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Giving More Drugs to Addicts in the Name of Help?
Psychiatric and pharmaceutical interests have tried to lead the drug rehab field and treatment professionals into thinking that treating drug and alcohol addicts with prescription drugs is a workable rehabilitation method. The truth is that if addicts are switched from their illicit drug of choice to another drug that they become and remain dependant upon to function in life they are medicated not rehabilitated. The psychiatric/medical theory and diagnosis that alcohol and other drug addiction is an incurable brain disease has led to millions of dollars of research and trials for the pharmaceutical industry to discover a drug to effectively halt addiction to one or more substances. The National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) has focused a lot of attention and effort into finding some wonder drug that will successfully treat addiction, only to come up high on hope and short on outcomes. One drug that has been legally on the market and approved for treating heroin addiction for years is methadone, which is a synthetic opiate. Although some in the treatment field tout methadone as a "cure" for heroin addiction the heroin problem still grows unchecked in this country and we have a reported 200,000 plus methadone users across the country who are now physically addicted to this drug. They have to show up at a clinic everyday for their daily dose and they are still trapped by drug addiction as they are physically dependent and fear the withdrawal symptoms associated with methadone. The symptoms of withdrawal for methadone are far more severe than heroin. Six months ago the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the drug Campral to treat alcohol addiction. In their release on July 29, 2004 the FDA wrote, "While its mechanism of action is not fully understood, Campral is thought to act on the brain pathways related to alcohol abuse." However, the side effects for this drug include, an irregular heartbeat or pulse; high or low blood pressure; unusual bleeding or bruising; headache, tremor, nervousness, or anxiety; amnesia and abnormal thinking. Last month a study from the Brookhaven Institute of New York claimed that a drug used to treat epilepsy, vigabatrin, can also be used to treat cocaine addiction although it has been associated with vision problems. Common side-effects for this drug include abdominal pain; abnormal coordination ; agitation; anxiety; clumsiness; confusion; mental depression; dizziness; drowsiness; double vision or seeing double; fatigue; trembling; tremor and unsteadiness. There is also the common prescription for treating symptoms of addiction with antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs. It is now widely known that antidepressants increase the risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior and anti-anxiety drugs such as Valium and Xanex are themselves highly addictive. It's time to take a new look at America's drug problem and realize that no matter how well intentioned, substitute drug treatment for chemical dependency has been a miserable failure. A combined national success rate of 16% to 20% tells us that. Drug-free rehabilitation methods have proven to be more workable and historically have produced a higher success rate than the American rehab field status quo.
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This intel was contributed by Catton
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May, 2012
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