Addiction: Alcohol, Opiates, Nicotine, and More Archives

Tolerance to Alcohol, Addiction, Alcohol Blackouts, and Potential Deadly Withdrawal: The Dangers of Alcohol Abuse

There are downsides to regular alcohol use and this post will go into detail about the certain drawbacks and dangers of alcohol abuse: addiction, tolerance to alcohol, alcohol blackouts, and dangerous withdrawal. These consequences can happen at various levels of alcohol intake for different people. Learn more about what to look for with regular drinking.

Read my previous post that includes 15 interesting facts about alcohol to help understand how alcohol works in the body.

Tolerance to alcohol:

With regular use, people become tolerant to alcohol and can drink more before feeling its effects. read more

How Does Antabuse Work? Everything You Need to Know to Decide if Disulfiram Antabuse Treatment is Right For You

Antabuse (Disulfiram is the generic name) is a medication given to people who are struggling with alcohol addiction and need medication to support their efforts to abstain. Breaking the cycle of addiction is extremely difficult and sometimes a person needs to medically remove alcohol as an option in order to begin to recover. Disulfiram Antabuse treatment is not a cure for addiction. It discourages drinking due to the extremely unpleasant consequences (the disulfiram reaction) that happen when Antabuse and alcohol are combined. How does Antabuse work? In order to understand this, we need to take a look at how alcohol is metabolized. Antabuse interferes with this pathway and this is why you get sick if you drink alcohol while taking Antabuse. read more

15 Interesting Facts About Alcohol: How Does Alcohol Work?

How does alcohol work in the body? Read these 15 interesting facts about alcohol to learn how it is absorbed and processed, how strong is a drink, how much is too much alcohol and when it becomes dangerous, and how long is alcohol in your system.

Drinking alcohol is ubiquitous in society but how does alcohol work in the body? Many people don’t know what it does or how it causes intoxication. Read these 15 interesting facts about alcohol to learn how it is absorbed and processed, how strong is a drink, how much is too much alcohol and when it becomes dangerous, how long is alcohol in your system, and how it can affect the liver.

1. Where is alcohol absorbed?

25% of alcohol is absorbed in the stomach in the first 5-10 minutes after consuming a drink. The rest of the 75% is absorbed in the small intestine. Even after you stop drinking, alcohol continues to be absorbed in the stomach and intestine and gets released into the bloodstream. read more

Need help quitting Juul? Learn more about treating Juul addiction.

The quit-smoking techniques available for traditional cigarettes also work for people treating Juul addiction. A Juul e-cig is unique, but not so special that it needs separate therapies to treat Juul addiction. Nicotine addiction is the same, regardless of the delivery mechanism. Quitting Juul is hard but not impossible.

Read the first post in this series to learn all about Juul e-cig and what makes it different from other e-cigarettes. read more

What is Juul? Hint: Teens love it! Find out what you need to know about Juul.

In this last year, people have started to reach out to me for help quitting Juul. I’ve been asked “Do you know how to treat Juul addiction?” as if it is some fancy and obscure entity rather than simply one of many electronic nicotine delivery systems. Even if people don’t quite understand what is Juul they know they are having a terrible time trying to stop using it. Juul’s ability to cause nicotine addiction isn’t special….or is it? Let’s talk about what you need to know about Juul. read more

There is a drug called Lean in school. Have you heard of it?

Truth be told, I read my daughters texts. I don’t feel great about it but 7th-graders aren’t “oversharers” (with their parents) and I want to have an idea of what is going on. Her texts were my source of learning about the drug called Lean. It wasn’t at a conference or in one of my 4,000 medical magazines that seem to come daily; it was embedded in a text to a friend about what their respective schools were like. She mentioned there were lots of kids who use Juul and some who use the Lean drug. What? Huh? Am I the last to know this is a thing? What is the drug Lean??!! read more

7 Alternatives to AA in Recovery from Addiction

Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) has helped countless people in their recovery from addiction but one size does not fit all with healing. The messages of AA don’t resonate with everyone and it’s important to know alternatives to AA exist. Healing and recovery are lost on some that become distracted by what they interpret as religious aspects of AA. This post is about the other options for a self-help addiction recovery program.

The more alternatives to choose from, the greater the chance that people will find a program they identify with. Recovery will still be hard but may be easier to start when it’s the right fit. read more

We Can Help Prevent Prescription Medication Abuse and Drug Diversion

Prescription medications stolen from friends and family are a major source of abused medication and are often the initial way middle and high schoolers first get access. To find your prescriptions, all it usually takes is a quick trip into the bathroom by friends, family, or workers struggling with addiction. Don’t be the source for their prescription abuse and drug diversion! Follow these 2 easy ways to prevent medication diversion and cut down on prescription medication abuse.

Will a Prescription Monitoring Program Help Combat Addiction?

Up until recently, doctors had no reliable way of knowing what controlled substance medication patients were filling and if the patient was “doctor shopping”. Diverted prescription medications flowed into communities contributing to the problem of prescription medication abuse. The DEA has estimated that prescription drug diversion is a $25 billion-a-year industry! Prescription monitoring programs are one way to help curb the diversion of controlled substances and identify patients who may be struggling with a substance use disorder or at risk for overdose. read more

Naloxone: The antidote for opiate overdose

We can do more to stop the surge of deaths from opiate overdose. Naloxone is an opiate overdose treatment. It is an antidote that can be used to reverse an opiate overdose (like a heroin overdose). Did you know that over 33,000 people in the United States died from opiate overdoses in 2015? In Connecticut alone there were 723 opiate overdoses in 2015, 444 of them were fatal. According to the CDC, drug overdoses are the leading cause of death of Americans under 50 years old.

Ambulances and hospitals have been treating overdoses with Naloxone for decades. Given the current opiate epidemic, steps have been taken to make Naloxone more accessible to the general public. Naloxone can save the life of a person who is overdosing on an opiate.

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