by Anthony Myers | Sep 29, 2017 | Addiction, Drug Addiction, Substance Abuse
If you had a magic wand that take away pain, but didn’t use it when someone was in pain, wouldn’t you use it? That may be how the current opioid epidemic started. Physicians were told by pharmaceutical companies that their new opioids were magic: they took away pain...
by Anthony Myers | Sep 28, 2017 | Addiction, Alcohol Abuse, Drug Addiction, Substance Abuse
You can find “facts” to fit your desired outcomes, and choose to disregard other information that, in Al Gore’s parlance, are “inconvenient truths.” We’re all guilty of this to one extent or another. It’s called the backfire effect, conformation bias and a few...
by Anthony Myers | Sep 21, 2017 | Addiction, Drug Addiction, Health and Wellness, Substance Abuse
There is a myth that one of the Sibyls (oracles) approached the last Roman king (before the creation of the Roman Republic), Lucius Tarquinnius Superbus, with several books of prophecies, asking an exorbitant price. He refused, so she burned some of the books, and...
by Anthony Myers | Sep 15, 2017 | Addiction, Recovery, Substance Abuse
We are not a democracy, as we were often inaccurately taught in grade school civics classes, but a democratic republic. One consequence of that is that legislators can and do ignore the will of the voters and (as one blogger put it) “don’t even have to act like...
by Anthony Myers | Sep 1, 2017 | Addiction, Drug Addiction, Mental Health, Substance Abuse
One of the most common and least known forms of addiction (to the general public; don’t trust an addiction specialist who hasn’t heard of it) is dual diagnosis, also known as co-morbid and co-occurring disorders, where a patient has both an addiction and a...
by Anthony Myers | Aug 25, 2017 | Addiction, Alcohol Abuse, Drug Addiction, Substance Abuse
If you do anything specifically to get intoxicated, that’s not ideal. Intoxication can be the necessary or accidental side effect of something, from pain medication to a runner’s elevated endorphins, but if you want and try to get buzzed, high, wasted or drunk, that...