What should you do if you suspect your child is using drugs?

Two things:

1) Drug Test

2) Drug Test.

Drug tests don’t lie. Drug addicts do. It is your job and responsibility as a parent to seek treatment for a child who is showing signs of any disease, including addiction. Drug addicts cannot pass a properly administered drug test. So if you really want to know the truth, you are one simple step away from finding it out.

“When young people get clean, they like being drug tested,” Jon Daily said, when we talked on my radio show. “They like to be able to tell their friends that their parents are drug testing them. It [gets them off the hook and] makes all the peer pressure go away.”

You can read about my family’s experience with home drug testing in my book The Addicts Among Us. Brandon is now clean of opiates, but to this day, I still drug test him. Here is an excerpt from the book:

I get a lump in my throat every time I walk to my closet to retrieve the six-panel drug test that I keep stocked. I tested Brandon one Saturday morning just before he moved out on his own. He wobbled his sleepy body towards the bathroom door and I stood next to it. I watched the side panel of the test cup as the urine within soaked into the strips of paper. It only takes about a minute but it seems like so much longer. I have to remind myself to breathe as I await the verdict. Two lines form for each panel, representing each drug all negative and I exhale in relief. Brandon tested completely clean and now I can rejoice in his sobriety, another step closer to the trust he lost so many years before. He maneuvers his sleep body back to the bed as he smiles with confidence because he was the only person who truly knew what the test result was going to be when I first woke him, and I am now the second. 

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“Addiction,” he says, “is a pathological relationship to intoxication.” The goal of his practice, Recovery Happens, is to achieve wellness. They don’t strive to get people “clean,” they strive to get people “well,” because if the underlying issues aren’t treated, it’s likely that the problem won’t go away.

I have, at times, railed against short duration programs for treating addiction, noting their failure to address underlying issues, inability to teach ways to deal with situations in the addicts’ day to day lives that trigger drug abuse, their “cake bake” approach to detoxification and disease eradication, where, Bing! the timer goes off and out they go. Really, an addict needs to learn to manage their illness, to recognize what is at the root of their addiction, and to deal with it. One thing Daily brought up was the fact that even the best intentioned friends and family come with their own baggage, their own shit they haven’t dealt with, and they bring it to the relationship with the addict.

Jon Daily said, “Time, money, energy and emotion all need to be in place for treatment to work. It’s a huge investment.” I couldn’t agree more. If a 30-60 day treatment program for treating drug addiction is connected to an extended care program, extended counseling, sober living support, and even family counseling, the idea is it will be more likely to be successful.

For us, I think, it was important to get my son away from all of his triggers, and I talked about this in my book. He needed to be far, far away, I think. When he was home, it was too easy to have a “friend” slip pills onto the windowsill, etc. As you know if you’ve read any of my books or previous blog posts, Brandon went to Narconon. Twice. They kept him long enough to uncover underlying issues and help him learn new ways to deal with them. What I say on my radio show, one of my mantras, is the best treatment is the kind of treatment that works for you. What treatment has worked for you? Feel free to comment below, and share with others.

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Thankfully, the word is starting to spread, as this article in USA Today reveals.  I only hope that action follows.

You can listen to my interviews with activists helping to promote this cause, including the producers of the award winning Behind the Orange Curtain, here, on Voice of America’s Afflicted by Addiction.

Opiates: Oxy/Heroin connection, fig. 1 The Addict Among Us

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I totally agree. In both of my books I have stated that addiction is not a crime and it should not be treated as a crime. The stuff addicts do to support their habits is an outgrowth of their addiction, their medical condition, and locking them up with hardened criminals can’t be the solution.

In some related good news, an article in the Sac Bee on April 23 explained that California has cut the number of state prisoners incarcerated for drug related crimes in half during the last two years.

Jeffery Callison (now corrections spokesman, and once Insight show-host) is quoted in the article as saying “Putting offenders who have committed lower-level crimes in prison for long periods is not generally the best way to spend tax dollars and protect public safety… Keeping lower-level drug offenders closer to their families and communities where they can take advantage of local programs and receive drug treatment makes more sense than sending them to prison where they are surrounded by more hardened criminals.” (Sac Bee, page A3, 4/23/13)

As you know, I went undercover to bust a “big fish” and allow my son the opportunity to go to rehab rather than prison. I’m happy to see the numbers of incarcerated drug offenders go down.

Turns out, the Federal Government and California are on the same track. President Obama’s 2013 National Drug Control Strategy de-emphasizes the criminal aspect in favor of acknowledging the science behind the belief that drug addiction is “not a moral failing but rather a disease of the brain that can be prevented and treated.” Even Gil Kerlikowske, the director of National Drug Control Policy acknowledges: “We must address drug use as a public health issue, not just a criminal justice issue.”

And, regardless of how you feel overall about Obama-care, it contains a provision that requires insurance companies to cover addiction treatment, something Avi Israel and I discussed on my radio show. Insurance covers the drugs that addict you, but currently has little or no coverage to treat you once you are addicted. We need much in the way of reform, such as:

•  Prescription Drug Monitoring (PDM) programs mandated to make sure the people who truly need prescription drugs for treatment get them while those who have become addicted or are abusing the drugs are exposed;
• Mandatory training for Doctors who prescribe these drugs—training that doesn’t come from Big Pharma who is pushing the sales of their own product;
• We need drugs like Hydrocodone moved to a schedule 2 drug to rein in over-prescribing, abuse, addiction and death;
• We need a system in place to recapture unused or unwanted drugs to remove dangerous addictive and deadly drugs from the medicine cabinets of our neighborhood homes, and keep them out of our land fills and water supply.
• We need to stop the advertising of Pharmaceutical drugs as the US is one of two countries in the world which allows this.  We do not need a commercial to diagnose our medical problems.
• Mostly, we need the FDA to wake up and protect the citizens of this country and be the watchdog agency it was designed to be, not the lapdog of Big Pharma that it has been for years. Dr Throckmorton and Dr. Rappaport of the FDA need to listen to the cries of parents who have buried their children, not take “honorariums” (monetary bribes) from Big Pharma while they are entrusted to protect we the people!

Reform and changes are needed because the environment has changed.  No reform is a cure-all, but if it helps reduce the staggering number of deaths, then it is necessary.

This just makes sense, doesn’t it?  Tell me what you think.

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I asked April why she embarked on a mission that requires her to relive her darkest moment over and over again. Here are highlights from this bit of the show. You can listen to the entire show on Voice America.com. I’ll have a different guest each Tuesday at noon. Please join me.

Brad: I know the limelight is not your goal… Can you share with us what [this prescription drug abuse activism] does for you as a mother? How this helps you, how this makes you feel, what your ultimate goal is in doing this?

April Rovero: …Joey was a wonderful son. His death came as a complete shock. Our whole family is devastated. This is something that should not have happened. … The thought of some other family going through this just kills me, it brings it all back home; every time I hear about a death, it is like a dagger in the heart. At the bottom of all the work we’re doing, It is the mission to save people, save families from going through what we’ve gone through. It is a pure “I want to help” mentality. There is a certain amount of anger that I have, at the fact that I didn’t know. I should have known that these drugs were being abused and misused and that they were so powerful that they could kill you. I didn’t know this because nobody else was talking about it, and so shame on me if I don’t raise the voice that can give others the opportunity to avoid what happened to us. So, this is the mentality that I work from, to save lives.

For me as a mom, to have lost my precious child, you know Joey was more than just an overdose. This helps me know that his life has made a bigger difference than just he died from an overdose and that’s the end. It gives me some level of peace to know that his story is making a difference. People are paying attention and learning from his life and his story.

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Parents are outraged that dirty doctors (drug dealers in white coats) are allowed to practice for years after their abuses are detected, and they are allowed to kill dozens more, addict thousands more, while the CMB pushes paper around and refuses to act on information provided by a State of California Department of Justice system, called CURES, that exposes these doctors. Their paper trail (the lethal prescriptions they write, doling powerful painkillers designed for end of life care to teenagers!) is all but ignored.

The CURES system is the Controlled Substance Utilization Review and Evaluation System, “committed to assisting in the reduction of pharmaceutical drug diversion without affecting legitimate medical practice or patient care. The CURES/PDMP is a valuable investigative, preventive, and educational tool for law enforcement, regulatory boards, educational researchers, and the healthcare community,” according to the Department of Justice website.

This system “contains over 100 million entries of controlled substance drugs that were dispensed in California….[and should] make it much easier for authorized prescribers and pharmacists to quickly review controlled substance information via the automated Patient Activity Report (PAR) in an effort to identify and deter drug abuse and diversion through accurate and rapid tracking of Schedule II through IV controlled substances.”

The implementation/enforcement of this program is apparently down to one employee for all of CA, and is essentially on life support. The website says that they are unable to field inquiries regarding the program at this time because of staffing. Even with these dire financial straits, the CMB literally laughed at the idea of adding $9 a year to their physicians’ licensing fee to help fund CURES. This is not only a Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDM) but has provisions to train doctors on the medicines they are prescribing. I waved $9 cash over my head during my testimony to illustrate this absurdity of refusing to pay this meager amount.

The President of the CMA Dr. Sharon Levine was not being entirely forthright at the meeting when she stated that the CMB was “complaint-driven by charter.” She seemed to me to be skirting the issue of why the CMB could not investigate doctors—Just another way to look away from their responsibility to police their own peers and protect the citizens from criminal-doctors.

The saddest part for me may have been the fact that the representatives from the CMB left the hearing after they spoke; and most of the Senate panel also began skulking out one by one during the meeting, leaving just a few to hear the parents who were there to testify.  The parents, many of whom were holding pictures of their dead children, were told that the hearing would be on the record and that the panel and the CMB could listen to it later.  Outrageous!  We are the people and these people work for us!

After this there was a press conference on the steps of the capitol where these same parents each briefly told their stories to reporters from all stations;

Read more here.

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So all eyes turn to gun control because the news reports another senseless shooting of innocent children, and we chant for change.  We demand that laws and lawmakers and watchdog government agencies do a better job, be more accountable and cut red tape.  We contemplate serious legal bans and even changes to the US Constitution.  We want action now on guns because the media lights the fire and fans the flame.

Over 60 Deaths per Day

While this goes on, another day passes and over 60 people die of prescription drug overdose.  Sixty grieving families are forever destroyed. Tomorrow will come and this staggering statistic will repeat itself. And again the next day; day after day. These parents will never hug their children again.  On average every 24 minutes a person takes their last breath after taking a legal drug in the United States . . . Where is the outrage?  Where is the call for action?

These parents and I believe that so much can be done to reduce the number of RX drug overdoses yet our broken system clunks along seemingly blind to the fact that the epidemic of RX drug overdoses escalates every day.

The lack of outrage is due in part to the lack of media attention this topic receives. The media neglects reporting about this epidemic.  Yes, I believe the media has a conflict of interest.  How long do you need to watch TV to see a drug commercial?  Would you do a scathing report and broadcast it on your station so your top client would be exposed as a lying drug peddler?  Remember Big Tobacco?  Did we the people ever hear anything but murmurs on the secret memos and highly addictive designing of tobacco products before Big Tobacco couldn’t advertise?  I think not.

The FDA is Big Pharma’s Puppet

People talk about the power of the gun lobby in our country. I suggest it is a sheep compared to the wolf that is the pharmaceutical lobby.

I attended an FDA hearing in Washington DC recently. The topic was the approval of Zohydro, a shameless effort by another greedy drug manufacturer to put more synthetic heroin in our medicine cabinets.  I watched in shock as the FDA  bullied the doctors weighing whether to approve this opioid because it had previously approved similar drugs.  I mistakenly believed that the FDA’s Dr. Bob Rappaport who is a Director, Division of Anesthesia, Analgesia and Rheumatology Products, was a paid employee of or lobbyist for Zohydro’s manufacturer, Zognix, as he pressured the panel to approve the drug because the FDA had already approved so many drugs just like it.

Forget the fact that we have since discovered that those similar drugs were approved after the manufacturers outright lied about the highly addictive nature of these drugs, then marketed them to doctors using the same lies and voila, thousands of people have become addicted and died.  So what do our watchdog agencies do?  They fine these manufacturers hundreds of millions of dollars; put the money in their coffers while Big Pharma profits are in the billions.  What do we the people do?  We send our addicted children to rehab and lay our children in coffins, all at our own expense and our lives forever changed.

Nobody wants to take prescriptions away from those who need them

I’m not looking for a ban on pain killers or expecting drug abuse to ever be eradicated by any kind of legislative action or product reformulation. Dr. Douglas C. Throckmorton, head of the FDA, when questioned about tamper resistant coatings on pills (a treatment which restricts the crushing, snorting, smoking and injecting of prescriptions intended to be swallowed) stated that “the technology is relatively new.” There’s no such thing as a cure all, but there are measures that slow the progress of an epidemic and that’s what we’d like to see in place of a corrupt approval process and a broken system of distribution.

Were seat belts and airbags a cure-all to traffic deaths?  Was the needle exchange program a cure-all to AIDS?  Are stop signs a cure-all to idiots who run through them?  Are stricter drinking and driving penalties a cure all?  No they are not! These preventative measures have reduced the number of deaths and injury and that was the realistic goal.

So no Dr. Throckmorton, Doug, we don’t expect a cure-all!  Ask any Opioid addict and they will tell you that when the tamper resistant coating was applied to Oxycotin and Opana its popularity among addicts went down and other prescription opiates that did not have this protection moved to the top of their list alongside heroin!

OXY returns as a Generic so the FDA’s plan . . . NADA!

This year, the patent expires on the original Oxy formula and Oxy comes back out in its original easy-to-abuse form as a generic.  The FDA and Dr. Douglas Throckmorton stated “those generic formulations will not be covered by the (FDA) guidance; nor will other immediate-release generic opioids currently on the market.” Boy, it sure is great that the FDA can ignore their responsibility to the citizens of this country and downplay efforts to address the common ways a drug is abused.

The FDA is an agency we Americans expect to protect us from these dangerous drugs. Perhaps a cure-all to the FDA rubber stamping approval of highly addictive drugs and disregarding the devastating impact of generic release of drugs that have contributed to an epidemic of addiction and death is to stop allowing Big Pharma the ability to fund the FDA and pay its’ panel of doctors for “consulting” work.

This has everything to do with a system of manufacturing,  approving, prescribing, advertising and pushing powerful dangerous and deadly drugs into our homes that is killing our children at a rate that is more than double the loss of life at Sandy Hook every single day of the year!  Approximately 700 times as many children die from a prescription drug overdose than in school shootings annually. Where is the outrage? Not in the media and not in the government. You’ve gotta ask: Why the hell not?

The post Gun reform vs. Rx Drug reform. Where is the outrage? appeared first on RX DrugAddict.

Grass root parent groups are springing up all across the USA as their children die from drugs doctors prescribe. This story needs to be moved from the obituary page to the front page! And I am doing what I can, from guest blogging on sites like this one, to trying to get the word out on radio and television shows, to corresponding with Dr. Throckmorton of the FDA.

I wrote a note to Dr. Throckmorton in which I described my unique perspective on the issue of prescription medication regulation and control—in that I have a wife who needs pain medication from a car accident and so I do not want her access limited. I also have a prescription drug addict in remission, my 27-year old son. Ironically, in my wife’s accident, she was run down by a young woman who was so high on her pain medications that she couldn’t stand up after she poured herself out of her car. A fair FDA evaluation on the distribution and classification of these powerful addictive and deadly prescription drugs would include all sides of the argument.

The FDA’s Deputy Director for Regulatory Programs in the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, Throckmorton, wrote me back. Signed his note, “Doug.”

I have never met a parent who thought their child would become a drug addict and I have never met an addict who thought they would become addicted. This is a big deal.

Have you told Dr. Throckmorton your feelings on the subject? You can contact him at the FDA.

Check out this DEA video.

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He’s made this incredible shift from drug addiction to a healthy lifestyle. And we’re counting our blessings and our carbs.

The post Good stuff from a guy who formerly survived on Oxy appeared first on RX DrugAddict.

When “Derek’s” mom came downstairs in the morning, she found her son in the same place she had left him with some buddies the night before– in front of the TV, on the couch. Only, his friends were gone and Derek was dead.

These horrible tales of prescription drug and opioid abuse, as well as “Martha’s” story, are in my new book. But so is the hopeful story of a real friend, Andrew, who helped us get our son Brandon into rehab after he relapsed in 2010.

Andrew was living with our son when, following some dental surgery and a serious lapse in judgment, Brandon started his slide down the slippery slope of opiate addiction. I talked to him on the phone and could tell he was using again. When confronted, he admitted that he had taken some Norco pain pills but “had it under control.” How many? Ten. Yea right! Remember, if an addict admits to using one, he used ten…admitting to ten? We had a real problem on our hands again.

So Lisa and I had a kind of intervention going on over the phone, with Andrew and another roommate with Brandon in San Diego and us up in Northern California. The roommates acknowledged that they were overwhelmed and willing to do whatever we said. When Brandon ran from the room, screaming and completely out of control, I said, “Go get him and drag his ass back to this phone and don’t let him out of your sight.” And Andrew, who is a big guy, did just that.

Later, after everything had settled down a bit and Brandon had agreed to head back to rehab, Andrew agreed to escort him to the airport for a flight scheduled to leave in just a few hours. We were discussing the logistics of this, and Brandon headed to his room to pack a bag. After a few tense minutes, I asked Andrew where Brandon was, and he said he had gone in the bathroom to take a shower. I said, “Go kick down the door if you have to and don’t take your eyes off of him! He could have ten Norcos with him now!” You could hear Brandon screaming at Andrew when he jimmied the bathroom lock and opened the door. I could hear Andrew tell him, “Your Dad is on the phone and he told me not to leave your side!” There’s more of this story in my new book*, but suffice to say, he didn’t leave Brandon’s side until he was on the plane to rehab.  And THAT is a friend.

*My new book, How to Prevent, Detect, Treat & Live With The Addict Among Us, is available at this website, in print and for your ebook reader. If you’d like to get my first and second book together, you can do that! Just click on the Two Book Set.

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