NARCONON REFLECTION

Today there are many realizations pouring out of the Narconon drug rehab. Many of the students like to share them with the hopes that they can be of help to others with addiction problems.  The realizations are simple, but powerful.

“Today was a good day in class.  I was in great spirits and very attentive.

The work today made me realize that I can keep control of my mind and my urges.  It’s my choice to control my actions and to use all the tools I have been taught to overcome urges.

Today I learned to stop, think and relax.  I don’t have to keep going a mile a minute.  I need to take time for myself and relax.  I don’t have to constantly plan every detail of my life.

This was a big gain for me because I always had to go, go, go…”

Narconon drug treatment helps with most drugs of abuse – heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, pot, Xanax and alcohol.

Narconon Drug Treatment New Life Program  877-413-3073

The Decline and Fall of Michael Jackson

By Ian Halperin

Whatever  the final autopsy results reveal, it was greed that killed Michael Jackson. Had he not been driven – by a cabal of bankers, agents, doctors and advisers – to commit to the gruelling 50 concerts in London’s O2 Arena, I believe he would still be alive today.

During the last weeks and months of his life, Jackson made desperate attempts to prepare for the concert series scheduled for next month – a series that would have earned millions for the singer and his entourage, but which he could never have completed, not mentally, and not physically.

Ailing: Michael Jackson may have worn a mask in public to protect his diseased lungs

Michael knew it and his advisers knew it. Anyone who caught even a fleeting glimpse of the frail old man hiding beneath the costumes and cosmetics would have understood that the London tour was madness. For Michael Jackson, it was fatal.

I had more than a glimpse of the real Michael; as an award-winning freelance journalist and film-maker, I spent more than five years inside his ‘camp’.

Many in his entourage spoke frankly to me – and that made it possible for me to write authoritatively last December that Michael had six months to live, a claim that, at the time, his official spokesman, Dr Tohme Tohme, called a ‘complete fabrication’. The singer, he told the world, was in ‘fine health’. Six months and one day later, Jackson was dead.

Some liked to snigger at his public image, and it is true that flamboyant clothes and bizarre make-up made for a comic grotesque; yet without them, his appearance was distressing; with skin blemishes, thinning hair and discoloured fingernails.

I had established beyond doubt, for example, that Jackson relied on an extensive collection of wigs to hide his greying hair. Shorn of their luxuriance, the Peter Pan of Neverland cut a skeletal figure.

It was clear that he was in no condition to do a single concert, let alone 50. He could no longer sing, for a start. On some days he could barely talk. He could no longer dance. Disaster was looming in London and, in the opinion of his closest confidantes, he was feeling suicidal.

To understand why a singer of Jackson’s fragility would even think about travelling to London, we need to go back to June 13, 2005, when my involvement in his story began.

As a breaking news alert flashed on CNN announcing that the jury had reached a verdict in Jackson’s trial for allegedly molesting 13-year-old Gavin Arvizo at his Neverland Ranch in California, I knew that history had been made but that Michael Jackson had been broken – irrevocably so, as it proved.

Nor was it the first time that Michael had been accused of impropriety with young boys. Little more than a decade earlier, another 13-year-old, Jordan Chandler, made similar accusations in a case that was eventually settled before trial – but not before the damage had been done to Jackson’s reputation.

Frail: In a wheelchair last year, Michael Jackson looked in no state to perform 50 tough gigs

Michael had not helped his case. Appearing in a documentary with British broadcaster Martin Bashir, he not only admitted that he liked to share a bed with teenagers, mainly boys, in pyjamas, but showed no sign of understanding why anyone might be legitimately concerned.

I had started my investigation convinced that Jackson was guilty. By the end, I no longer believed that.

I could not find a single shred of evidence suggesting that Jackson had molested a child. But I found significant evidence demonstrating that most, if not all, of his accusers lacked credibility and were motivated primarily by money.

Jackson also deserved much of the blame, of course. Continuing to share a bed with children even after the suspicions surfaced bordered on criminal stupidity.

He was also playing a truly dangerous game. It is clear to me that Michael was homosexual and that his taste was for young men, albeit not as young as Jordan Chandler or Gavin Arvizo.

In the course of my investigations, I spoke to two of his gay lovers, one a Hollywood waiter, the other an aspiring actor. The waiter had remained friends, perhaps more, with the singer until his death last week. He had served Jackson at a restaurant, Jackson made his interest plain and the two slept together the following night. According to the waiter, Jackson fell in love.

The actor, who has been given solid but uninspiring film parts, saw Jackson in the middle of 2007. He told me they had spent nearly every night together during their affair – an easy claim to make, you might think. But this lover produced corroboration in the form of photographs of the two of them together, and a witness.

Other witnesses speak of strings of young men visiting his house at all hours, even in the period of his decline. Some stayed overnight.

When Jackson lived in Las Vegas, one of his closest aides told how he would sneak off to a ‘grungy, rat-infested’ motel – often dressed as a woman to disguise his identity – to meet a male construction worker he had fallen in love with.

Hidden life: It was ‘clear Michael Jackson was gay’ but he married twice, firstly to Lisa Marie Presley, above

Jackson was acquitted in the Arvizo case, dramatically so, but the effect on his mental state was ruinous. Sources close to him suggest he was close to complete nervous breakdown.

The ordeal had left him physically shattered, too. One of my sources suggested that he might already have had a genetic condition I had never previously come across, called Alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency – the lack of a protein that can help protect the lungs.

Although up to 100,000 Americans are severely affected by it, it is an under-recognised condition. Michael was receiving regular injections of Alpha-1 antitrypsin derived from human plasma. The treatment is said to be remarkably effective and can enable the sufferer to lead a normal life.

But the disease can cause respiratory problems and, in severe cases, emphysema. Could this be why Jackson had for years been wearing a surgical mask in public, to protect his lungs from the ravages of the disease? Or why, from time to time, he resorted to a wheelchair? When I returned to my source inside the Jackson camp for confirmation, he said: ‘Yeah, that’s what he’s got. He’s in bad shape. They’re worried that he might need a lung transplant but he may be too weak.

‘Some days he can hardly see and he’s having a lot of trouble walking.’

Even Michael Jackson’s legendary wealth was in sharp decline. Just a few days before he announced his 50-concert comeback at the O2 Arena, one of my sources told me Jackson had been offered £1.8million to perform at a party for a Russian billionaire on the Black Sea.

‘Is he up to it?’ I had asked.

‘He has no choice. He needs the money. His people are pushing him hard,’ said the source.

Could he even stand on a stage for an hour concert?

‘He can stand. The treatments have been successful. He can even dance once he gets in better shape. He just can’t sing,’ said the aide, adding that Jackson would have to lip-synch to get through the performance. ‘Nobody will care, as long as he shows up and moonwalks.’

He also revealed Jackson had been offered well over £60million to play Las Vegas for six months.  ‘He said no, but his people are trying to force it on him. He’s that close to losing everything,’ said the source.

Forced: Michael Jackson thought he was agreeing to 10 concerts at London’s O2 Arena not 50

Indeed, by all accounts Jackson’s finances were in a shambles. The Arvizo trial itself was a relative bargain, costing a little more than £18million in legal bills.

But the damage to his career, already in trouble before the charges, was incalculable. After the Arvizo trial, a Bahraini sheikh allowed Jackson to stay in his palace, underwriting his lavish lifestyle. But a few years later, the prince sued his former guest, demanding repayment for his hospitality. Jackson claimed he thought it had been a gift.

Roger Friedman, a TV journalist, said: ‘For one year, the prince underwrote Jackson’s life in Bahrain – everything including accommodation, guests, security and transportation. And what did Jackson do? He left for Japan and then Ireland. He took the money and moonwalked right out the door. This is the real Michael Jackson. He has never returned a phone call from the prince since he left Bahrain.’

Although Jackson settled with the sheikh on the eve of the trial that would have aired his financial dirty laundry, the settlement only put him that much deeper into the hole. A hole that kept getting bigger, but that was guaranteed by Jackson’s half ownership of the copyrights to The Beatles catalogue. He owned them in a joint venture with record company Sony, which have kept him from bankruptcy.

‘Jackson is in hock to Sony for hundreds of millions,’ a source told me a couple of months ago. ‘No bank will give him any money so Sony have been paying his bills.

‘The trouble is that he hasn’t been meeting his obligations. Sony have been in a position for more than a year where it can repossess Michael’s share of the [Beatles] catalogue. That’s always been Sony’s dream scenario, full ownership.

‘But they don’t want to do it as they’re afraid of a backlash from his fans. Their nightmare is an organised ‘boycott Sony’ movement worldwide, which could prove hugely costly. It is the only thing standing between Michael and bankruptcy.’

Legacy: Michael Jackson wanted to ensure the future of his children by leaving them 200 unpublished songs

The source aid at the time that the scheduled London concerts wouldn’t clear Jackson’s debts – estimated at almost £242million – but they would allow him to get them under control and get him out of default with Sony.

According to two sources in Jackson’s camp, the singer put in place a contingency plan to ensure his children would be well taken care of in the event of bankruptcy.

‘He has as many as 200 unpublished songs that he is planning to leave behind for his children when he dies. They can’t be touched by the creditors, but they could be worth as much as £60million that will ensure his kids a comfortable existence no matter what happens,’ one of his collaborators revealed.

But for the circle of handlers who surrounded Jackson during his final years, their golden goose could not be allowed to run dry. Bankruptcy was not an option.

These, after all, were not the handlers who had seen him through the aftermath of the Arvizo trial and who had been protecting his fragile emotional health to the best of their ability. They were gone, and a new set of advisers was in place.

The clearout had apparently been engineered by his children’s nanny, Grace Rwaramba, who was gaining considerable influence over Jackson and his affairs and has been described as the ‘queen bee’ by those around Jackson.

Rwaramba had ties to the black militant organisation, the Nation of Islam, and its controversial leader, Louis Farrakhan, whom she enlisted for help in running Jackson’s affairs.

Before long, the Nation was supplying Jackson’s security detail and Farrakhan’s son-in-law, Leonard Muhammad, was appointed as Jackson’s business manager, though his role has lessened significantly in recent years.

In late 2008, a shadowy figure who called himself Dr Tohme Tohme suddenly emerged as Jackson’s ‘official spokesman’.

Tohme has been alternately described as a Saudi Arabian billionaire and an orthopaedic surgeon, but he is actually a Lebanese businessman who does not have a medical licence. At one point, Tohme claimed he was an ambassador at large for Senegal, but the Senegalese embassy said they had never heard of him.

Misguided: Michael Jackson showed no sign of understanding why anyone might be legitimately concerned about him sharing a bed with young boys

Tohme’s own ties to the Nation of Islam came to light in March 2009, when New York auctioneer Darren Julien was conducting an auction of Michael Jackson memorabilia.

Julien filed an affidavit in Los Angeles Superior Court that month in which he described a meeting he had with Tohme’s business partner, James R. Weller. According to Julien’s account, ‘Weller said if we refused to postpone [the auction], we would be in danger from ‘Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam; those people are very protective of Michael’.

He told us that Dr Tohme and Michael Jackson wanted to give the message to us that ‘our lives are at stake and there will be bloodshed’.’

A month after these alleged threats, Tohme accompanied Jackson to a meeting at a Las Vegas hotel with Randy Phillips, chief executive of the AEG Group, to finalise plans for Jackson’s return to the concert stage.

Jackson’s handlers had twice before said no to Phillips. This time, with Tohme acting as his confidant, Jackson left the room agreeing to perform ten concerts at the O2.

Before long, however, ten concerts had turned into 50 and the potential revenues had skyrocketed. ‘The vultures who were pulling his strings somehow managed to put this concert extravaganza together behind his back, then presented it to him as a fait accompli,’ said one aide.

‘The money was just unbelievable and all his financial people were telling him he was facing bankruptcy. But Michael still resisted. He didn’t think he could pull it off.’

Eventually, they wore him down, the aide explained, but not with the money argument.

‘They told him that this would be the greatest comeback the world had ever known. That’s what convinced him. He thought if he could emerge triumphantly from the success of these concerts, he could be the King again.’

The financial details of the O2 concerts are still murky, though various sources have revealed that Jackson was paid as much as £10million in advance, most of which went to the middlemen. But Jackson could have received as much as £100million had the concerts gone ahead.

It is worth noting that the O2 Arena has the most sophisticated lip synching technology in the world – a particular attraction for a singer who can no longer sing. Had, by some miracle, the concerts gone ahead, Jackson’s personal contribution could have been limited to just 13 minutes for each performance. The rest was to have been choreography and lights.

‘We knew it was a disaster waiting to happen,’ said one aide. ‘I don’t think anybody predicted it would actually kill him but nobody believed he would end up performing.’

Their doubts were underscored when Jackson collapsed during only his second rehearsal.

‘Collapse might be overstating it,’ said the aide. ‘He needed medical attention and couldn’t go on. I’m not sure what caused it.’

Meanwhile, everybody around him noticed that Jackson had lost an astonishing amount of weight in recent months. His medical team even believed he was anorexic.

‘He goes days at a time hardly eating a thing and at one point his doctor was asking people if he had been throwing up after meals,’ one staff member told me in May.

‘He suspected bulimia but when we said he hardly eats any meals, the doc thought it was probably anorexia. He seemed alarmed and at one point said, ‘People die from that all the time. You’ve got to get him to eat.’’

Indeed, one known consequence of anorexia is cardiac arrest.

After spotting him leave one rehearsal, Fox News reported that ‘Michael Jackson’s skeletal physique is so bad that he might not be able to moonwalk any more’.

On May 20 this year, AEG suddenly announced that the first London shows had been delayed for five days while the remainder had been pushed back until March 2010. At the time, they denied that the postponements were health-related, explaining that they needed more time to mount the technically complex production, though scepticism immediately erupted. It was well placed.

Behind the scenes, Jackson was in rapid decline. According to a member of his staff, he was ‘terrified’ at the prospect of the London concerts.

‘He wasn’t eating, he wasn’t sleeping and, when he did sleep, he had nightmares that he was going to be murdered. He was deeply worried that he was going to disappoint his fans. He even said something that made me briefly think he was suicidal. He said he thought he’d die before doing the London concerts.

‘He said he was worried that he was going to end up like Elvis. He was always comparing himself to Elvis, but there was something in his tone that made me think that he wanted to die, he was tired of life. He gave up. His voice and dance moves weren’t there any more. I think maybe he wanted to die rather than embarrass himself on stage.’

The most obvious comparison between the King of Pop and the King of Rock ’n’ Roll was their prescription drug habits, which in Jackson’s case had significantly intensified in his final months.

‘He is surrounded by enablers,’ said one aide. ‘We should be stopping him before he kills himself, but we just sit by and watch him medicate himself into oblivion.’

Jackson could count on an array of doctors to write him prescriptions without asking too many questions if he complained of ‘pain’. He was particularly fond of OxyContin, nicknamed ‘Hillbilly heroin’, which gave an instant high, although he did not take it on a daily basis.

According to the aide, painkillers are not the only drugs Jackson took.

He pops Demerol and morphine, sure, apparently going back to the time in 1984 when he burned himself during the Pepsi commercial, but there’s also some kind of psychiatric medication. One of his brothers once told me he was diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was younger, so it may be to treat that.’

His aides weren’t the only ones who recognised that a 50-concert run was foolhardy. In May, Jackson himself reportedly addressed fans as he left his Burbank rehearsal studio.

‘Thank you for your love and support,’ he told them. ‘I want you guys to know I love you very much.

‘I don’t know how I’m going to do 50 shows. I’m not a big eater. I need to put some weight on. I’m really angry with them booking me up to do 50 shows. I only wanted to do ten.’

One of his former employees was particularly struck by Jackson’s wording that day. ‘The way he was talking, it’s like he’s not in control over his own life any more,’ she told me earlier this month. ‘It sounds like somebody else is pulling his strings and telling him what to do. Someone wants him dead.

‘They keep feeding him pills like candy. They are trying to push him over the edge. He needs serious help. The people around him will kill him.’

As the London concerts approached, something was clearly wrong. Jackson had vowed to travel to England at least eight weeks before his first shows, but he kept putting it off.

‘To be honest, I never thought Michael would set foot on a concert stage ever again,’ said one aide, choking back tears on the evening of his death.

‘This was not only predictable, this was inevitable.’

On June 21, Jackson told my contact that he wanted to die. He said that he didn’t have what it would take to perform any more because he had lost his voice and dance moves.

‘It’s not working out,’ Jackson said. ‘I’m better off dead. I don’t have anywhere left to turn. I’m done.’

Michael’s closest confidante told me just two hours after he died that ‘Michael was tired of living. He was a complete wreck for years and now he can finally be in a better place. People around him fed him drugs to keep him on their side. They should be held accountable.’

A federal advisory panel voted narrowly on Tuesday to recommend a ban on Percocet and Vicodin, two of the most popular prescription painkillers in the world, because of their effects on the liver.

Click here to read more…

Lynn Steinhart was a triathlon runner for so long, fell of the her horse and then while running 1/2 Ironman she had to stop. She found Egoscue and really dedicated herself to it. Now she is getting ready to run again and knows how to help herself get out of pain!

“Lynn Steinhart”

Admittedly, these days, I’m a little bit lost.

I can grasp a thing, yet I can’t quite hang on to it. It isn’t that I let it fall away. It releases me or discards me, and I drift again.

I want to work: I work all the time.

I thrive on work: I want to thrive on work, and recognition.

I want work that is official:  I want compensation that asserts my value, as I shrink in visibility.

I want my name on payrolls:  weekly, biweekly, semi-monthly, four-weekly, monthly. Even the bonus payroll, as it used to be, when I knew myself in the cursive that signed my letters to those I loved.

I want to write. I want to see and write. I want to read and write. I want to walk and write, and make love and write, and dance and write.

I have not changed, only aged.

I can’t remember what it felt like to assume. I can’t remember what it felt like to be glib. Admittedly, I assumed and was glib, once.

Yes, there is my name. Yes, there are my sons. Yes, there is history that clothes me, objects that illustrate me, collisions that narrate me. Yes, of course I have changed.

Admittedly, I’m tired. Four consecutive nights now, with insufficient sleep.

I’m tired and in pain. Fatigue pervades everything. Weariness is the reason I begin to disappear, the reason that old people disappear, the reason my grandfather decided it was time to go. His son was gone. His wife was gone. Ninety three years were enough, so he went to sleep. And he was gone.

It’s Tuesday, and there are 80 miles of highway ahead to take my son to painting class, to wait, to walk a little, to come back home. Damn this arm and back. Damn this fatigue. Damn the names that slip away.

Sometimes we are part of what leaves us. Sometimes, we are not.

Admittedly, Tuesday I am angry, and too worn for active anger. Too many days, this throbbing; too many days, this over-the-counter med that helps a little, but the effects are temporary.

Like love. Sometimes, like love. Usually, like love.

Love comes in variations. We dare to delineate the types of love, to count them out and label them. We place them all, gingerly (for love is fragile), in a few small baskets. We mark one basket with “romantic love,” where we prepare a special berth for a delicate thing we adorn with the title “true love.”

But there are many types of love, like types of pain. They have names, some of which I know and some of which I fabricate: illusion love, history love, momentary love, transition love, evolving love, echo love, phantom love, crazy love.

I know about illusion love, which you experience with a spouse or partner as you imagine them to be. You refashion them in your mind so you can stay, convinced that all is well. Sometimes, we call illusion love “marriage.”

I know about history love; it is what my father felt for my mother. Hers was illusion love; his was not rocking the boat, respect for shared decades and joined families. This, too, we sometimes call “marriage.”

Momentary love may be my best event; sometimes it is true love (which I cannot define), but true love that doesn’t last. Sometimes it is passion, and the euphoria that spreads lavishly through blood and tissues like hallucinations. Sometimes it flares for a night, sometimes settles in for a month, sometimes crowns, bursts forth, soars, and flies its colors brightly, then fades.

Transition love is what we experience after heartbreak. But heartbreak isn’t about the heart, though the pain seems to burn from the center of the body. Heartbreak is a tangling of the senses and the mind as capacity disintegrates. It is the slow process of searching for capacity again, for the pieces of self we recognize that do our bidding, pieces to reassemble into some configuration that will function: legs swing out from the bed, the torso follows, arms and hands wash the face and brush the teeth.

Transition love glues the new configuration into place, albeit temporarily. It solidifies the structure, so functioning becomes mechanical again. Acts of love reinstall themselves, so we can recall their shape and their usage.

Evolving love is hopeful, and sometimes surprising. It is a gradual climb upwards – a dash of this, a  sprinkle of that. It is the speck, then the grain of rice, then the wriggling, emergent form of a developing fetus. We don’t know its true name or its true face.

Echo love is for those who have passed beyond our reach. One way or another, they have gone silent.

Phantom love is similar, but absence has yet to process. It is filled with the pain of departed mass, pain of befuddlement, pain like the amputated limb. We know the limb is lost, but the suffering will not stop.

Crazy love ignites feats of unprecedented strength, spontaneous acts of creation, fiery lovemaking, irrational declarations, feverish nights racing to swallow up the breath and organs and heat of the one we are probably viewing through the eyes of illusion, but no matter – we’re crazy in love.

My grandfather decided to go to sleep and not wake up. 65 years with his wife and four without his wife. He knew all sorts of love: history love, phantom love. I think he also must have known crazy love.

It’s Tuesday, and there are 80 miles of highway to travel. I wonder if my son will change his palette today from last week’s grays and golds to browns and reds.

I wonder if it’s time to try red hair, like my sister’s hair, instead of painting the gray to match the color of my eyes and the color of my brows.

I love this heat, this hideous, heavy, blessed near-midsummer heat that penetrates and soothes my bones.

Next week the heat will cure me once and for all. Next week the heat will linger in my shoulder joints and my muscles and my hips, and I’ll be 26 and in Jamaica again, dancing to the music of steel drums, and sipping spiced rum. Next week, the heat will send me a lover to fill me with flames, to wrap his arms around the parts that ache. The lover’s heat is something I cannot define, but for a little while, it burns away every particle of pain.

Admittedly, it’s not a good day.

No red for my hair. My coloring is winter. She is not my sister. It was only a story we used to tell, the two of us, laughing. Because we were friends without family, friends who had chosen each other.

Friendship love is not romantic love, but it can last forever, like parent love if you’re lucky. Like child love, in spite of everything.

It’s Tuesday and there are 80 miles of road ahead, then 80 miles of road to come home. I wonder if my son will paint in browns and red.

June 29, 2009 – We must learn how to reduce the harms associated with our drug use, including reducing easily preventable deaths from overdose.

As the world continues to mourn the death of Michael Jackson and the details of his final hours emerge, it appears that it may be another in a long line of celebrity drug overdoses. Jackson is reported to have taken a number of painkillers known as opioids on a regular if not daily basis.

Michael Jackson inhabited his own rarified world, and we are used to hearing about drug overdoses in the context of fast-lane inhabiting music and film stars, like Jackson and Heath Ledger, who died of an opioid overdose last year. But even among average Americans, deaths from drug overdoses have been rising and have reached crisis levels in our country. A recently-released report by the Drug Policy Alliance documents the extent of the problem: drug overdose is now the second-leading cause of accidental death in America, surpassing firearms-related deaths. Many of those affected are young people. Among teenagers there has been a steep rise in misuse of prescription drugs. A December 2008 survey of high school seniors reported that more than 15 percent of high school seniors reported using prescription drugs for non-medical reasons. But it’s not just young people who are dying of overdoses: overdose is the number-one injury-related killer among adults in Michael Jackson’s age group: 35-54.

This spike in overdose deaths is almost entirely attributable to increasing numbers of people overdosing on legal, prescription drugs; overdose deaths from heroin and other illegal drugs have leveled off in many places as a result of harm reduction efforts. Most of these drugs are opioids, which can include both opium-derived drugs like morphine and codeine, and synthetics like Oxycontin and Vicodin, both of which were allegedly used by Michael Jackson, and Demerol, with which he reportedly was injected just before he died. Other commonly prescribed opioids include Percodan and Percocet. Some of the drugs involved in overdoses have been diverted to the black market and sold illegally, while others are obtained through legal prescriptions. Pain patients can misunderstand their doctors’ instructions and accidentally exceed their prescribed doses of painkillers.

But in Michael Jackson’s case, if it was caused by an opioid overdose, his death might have been averted had people close to him had access to a simple and reliable antidote: naloxone, otherwise known as Narcan.

Naloxone, if administered to someone who has stopped breathing as a result of an opioid overdose, can reverse the effects of the overdose and restore normal breathing in two to three minutes. Naloxone has been used effectively in emergency rooms to reverse overdoses for over 30 years. Tens of thousands of lives could be saved if naloxone were more widely available and more people (including doctors, pharmacists and other health care professionals, as well as law enforcement professionals, many of whom are currently unfamiliar with naloxone), were trained in its use.

Cities with programs that increase the availability of naloxone, among them Chicago, Baltimore and San Francisco, have seen their overdose rates decline dramatically. New Mexico, which for years had a high number of deaths from drug overdoses, saw a 20 percent decline in such deaths after the state’s Department of Health began a naloxone distribution program in 2001. Naloxone itself has no abuse potential, making it a good candidate for over-the-counter availability. If people who are prescribed an opioid were also be given a prescription for naloxone, with instructions for them and their caregivers on how to administer it, this spike in overdose deaths could be reversed.

But our country’s drug war mentality prevents this safe and effective remedy from being made more widely available. Fear that doing so will encourage drug use causes the government to restrict naloxone’s availability. This “abstinence only” mindset is the same one that for years has prevented the federal government from funding syringe exchange programs — proven to reduce the spread of HIV, hepatitis C and other blood-borne diseases — for injection drug users. Just as the “abstinence only” model has proven a failure at preventing unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, it has been a failure at reducing drug use or the harms associated with drug use. Rather than continuing these failed policies, we need evidence-based solutions to the problems of drug misuse and drug overdose.

Fortunately some attention is now being paid to the overdose crisis. A bill known as the Drug Overdose Reduction Act was recently introduced in Congress by Rep Donna F. Edwards (D-MD). The bill would create a federal grant program to provide cities, states, tribal governments and community-based groups with funding to prevent and reduce overdose deaths; task the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with responsibility for reducing overdose deaths; commission studies on the efficacy of various strategies to reduce overdose deaths; and create a nationwide surveillance system for monitoring overdose trends. A Facebook group called Purple Ribbons for Overdose Prevention now has nearly six thousand members across the country and is growing daily.

Another part of the solution to the overdose crisis are “Good Samaritan/911” laws, which provide immunity from arrest and prosecution for drug use or possession to anyone who calls 911 to report an overdose. Many lives could be saved if friends of overdose victims weren’t afraid of being prosecuted if the police are called to the scene. New Mexico last year became the first state to pass such a law, and similar legislation is now pending in several states.

We need to accept the reality that people will always use drugs, whether legal or illegal, prescribed or sold on the street, mood or performance enhancers, pain killers or stress reducers or sleep-enablers. We are a nation of drug users. We must learn how to reduce the harms associated with our drug use, including reducing the unconscionable and unnecessary number of deaths from overdose. By Jill Harris. Source.