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13th August 2015 Family Help & Advice

Synthetic Drugs

The term synthetic drug refers to non-organic, chemically manufactured and unpredictably unsafe drugs such as Meth-amphetamine, MDMA, GHB, Kat and Ketamine. These drugs are manufactured by back street-chemists and are highly toxic and very often fatal.

Strength’s vary and the death toll is rising. There is a trend at the moment affecting the global population, where teenagers as young as 12 years old are trying these synthetic drugs and are having heart attacks and other major respiratory failures.
These drugs are seen as “club drugs” but kids who are not old enough to go to clubs still have access to these drugs and are abusing them at alarming rates.

Synthetic Cannabinoids and Cathinones

Synthetic Cannabinoids, commonly known as synthetic marijuana, K2 or Spice, are sold in legal retail outlets as “herbal incense” or “potpourri”, and synthetic Cathinones are often sold as “bath salts” or “jewellery cleaner”. They are labelled not for human consumption to mask their intended purpose and so that Governments around the world are not able to make it illegal.

Risk to the Public Health

The contents and effects of synthetic cannabinoids and cathinones are unpredictable due to a constantly changing variety of chemicals used in manufacturing processes devoid of quality controls and government regulatory oversight.
Health warnings have been issued by numerous public health authorities and poison control centres describing the adverse health effects associated with the use of synthetic drugs.
The effects of synthetic cannabinoids include severe agitation and anxiety, nausea, vomiting, tachycardia (fast, racing heartbeat), elevated blood pressure, tremors and seizures, hallucinations, dilated pupils, and suicidal and other harmful thoughts and/or actions.
Similar to the adverse effects of cocaine, LSD, and methamphetamine, synthetic cathinone use is associated with increased heart rate and blood pressure, chest pain, extreme paranoia, hallucinations, delusions, and violent behaviour, which causes users to harm themselves or others.

-source /www.whitehouse.gov

Lately we have seen very troubling viral videos and pictures going around on social media channels of people using these synthetic drugs and having seizures and fits. There have been posts on Facebook of people dying because of these drugs. Mothers and fathers begging and pleading for other parents to look out for the signs of drug abuse because the reality is, people are dying from addiction every day.

31st July 2015 Testimonials

Compromising Principles

I find my experience in early recovery has had a few challenges. On one hand I’m trying to live by certain principals that I adopt from those around me in recovery and from the fellowship meetings I attend. On the other hand I’m fighting my old principals that I learnt from using drugs for so many years.
It became clear from the first time, I entered a treatment centre that my principals had been violated. I didn’t grow up with some gangster, thieving family. My people were from good stock, caring, loving high achievers. Mixing with the high society of Johannesburg wasn’t foreign to me. Our house appeared in Architecture magazines, we had a house in Portugal and by all means we lived well. With that sort of upbringing, came the morals and values of that lifestyle. Maybe I valued exterior influences more than I should have, but nothing to the extent that my life turned out to be.
I was told the normal stuff when growing up. I knew the difference between right and wrong and my family guided me as best as they could.
By the end of my active addiction I was a mess. I literally had compromised every value, moral and principle I had been taught besides murder. I was a rampant thief and liar, I couldn’t be trusted and the only way you knew when I was lying was when my mouth was open. The principles and life lessons I learnt through addiction changed my life so dramatically that when I was alone I was more dangerous to myself than to others. There is a serious problem when you sit alone and feel petrified of your own company.
As my addiction progressed to the later stages there could have been a check list of all the principles I broke.

Never use cocaine – CHECK
Never use crack – CHECK
Never use heroin – CHECK
Never use a needle – CHECK
Never steal – CHECK
Okay never steal twice – CHECK

The list can go on for hours, the point is the need to feel different or better always compromised my beliefs and principles.
Now in recovery I’m having to unlearn these behaviours and it can get really complicated. When I start looking at what are needs and what are wants. I start looking into motives and reasons. I evaluate and re-evaluate most decisions. Major decisions are done with consulting a few people who know me and my behaviour patterns.
I’m adopting new principles from those around me in the fellowship and in my peers I chose to surround myself with today.

21st July 2015 Addiction News/Articles

The Opposite Of Addiction Is Not Sobriety

Johann Hari, author of the New York Times best-selling book “Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs,” has been exploring the true cause of addiction, something he believes is largely misunderstood.

In a Ted Talk filmed last month, Hari challenged the belief that addiction is caused by chemical hooks, saying patients who receive painkillers after medical procedures but have no issue getting off the drugs largely disprove that theory.

“If what we believe about addiction is right, if those people are exposed to all those chemical hooks, what should happen? They should become addicts,” he said. “It doesn’t happen.”

What Hari believes to be the cause of addiction – be it drug addiction, gambling addiction or even addiction to your mobile device — is a lack of human connection.

“Human beings have a natural and innate need to bond. And when we’re happy and healthy we’ll bond and connect with each other,” Hari explained. “But if you can’t do that — because you’re traumatized or isolated or beaten down by life — you will bond with something that will give you some sense of relief. Now that might be gambling, that might be pornography, that might be cocaine, that might be cannabis, but you will bond and connect with something because that’s our nature, that’s what we want as human beings.”

Watch Hari’s Ted Talk above.

“For a hundred years now we’ve been singing war songs about addicts,” Hari said. “I think all along we should have been singing love songs to them. Because the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection.”

Read Johann Hari’s blog for The Huffington Post, “The Likely Cause Of Addiction Has Been Discovered, And It Is Not What You Think,” here. Hari will be speaking on August 26th in Edinburgh, in early September in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, and in mid-September in Mexico City. For details of these events go towww.chasingthescream.com.

Wrapping it up

We hope that you found this article fascinating and helpful. If you are struggling with an Addiction or know someone who is. Please feel free to contact us and we can help you with your next steps.

Cherrywood House is a rehabilitation centre for people suffering from substance and other addictive disorders. It is situated in the tranquil, semi-rural environments of Constantia, Cape Town, South Africa. We offer Residential Programmes, Aftercare Support Services, Outpatient programmes, Family Support Groups. For more information. Visit our Website Here.

9th July 2015 Family Help & Advice

This Is Your Brain On Neuroscience

By Zachary Siegel 07/05/15

Addiction science and neuroscience will make your head spin.

It’s not brain surgery Shutterstock

It’s the age of what people are calling the “neuro-disciplines.” It all began with a now well-known branch of medicine called neurology, the study of the nervous system, whose first registered use was in 1681. The Ancient Greek prefix has since attached to, well, just about every discipline under the sun: neurolaw, neuroengineering, neurotheology, neurophilosophy, neuroethics, neuroeconomics, neuropedagogy, neuromarketing.

And of course, addiction cannot escape the long-armed “neuro” prefix as there is aburgeoning body of neuroscience dedicated to the study of need, desire, and addiction. Last month, The Fix interviewed Dr. Nora Volkow, the pre-eminent neuroscientist directing research at the National Institute of Drug Abuse. Dr. Volkow said there is “physical evidence that addiction hijacks not only the ability to feel normal pleasure, but also the very circuits in charge of exerting free will.” NIDA, then, essentially determines what is mainstream addiction neuroscience.

In preparation to get the other side of the story, The Fix reached out to a number of not-so-mainstream but equally brilliant scientists and neuroscientists who are wary of the reductive simplicity—a leap from brain to behavior— put forth by an institution such as NIDA that informs drug war policymaking, what kind of research gets funded, and ultimately affects how one with addiction gets treated.

7th July 2015 Addiction Information

Cross Addiction

If you understand the fundamentals of addiction, you’ll understand that it was never about the drugs or alcohol or other self-destructive behaviours.

What characterizes addiction is the obsessive and compulsive nature of the behaviour and also what happens when we do act out on that behaviour. We start a process that is exclusive to our condition, POWERLESSNESS. Powerlessness means that we lose control and our lives become unmanageable. Unmanageability can be characterized by looking at certain areas of life.

Socially, Financially, Spiritually and emotionally. If we take an honest look at those areas of our lives, we will see, specific examples where the powerlessness has affected our very core.
Cross addiction is when you swop one drug of choice for another, quiet plainly it’s just allowing the manifestation of obsession to filter into different areas.
The way the brain works in addiction is like this. Our pleasure centers get overloaded with dopamine to name but one chemical.
Dopamine is a brain chemical involved in many different functions including movement, motivation, reward – and addiction. Nearly all drugs of abuse directly or indirectly increase dopamine in the pleasure and motivation pathways and in so doing, alter the normal communication between neurons.
-drugabuse.gov

6th July 2015 Family Help & Advice

How Do Addicts Make Decisions

Learning about the economics of decision-making could mean the difference between relapse and long-term sobriety.

Most, if not all, addicts and alcoholics struggle with quitting and staying sober. And many have an equally hard time understanding why. What if would-be recovering addicts and alcoholics knew more about what goes into the making decisions—and how setting and achieving goals, and putting value on rewards, goes wrong in addiction? Learning about the economics of decision-making will not only make life in recovery easier, but it could mean the difference between relapse and long-term sobriety.

Temporal discounting

The concept of temporal discounting is not new. In fact, it can be traced back to the earliest philosophers. In temporal discounting, people put less value on more distant rewards. “A bird in hand is better than two in the bush,” as the saying goes—the distant, seemingly-uncertain reward, even while greater, appears less valuable than the more immediate, certain one.

Many studies have shown that addicted people show higher temporal discount rates.And that’s at the crux of a substance use disorder. If all the reward from using heroin, let’s say, came 20 years down the road, and the problems with relationships, or the law, came immediately, addiction wouldn’t exist in the same form as it does now. “The immediacy [of the reward] is integral to the problem of addiction,” says Dr. John Monterosso, a professor at the University of Southern California and author of an intriguing article with Dr. George Ainslie on the behavioral economics of will in recovery.

29th June 2015 Family Help & Advice

Pushing Through

It’s not always rainbows and sunshine in early recovery. Gone is the myth, just because I’ve stopped using everything will be okay now. On the contrary, because you’ve stopped using or acting out on your addiction you will start to see the REAL wreckage of your past. All those feelings that have been pushed down for so many years start to surface. Don’t back away, it’s now time to move forward and start sorting through it all.

Pushing Through To Recovery

My experience with this was particularly moving. There have been very few times in my life when I have experienced such an immense amount of freedom through turmoil. Digging into the shame and guilt of the past was difficult but I noticed the harder it was to feel and deal with, the more freedom I experienced.

It isn’t and hasn’t always been easy since those days.
I’ve often heard people say “Life on Life’s terms” and I realize that I’m not only powerless over my addiction but I’m powerless over people, places and things.

9th June 2015 Information

New Relationships

Through our using we came to believe falsely that we were self-sufficient; that we didn’t need anyone else, we couldn’t stand anyone else as long as we had our drugs. Through this thinking, our interpersonal skills and abilities to communicate with others were put on hold and very possibly damaged. We were not designed to live in isolation, yet this is where addiction takes each one of us. Coming into recovery we need to un-learn these self-sufficient survival skills we taught ourselves in our addiction and learn healthy interpersonal skills in order to communicate in healthy ways with other healthy individuals. At first it is daunting to allow ourselves to become vulnerable around others; and we need to start deciphering what and who is safe, and what and who is not. We will make mistakes which are all part of our journey,remembering that learning from our mistakes is how we grow; and that believing that it is possible, we slowly learn how to build our skills and healthy relationships with others.

-guest blog

Next Steps

We hope that you found this article about new relationships helpful and encouraging. If you are struggling with an Addiction or know someone who is. Please feel free to contact us and we can help you with your next steps.

Cherrywood House is a rehabilitation centre for people suffering from substance and other addictive disorders. It is situated in the tranquil, semi-rural environments of Constantia, Cape Town, South Africa. We offer Residential Programmes, Aftercare Support Services, Outpatient Programme, Family Support Groups. For more information. Visit our Website Here.

5th June 2015 Family Help & Advice

Social Media Linked to Substance Abuse

Plenty of research has demonstrated that the addictive quality of social media is very real. And according to a new study, heavy social media use may also contribute to a different type of addiction.

Psychologists at the University of Albany found that not only is social media (particularly Facebook) itself potentially addictive, those who use it may also be at greater risk for impulse-control issues like substance abuse.

The researchers surveyed 253 undergraduate students, asking questions about their social media use, Internet addiction, emotion regulation and alcohol use. They found that roughly 10 percent of users experience “disordered social media use,” meaning that they exhibit addictive behaviors in the way they use platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. To assess disordered social media use, the researchers included questions that reflected modified diagnostic criteria for alcohol dependence, such as, “How good does Facebook make you feel?” and “Do you check Facebook first thing when you wake up in the morning?”

15th September 2014 Family Help & Advice

Personal Time

Our primary goal at Cherrywood House is to steer clients and families through their chaos and pain, to a place of freedom, reconciliation and joy. Our team and our program is specifically geared towards ‘relentless but sensitive therapy’. We believe that we have to dis-empower the dynamics of the addiction in order to empower our clients with the motivation and confidence to take personal responsibility for their life and growth.

An essential ingredient of lengthy and successful recovery, is the self-discipline of developing a healthy ‘personal time’ where clients learn how to participate in enjoying our beautiful planet and start to stop and smell the roses. The simple things of life that addiction robbed us of like walking the dog, playing on the beach, preparing a family meal or just reading in the quiet of the morning, are within our reach once recovery begins.

Once those life controlling urges of ‘getting and using and looking for ways and means to get more of the drug’ have been dis-empowered or removed, other healthy activities have to be created to exist it their stead. If life becomes all about sitting around doing nothing, or busy-ness busy-ness busy-ness, it gets terribly dreary or really tiring and these then become the climate for a relapse.

Our desire is that our clients can start to learn how to simply ‘be’ and to ‘know’ the splendour of freedom and to break away from the destructive hiding places that they ran to in chemicals.

Tag: addiction