using the KASPAR. Anyone sells to someone else, jail him or her for 10 years for tax fraud–or let them put $500,000 in the State coffers. Convicted twice, double the fine or time, and so on.

We might stand a chance of keeping $5 heroin away from our kids, if adults could buy a month’s supply for $30 and that includes $5 tax. Then we could worry about kids learning something other than how to do a line in school. It’s a much more honest system than the one we have now. And those officials who make so much more than their salaries, under today’s brokeback law, would be stuck with offices they don’t want; and we might find some honest folk to replace them. And the taxes might help fund treatment, enforcement, prevention, research and such.

Or we can all pretend that I didn’t say any of this in a public forum. And we can continue to bury folks who thought they were being safe while they were sneaking around using stuff they know next to nothing about…and dying before their time. Til next time: Peace!

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Drug Sense

Posted on Friday, May 3rd, 2013: by

Drug Sense is common sense legal, social, and medical “patches,” fixes, or remedies applied to the
use of drugs in modern times. The current system is badly broken and seems to contain within it the seeds for complete corruption and destruction of the rule of law. Besides that, it has proven that it is completely ineffective in protecting consumers. Instead it seems hell-bent on deepening the stigma of addiction: denying treatment in favor of incarceration for those who become addicted, and assuring, as the late Father Martin said,
that “as many as can possibly die from this illness will die from it.” – excerpted from Mickey S. Recktenwald Drug-Death Survey, by James F. Recktenwald, CADC, MSW
• Tax equally every dose of every product licensed for sale. Earmark such monies.
• Heeding the earmark, use monies raised to police the process, and to underwrite research, education, and treatment of persons whose use results in addiction.
• Require manufacturers to continue to run live data collection every five years on risks/benefits of use of their products from actual consumers as a condition for continued licensure as a manufacturer. Include data on overdose risks.
• Require product users to participate in a manufacturer’s confidential user data base or forego use of the medication.
• Require overnight hospital stays to allow observation for overdose (OD) cases.
• Require neurological consults for all unsuccessful ODs.
• FDA should monitor costs to assure that consumer costs are in line with production costs.
• Penalties should be equally burdensome on any human person who breaks the law. They should be monetary and stiff for any corporate entity that breaks the law.
• Permit all adults legal access to all medicinal preparations, at whatever stage of development, as long as manufacturers license the drug, give accurate feedback on testing for human consumption, and name the risks/benefits.
• Completely divorce the budget process for Law Enforcement from the growth of any illegal activity.
• Following a massive “Public Drug Education Campaign,” put production and sales of all substances into an unrestricted market format, at the lowest possible prices.
• Limit single sale quantities within any 30-day timeframe.
• Require a KASPAR-type registry for all substances.
• Continue public drug education on a regular basis.
• It is extremely important to our national image, and our self-image, that we devise some remedy for violation of drug laws that is humane, cost efficient, and easily enforced.
• Register every drug user of any substance, as a condition of purchase. Protect the identity of the user from any public scrutiny based on personal identification.
• Require manufacturers to provide simply-worded, plain-spoken educational materials for the drug-using public.
• Develop and keep publicly-funded, researchable data-bases on all drugs on the market.
• Utilize feedback loops with consumers to develop lines of drug study on every impact from social functioning to fine motor skills, and everything in between.
• Use these latter feedback loops to determine results of drug interactions, particularly, harmful ones.
• Require companies to include mention, in all advertising, of their informal and formal support of “supposedly independent think tanks” until it becomes too cumbersome an expense.
• Require companies to charge more realistic prices for products, and to maintain a publicly searchable, but customer-confidential, data base.
• Pour federal money into marijuana research.
• Fund equal numbers of marijuana proponents and the opposition.
• Require any state considering legalization to open itself to civil litigation if it has not done marijuana research in advance and/or has not provided its citizens with the same.
• Following production of the research, allow citizens to determine for themselves, armed with data, as to marijuana legalization.
• Include at least two questions regarding accidental death or intended killings, on the Kentucky Death Certificate, about drug use by the perpetrator and drugs s/he used.
• The Benzodiazepine/Opiate Death Syndrome (BOD Syndrome) risk list should be widely promulgated.
• Publicize the spiral into death caused by gradual impairment of the amygdala from overdose.
• Attempt some form of outreach to persons whose drug overdose resulted in emergency hospitalization to screen for potential traumatic brain injury and to make them aware of their risks.
• Begin to explore therapies for rebuilding skill sets in which the amygdala plays a major role.
• Establish a national drug-related death registry.
• Develop effective and dependable drug testing for use in jails and hospitals to determine when a person is medically compromised by virtue of drug or alcohol toxicity.
• Require medical facilities to develop secure rooms where uncooperative consumers whose lives are at risk may be safely housed until they are medically stable, as demonstrated by a reasonably safe or drug-free toxicology screen and stable vitals.
• Require jails and jailers to ship toxic clients to these secure medical holding facilities.
• Completely overhaul the Harrison Narcotic Tax Act and subsequent laws to provide protection to consumers, penalty-free and reasonable access to “of age” consumers, tax on each dose, and heavy penalties for deceptive new-drug-research-to-marketing business practices.
I will be taking this apart in coming weeks and explaining it. Till then, Peace. Jim Recktenwald

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When our chickens come home to roost.

Posted on Friday, April 26th, 2013: by

This analogy was first used by Chaucer in one of his Canterbury Tales to describe what happens when bad deeds bear fruit. ‘They return like…’ though he used ‘birds’ in his analogy. It wasn’t till much later that Robert Southey’s poem The Curse of Kehama, 1810 brought the chickens into the picture: “Curses are like young chicken: they always come home to roost.” My thanks to The Phrase Finder @ http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/ for helping me to locate this favorite saying of my mother. I used it in my last “Undoped Cut” and this will be installment two. However I owe homage to Malcolm X for sharpening the meaning of the phrase (thanks to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_X) when he commented on President John F. Kennedy’s assassination: “Malcolm X said that it was a case of ‘chickens coming home to roost’.”
This young Black hothead jailbird—a JFK contemporary—had changed. He became a religious leader in a bold African American Muslim revival movement; but he had not finished changing. He became a studious world traveler familiar with the deadly effects of provincial US policy in formative African nations who might rightly claim that Kennedy was no help to them—nations where he could see the benefit of universal cooperation and an end to racism. He returned home a beacon of rational politics aimed at returning US to primitive values of freedom for all citizens, praising multiracial cooperative effort for the common good, and publicly spouting that drug addiction was the tool of a classist society aimed at limiting upward mobility. He demanded that his followers be drug free. He realized that politics as usual had just donned a new façade—but was exporting the racial policies (that were still prevalent in the Great Society) to a brand new stage in SE Asia. Dealing in Death. To those of us hypnotized by the seeming return of Camelot, his words on the death of our leader seemed harsh. From a global perspective, and with the magnifier of years of perspective—Malcolm X’s point of view was well justified.
I raise chickens. Turn them out in the morning and they come home by themselves. The chickens coming home to roost in today’s United States are the indiscriminate use of drugs to manage everything from sleep loss to a hangnail. We believe it is our right to have no pain, no suffering, no reason to practice patience or tolerance. We believe it to the point that a sheriff fighting a drug deluge in his community might make use of some of the evidence taken in raids to help himself or those around him to avoid the inconveniences of life. Doctors’ children routinely raid parental offices for samples to take or to dole out to friends. All of our children, the sheriff’s, the doctors’, yours and mine—all of our children are watching what we do and what that says about our belief in the rule of law when it comes to drugs. And our chickens are coming home to roost as we bury our dead.
Peace! Until next time. (E-Mail: mijsold@hotmail.com)

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When the chickens come home to roost

Posted on Thursday, April 18th, 2013: by

I have just completed the first drug-related death study for KY’s Congressional District 5–perhaps the first actual head count since the “War on Drugs” began spilling bodies into our soil. I began the study as a way to deal with the death of my wife, Mickey, who died of overdose on May 8, 2011, not quite two years ago, at this writing. Back then, I was enraged that there was no official site where these death data were being compiled. For the years 2006-2011, with only 2/3 or a bit more or less collected, we can account for 1860 deaths in Kentucky’s US Congressional District 5. I have listened, mystified, as several local news sources have “celebrated” a reductioon in the number of deaths this past year. Myopia is not a virtue. It is a disabling condition. With 2012 data still coming in, the numbers give no reason for celebration. Many of the counties have the distinction of saying that fully one out of every four of their deaths are drug related.

Nor is this an Eastern Kentucky phenomenon. It is nationwide. Because of our reputation as the place where such stuff as drug-related deaths were born–we began looking into it. It is up to the rest of you folk, now, to count your dead. Not a pleasant business, I can assure you–but necessary, if we are ever to stop the carnage it spawns. Or just keep pretending that the pied piper got them, when your children disappear from the land. But you will have a memory of death seared into your broken dreams by that time, and nowhere to hide from it.

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