Do you care about addiction? Of course you do, otherwise you probably wouldn’t be reading this right now. Well, you’ve come to the right place A3 will try to address all your questions, but for now, you’ve stumbled onto our weekly links post full of information about addiction from around the world wide web. So enjoy!
Drugs: Bath salts, menthol cigarettes, and Charlie Sheen
PhoenixHouseOC-Geoff Henderson, the senior director for Phoenix House, the country’s largest nonprofit provider of substance use disorder and behavioral health treatment services recently attended the hearing in Los Angeles to ban bath salts. He gave his interpretation on the bath salts issue, emphasizing that in our world today we have an increasing amount of access to a variety of substances and that new things are continuously emerging that individuals might try. For more of Henderson’s thoughts check out his blog.
Star-Telegram– A study has been conducted which found that adding menthol to cigarettes may increase the likelihood of addiction. Menthol cigarettes are considered to be so dangerous because they have a cooling and anesthetic effect which may get more adolescents to smoke. There is a debate to see if menthol cigarettes should be banned. Right now they make up 30 percent of the cigarette market and are favored by 80 percent of African American smokers.
Psychology Today– Charlie Sheen is the latest celebrity that is dealing with drug addiction. He has previously mentioned that he did not want to go to rehab because he thought that he could clean himself up and expressed his disdain for everything 12-steps. A lot of people thought that this was ridiculous but here is an article in which Dr. Stanton Peele agrees with Charlie. Dr. Peele believes that a person can be fixed if they are being forced to do so and that I why he agrees with Charlie Sheen that only he can overcome his addiction on his own. Read this article to get a different opinion on addiction treatment. You can check out this article for Dr. Jaffe’s take on the same issue.
Alcohol-The youth and DUI’s
Medical News Today– A new study by (SAMHSA) found that 5.9 percent of adolescents aged 12 to 14 drank alcohol and about 317,000 of them received this alcohol from their parents or got it at home. This can dangerous because being exposed to alcohol at an early age can expose at-risk children to an increased risk of alcohol abuse and addiction later on in their lives. Parents should be educated about such risk factors and about limiting access and increasing education for at risk youth.
Contra Coast Times– A man who was arrested for driving under the influence was found guilty of a DUI after showing up to his pretrial hearing drunk. The man ran his vehicle off the road into a barbed wire fence back in 2010. At the time of the arrest his blood alcohol level was more than four times the legal limit.
The Daily Beast– Can there be such a thing as anxiety addiction? Some individuals think so. A study was conducted that found that during demanding and stressful circumstances our bodies cultivate and thrive on anxiety. The study found that during a stressful circumstance is was possible that some individuals use anxiety to boost cognitive performance while others are comforted by anxiety. Whether this should be called addiction, I’m not sure, but the idea of anxiety as rewarding is interesting.