Calm and Serenity is What Keeps me Clean and Sober, But sadly my old friend Marc B. never found it

I must always know that no matter what situations I may face, over reacting and getting all worked up about it will accomplish nothing in my favor. My old friend from Cicero Illinois Marc Begun was going through a tough time last winter with his 4 flat building. The winter here in the Midwest was very cold with temperatures below zero and as I visited Marc that cold day it happened that his water pipes just froze on one side in the rear of his building. He was a struggling addict and he just couldn't properly deal with his frozen pipe problem. He was screaming and pacing and complaining to his live in girlfriend Lorie. He just couldn't settle down about his frozen pipes. I told him that the only thing he could do is wait a week until the pipes thawed out. I told him the weather will be better then and he can contact the plumber to have him repair them. He wasn't listening no matter how hard I tried to calm him down. I told him "Marc, no mater if you scream and complain or if you sit there calm and cool, neither one will change your situation so why not just sit there calm and get it off your mind. Stress will take its toll on your health and cause you to relapse again on heroin. I was there to spend the night and I was able to calm Marc down a bit but for the most part he stormed and raged about his frozen pipes. It was then that I realized my old friend Marc truly had problems with addiction battles. I stayed the night and Marc was only able to settle down by taking a strong prescription pill for sleeping. You see, I hadn't seen Marc for almost 20 years and what I was realizing is that Marc had spiraled down into a very bad addiction. He wasn't dealing with adversity well and that's how I knew he needed help. I was in touch with him for four more months trying hard to help Marc cope better with his uneasiness but it was too late, On March 1st of 2018, just four months after I got back in touch with Marc after my 20 year absence from him, his sister Cheryl called me and told me her brother died the day before and I knew then and regretted I had been too late for helping my old friend Marc. Marc overdosed on Heroin, most certainly Fetynal laced. Life is fleeting but I am glad I was able to re-know my old friend Marc at least that 4 months I had been back in contact with him. Life leads us on a journey and sometimes it's a sad journey. Rest in Heaven Marc. God hold him.

Its too easy to to overdose on heroin today.

If you or someone close to you are addicted to Heroin you have plenty of worries. The Heroin thats on the street today is mostly a dangerous drug called fetanyl but small amounts can kill you. A lot of this cheap drug comes from China and gets here from the Mexican border. These dealers dont mix their drugs good and its causing many overdoses. I just lost a long time friend this month. He didnt expect to die but heres what he did. He smoked three dime bags of crack with a girlfriend and then they shared $100 of Heroin. They did the Heroin all at once. his girlfriend told me they always did that amount before. But, my friend who overdosed was 90 days sober from his last time using Heroin. After they did the Heroin they both passed out for about 3 hours. But right before my friend who died passed out he had put on his coat and called the dealer back and he told him he wanted to get more Heroin. As my friend was walking to the door he slumped over and fell on the rug and he never woke up again. His girlfriend grabbed the garbage bag and was going to throw out the trash when she passed out at the bottom of their inside hallway. She woke up to find her boyfriend upstairs dead. He turned blue. She called the paramedics but it was too late. My friend would have never expected to die from an amount of Heroin he was always doing in the past with no problems. If you are addicted to Heroin and if you stop for a few weeks then you need to know that your body will not handle the same amounts you were used to doing. Heroin is deadly. My friend who overdosed had went to drug counseling several months before his death and he was aware that when he had a blood test they told him he had fetanyl and morphine in his blood but there was no Heroin. So all the Heroin he was buying wasnt Heroin at all. Thats why being a Heroin addict in these times is extremely dangerous. Whats the moral of what Im trying to tell you here? Quit Heroin. Start somking pot heavily. I really dont have a good answer for you. I understand how hard it will be for a Heroin addict to quit but quitting must be the only option. Get help please because too many people are dying from these dangerous street drugs that they are mixing with and largely substituting for Heroin. This is a major crisis our country is going thru.

People don't get it. Addiction is a life long illness

"People always come up to me and say, 'We got heroin problems and all these other problems.' You know what? If you work all day long, you don't have time to do heroin," the Kenutcky senator said to applause while holding a meet-and-greet at the Airport Diner in Manchester.

The Centers for Disease 

Heroin Addiction Has doubled the last 10 years. Ressession influenced maybe?

Can a terrible economy be at the root of these high addiction numbers?                                                 

"Heroin use has more than doubled among people aged 18-25 in the United States in the past decade, according to CDC figures, while overdose death rates have nearly quadrupled. An estimated 45 percent of U.S. heroin users are also addicted to prescription painkillers." 

Certainly. When people have no bright financial future or cannot feed their family properly then the pressure they feel becomes one of failure and misery. Addiction bares fruit when a person is at their most vulnerable. Vulnerable being their mind is under stress and turmoil. When the mind is unquiet addiction takes root. A psychological disorder and stressful environmental pressures create the perfect stew to trigger an addiction. 

Addiction is the mind reacting to noise. The mind wants to end the pressure from all the complications going on inside it. The emotional and stressful feelings cause the mind to find temporary ways to numb the noise. Addiction works and  thats why a person with the right combination of underlying conditions will become addicted if not properly treating for those conditions.

Homelessness A Thing Of The Past. Here's How.

I read an interesting article out this week which supports a major study on Homelessness and how to end it. They conclude  "spending federal money to house the homeless would end it". Sounds impracticable I know but they say that the homeless waste a lot of tax money being on the street committing crimes etc. Sounds logical but people that are homeless are in that situation mostly due to mental illness and not being "socially stable". Some people if you gave them a free home they would invite drug dealing friends and the likes over and even rent out rooms in their house to support their addiction. They may even burn the house down or have troublesome people over that would cause fights and violence. The answer to putting an end to homelessness is to monitor the mental health of the homeless before you "give" them homes. You have to assess their stability and capability to be responsible on their own. You must grade the homeless by their stability level. Are they mentally capable of keeping a home safely? Some of the homeless "residents" can only be in a group home setting with strict rules and no visitors. Some are a danger to others and need daily monitoring, mental health treatment and medication. Their are degrees of homelessness.
Some people fall on hard times and become temporarily homeless and are easier to reintegrate back into society while others may have mental scars from abuse and neglect. There never will be simple answers but if the politicians really cared homelessness can be cut in half at the least but no one elected to office cares to do the heavy lifting necessary to help solve the social ills of today. The population is growing at a huge rate and if the issues of homelessness aren't better resolved now, then when the population has an extra 10 billion people in 50 years the world is in for some very tragic times. That's the reason you see this move toward globalization and a one world government, because our leaders are trying to prepare for a population explosion and at the rate their going everyone is in deep trouble and suffering times. Eliminating homelessness takes commitment, and that's something very few politicians care to do. Most are incompetent to even comprehend the issues.  Bill Wilson, the chief founder of Alcoholics Anonymous has been dead since 1971 but yet the organization he built still goes on to help hundreds of thousands of Alcoholics and drug addicts each year. That's more than tens of thousands of living politicians combined are doing right now.

Here's the link explaining the study to end homelessness.     http://finance.yahoo.com/news/cheapest-way-end-homelessness-ridiculously-191417117.html

In order to quit drinking/drugging its more than just "stop doing it". Its a change of lifestyle.

If you are addicted to drugs or alcohol and you want to stop that lifestyle, you need to change your entire lifestyle and the way you think about your life. There are factors that made you an addict and by eliminating your vice, its not the only thing you need to do to live sober and clean. You became addicted in the first place because of factors beyond your control. You felt overwhelming pressures in your daily environment. Also you were weighed down by hard to control factors associated with or associating with your family. There were financial burdens you may have felt unable to properly control or handle. Your physiological make up caused you to endure an unquiet mind due to anxiety or depression or something of a psychotic nature. The pressures within your family may have added to your anxiety or depression. Whatever the set of circumstances you faced, they were enough to make you uneasy to the point that you became addicted to drugs or drinking as a form of self medicating weather you realized it was occurring to you or not.

Getting clean from addiction means you have to look at the areas of your life you felt bogged down and severely uneasy about. You will need to take inventory of what coping issues you have and know what will bring them more at ease. It is a process of healing, correcting and understanding your life in a new way. Take it one step at a time and see to it you have a good psychiatrist or therapist that you can recount your life with so that there is an objective honest opinion you can get true feedback from. This is where a true change happens in your life.

When these negative and destructive influences are best understood by you, it will be then and only then that you can confront them and eliminate the power they have over drawing you into an addictive pull which leads you to seek self medication in order to tame their unpleasant and unbalanced mental stresses and strains. Addiction is the minds way of finding ease. Draw these influences down and it will be easier for you to abstain from drugs and alcohol.

There is no Cure for alcoholism or drug addiction. Only medical aids to help an addict.

There is a book by Roy Eskapa titled"The Cure for Alcoholism: The medically proven way to eliminate alcohol addiction". There have been advances in medicine to help eliminate cravings and block effects of some addicting drugs including alcohol. But anyone that says they have the "cure" for addiction are way off base. The title of this book is selling instant gratification to sell books. If an addict uses a drug to block the effects of addicting drugs that will deter an addict from using that particular drug, but that does not arrest the underlying factors that come together to give an addict an unquiet mind. The addict also has to cooperate and take the medicine faithfully to block the effects of the drug they are addicted to. I have pointed out all along that mostly physiological factors determine if a person will become an addict and also determine what drug will become addicting to the addict. But the unquiet mind which is the underlying factor of all addiction needs to be treated to suspend the addiction. That's right. The addiction can only be suspended not cured. All environmental, psychological and physiological factors that make up an addict must be addressed. By using Naltrexone and other drugs to block an addictive drugs effects, the addict will still gravitate to another drug or behavior. If the underlying factors are not addressed then the addict cannot manage a daily sobriety. Any pills that aid in helping an addict get clean are just that, an aid to helping ease the symptoms of withdrawal and the cravings. 

 

The major effects aging has on addiction

Aging and addiction are something the addict and the loved one trying to help the addict should learn about. When an addict ages they tend to mellow and not be as severe as they were when they were 20 versus age 40. But as the addict grows older and greyer theyre use of drugs or alcohol will natural go down but the flip side of that coin is that the addict/alcoholic will need less of theyre drug or alcohol to get higher. This is more true with drinking than with hard drugs. Also as the addict continues to use drugs and alcohol into their 40s, and beyond, they tear down the health of their mind and bodys organs. Just the heavy and continued use of drugs and alcohol by the severe addict will on average cut 10 to 20 years off their life. It is very important that the addict/alcoholic quit using drugs and alcohol before middle age because if they dont the future is not a healthy one.

I have not met an addict who was healthy in their forties or fifties. And its very hard to find an active addict or alcohol that makes it into their 60s. If they do they are sick and have not much time to live anymore. When we are young and invincible we discard such thought. After all we never believed we were gonna get old. We thought youth was ours forever. We have to always realize the clock is ticking away. Because if we dont change our destiny and quit drinking and drugging early in life, our destiny will not be a long one.

OCD and Epilepsy, The many causes to psychological disorders.

To get a psychological disorder does not mean a distant relative was a looney. Genetic makeup is a huge factor in getting a disorder but not the only factor to cause it. Brain damage or trauma can trigger a disorder. Epilepsy and brain convulsions along with strep infections can trigger permanent OCD. Sociopaths usually become that way when they are shown no love by their parents. Hence they grow up unable to feel emotions normally. If a childs parents never loved them then why should a stranger. But usually there seems to be an underlying factor that makes a child more prone to sociopathy and when raised in the right (or wrong I should say) they become cold and calculated feeling no emotion.

Can psychological disorders be prevented? In some cases maybe. But how is a parent to accept the fact that they are the cause of triggering sociopathy in their children. How do you prevent a person from getting an epileptic seizure? Even though we know some causes to disorders this doesnt meaan we can prevent them or cure them. We can better understand them and hope this helps with future treatment or possible prevention but thats about all we could do. Once the brain is damaged theres no reversing it. But future advances could lay the  foundation for more cures.

I had high fever convulsions when I was a child which led to my getting OCD. In brazil in the early 1990s they had a major epidemic of strep throat. tens of thousands of kids got strep throat and afterward it was noticed that over 5 percent of those affected with strep throat became permanently ill with Torrettes and OCD.

Psychological Trauma is the root to Self Harming.

This question from Yahoo Answers is a great illustration of what and why a self harmer cuts.
""

Mom found out about self harm and is ignoring me?

So I wrote a letter to my mom telling her about my self harm and now she is ignoring me..she pretends I don't even exist and she's told my dad that i'm only allowed to wear long sleeves and on really hot days I can pretend that my arm is sprained and wear bandages btw it's summer. I feel so ashamed...I can't take it!!! It would take forever to explain my story..let's just say there is a lot of physical, psychological, and emotional abuse going on in my house.       "


To help a self harmer to recover and stop harming is a very difficult thing. It takes time and patience and therapy. Very deep therapy. As this boy describes that he comes from an abusive household. How does a child leave a home when he is not grown enough to understand how to make it on his own. The abuse will continue until he is old enough to be on his own. What child wants to turn in an abusive parent or parents. The state will bring havoc in his life if he does. Its very difficult working with adolescent victims of abuse and neglect. Often times they dont get help until they are a young adult. By that time they often have turned to drugs and alcohol to cope.


"AS THE TWIG IS BENT SO SHALL THE TREE GROW"