#my mother's a substance abuse counselor. i have struggled with things. addicts and people with ocd are near and dear to my heart.

[meredoubt]

Iza Ingellvar is the ex-blood mage elven embodiment, distilled, of "Bullet with Butterfly Wings." He could not be less insufferable, but he has been through the wringer. Lace Harding is his everything. Booktok/booktube would definitely have many opinions on the two of them

Anyway, stream some Smashing Pumpkins and certainly do not imagine Lace Harding, who was friends with Cullen, recognizing the signs with a sinking dread

[wishcamper]

Nesta, Interrupted: gendered perceptions of alcoholism in ACOSF

CW: addiction, sexual assault, gendered violence.

Creds: I’m a licensed counselor with a degree specialization in treating addiction. I have career experience with multiple modes of mental health, trauma, and substance use treatment in women-specific carceral, institutional, and healthcare settings. And I know anyone can come on the internet and say that, but I pinky promise.

The short version:

ACOSF stigmatizes alcoholism in line with cultural standards.

Western culture feels differently about female and male alcoholics due to systemic sexism, and thus treats them differently.

Women’s experience of alcoholism is often compounded by or even a result of systemic factors and intersectional identity.

Nesta’s treatment in ACOSF, while repugnant, is in many ways very accurate of attitudes today.

(I’ll be using “women/men” and “male/female” to denote cis afab and amab people. Little research exists on the experiences of queer, nonbinary and gender expansive considerations in addiction and recovery, which is a fuckin’ shame. Studies are also largely conducted with white participants due to enormous barriers to treatment for Black, Indigenous, and people of color, so this convo is inherently incomplete where it neglects those intersections.)

Okay, first things first: ACOSF is a book that stigmatizes alcoholism. I will not be taking questions.

The number one thing to understand is that in America, land of Miss Sarah, we are very bad at addiction treatment (tx). Why? Because our culture hates addicts has as stigma around addiction. And female alcoholics bear a very specific set of stigmas based in their identity.

In Susanna Kaysen’s memoir Girl, Interrupted , Kaysen’s character is institutionalized following a non-fatal suicide attempt. When evaluated, she’s diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, that bastion of diagnoses perfect for people (75% of whom are female-identified) who don’t fit into our polite definition of functioning. As the book unfolds, she reflects on how (white) women are often pathologized when they buck against systems of oppression that create the dysfunction in them in the first place. That is not to say other women in the institution are not genuinely in need of help, nor that mental illness in women is always from a systemic wound. But it’s crucial in the treatment of female addiction and mental health disorders to considered the systemic factors of gendered violence and patriarchy, and the attitudes we hold about women who struggle with drinking.

Think about female alcoholics in media. If she’s young, she’s a loose, reckless sl*t looking for trouble and deserving of the reality check when she finds it (Amy Schumer in Trainwreck, Lindsay Lohan in general). Or if the woman are older, they are discarded, or gross, or pathetic, or evil like anyone Faye Dunaway played or Eminem’s mom in 8 Mile (deep cut lol). Men are afforded a much larger spectrum of experiences and struggles - Ernest Hemingway, Leaving Las Vegas, Sideways, the dude from A Star is Born, Frank from Shameless (brilliant), frat boys, blue collar workers, introspective tortured artists, fucking IRON MAN. I could go on forever, but I hope that illustrates the depth and diversity of male-centric stories of alcoholism not often afforded to women.

One of the most empathetic and accurate portrayals of female alcoholism, in my opinion, is in the show Sharp Objects (the book, too, but actually witnessing it makes a difference). We see Amy Adams’ Camille swig vodka from an Evian bottle while fending off vicious, veiled attacks from her verbally and emotionally abusive mother and experiencing flashbacks of teenage sexual assault. We watch her struggle to find emotional safety in her conservative hometown, both wanting to fit in and get out in order to survive. We GET why she drinks and I have trouble blaming her for it even as she wreaks havoc on herself and others. We can see her clawing just to make it out alive, and alcohol is the tool she’s using to do it, for better or worse.

Which is where Nesta enters the chat. When we get our first glimpse of her alcohol use is ACOFAS, it’s portrayed as something everyone knows about but that she’s still mostly keeping it together - her dress is clean, her hair is neatly braided, she doesn’t need a chaperone to show up to a family event. The deterioration between ACOFAS and ACOSF is alarming, and we know that alcoholism is a progressive condition so that tends to happen. Was there a particular trigger? That’s hard to say. Solstice certainly didn’t help, especially with the pressures to perform and conform to the standards of the Inner Circle aka the people in power. I imagine seeing her sisters bouncey and reveling in the world that stole them and killed their father was probably.. tough, to say the least. The barge party seems to be a turning point as well, though this one is more confusing to me. But given the child abuse, extreme poverty, sexual assault, kidnapping, bodily violation, witnessing her father’s murder, almost dying, WAR - and that’s not even to mention essentially becoming a refugee - it would be amazing if she DIDN’T drink. She 100% has complex trauma, and is looking for ways to cope.

No one with full capacity dreams of becoming an addict when they grow up. Addiction, in my professional and personal experience, is largely a strategy for coping with a deeper wound. People don’t drink to feel bad. They drink to feel good, and to survive. Nesta herself is drinking to survive, but it’s having the unfortunate side effect of killing her at the same time. As she slides into active addiction, the thought of her own death may even be comforting, and alcohol in that way is her friend. (There's some interesting research right now framing addiction as an attachment disorder, but I don't know enough to speak on it much.)

So she obviously needs help. That’s not a debate. What is a debate is how the IC should best go about intervening. A variation on the Johnson method is used in ACOSF (the one from the show Intervention) and appears to be successful only because they threaten her if she doesn’t comply. This method has mixed data to support it, and while it’s very good at getting people into tx, there is a higher relapse rate for those who receive it (1). The “family” gathers and tells her the ways she’s hurt them and tell her the consequences if she doesn’t seek the help they’re offering. And again, so many of their reason are the effects on THEM, how she’s making THEM look, not her pain.

The IC’s ignorance and dismissal of her alcoholism in ACOSF is frankly mystifying. Why do they intervene on all the drinking and sexing, anyway? It seems like they’ve been fine enough with it up to this point. But now it's gone too far, not because of her illness but because she is embarrassing them. And I don’t know about you, but between Cassian apparently fucking half of Velaris and Mor’s heavily documented emotional drinking, that’s hard to square. It makes it feel much more likely that they don’t like the way she is coping, that she is not fitting into their picture of who she’s supposed to be. This picture is inherently gendered, because Prythian society and those who live in it have explicit and implicit expectations of gender roles, whether they’ll admit it or not. Cassian and Mor are playing their roles well; Nesta is not.

That leads me to believe it is NOT all about her, but the systemic and internal factors influencing their perception of her and the ways she’s struggling. It’s distasteful to them for her, a female, to be deteriorating this publicly, despite the fact that her very identity makes it harder for her to function in the patriarchy of Prythian. We hear almost exclusively about sexual violence against women, aside from 2 male characters. Past or present assault of women is a major plot point on multiple occasions (Mor, Gwyn, Nesta, Emerie, Rhysands mom and sister, the lady of autumn, Cassians mom, Azriels mom, I could go on). But something about the way Nesta is contending with that is unacceptable, and I believe it’s because she’s not trying to cover up her dysfunction. In prythian, we keep these things hidden- Mor’s assault is never processed in full, Azriel’s mom seems to be alone at Rosehall, priestesses are literally hidden inside a mountain for centuries. Women process trauma alone and in the dark, but Nesta is in the light and she is loud. She is refusing to hide her problems, and the IC don’t like that, whether they realize it or not.

So why don’t the IC understand this? Like I said earlier, as a culture we hate addicts, or what they stand for, in very much the same way I think we hate people experiencing homelessness. We convince ourselves it was a series of bad choices that led someone where they are, choices we would never make because we are smart, smarter than them. We believe are more in control than that. We can prevent bad things from happening to us because we are good, because we are better than whoever it’s happening to. But the reality is almost ALL of us are one hospital stay away from homelessness, just as all of us are one trauma away from addiction. And with female addicts, we have another layer of expecting women to only struggle nicely and quietly, or to go away. Intersectional factors are at play here, too: white women are much more likely to have alcoholism attributed to mental health and trauma factors, where people of color often suffer the same addiction being more associated with crime. You can imagine how that plays out differently.

So what is the effect of all this? Gendered expectations lead to not only external stigma around addiction and tx, but also to internalized stigma which can limit willingness to seek tx. (2) Many social forces encourage women to drink and discourage them from telling anyone. Factors such as poverty, family planning, access to education, racial discrimination, and location can make services harder to access. Internally, women are more likely to enter treatment with less confidence in their ability to succeed, but report more strengths and more potential to grow recovery strengths during and following tx. For men, the pattern is reversed (3). And women have more successful tx episodes overall when gendered considerations are a part of the design and implementation of services (4). For Nesta, the effect is that she’s forced into treatment and copes by having hate sex with her ex and changing herself to conform to her family’s expectations while the House and the Valkyrie’s actually take care of her. I do not see how Sarah drew the line from there to recovery, I truly don’t. If anything, she recovers in spite of the ICs intervention, not because of it.

In summary, Nesta Archeron deserved better. Nesta deserved the same compassion the book gives to men who are struggling, and it’s a reflection of not just the book’s culture but the author’s culture that she doesn’t get it. Female alcoholics are worthy of treatment that integrates their identities, as those identities are often essential factors contributing to their addiction. What's shown in ACOSF is a reality many women live, and they shouldn't have to.

Barry Loneck, James A. Garrett & Steven M Banks (1996) The Johnson Intervention and Relapse During Outpatient Treatment, The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, 22:3, 363-375, DOI: 10.3109/00952999609001665

Groshkova T, Best D, White W. The Assessment of Recovery Capital: Properties and psychometrics of a measure of addiction recovery strengths. Drug Alcohol Rev. 2013;32(2):187–94.

Best D, Vanderplasschen W, Nisic M. Measuring capital in active addiction and recovery: the development of the strengths and barriers recovery scale (SABRS). Subst Abuse Treat, Prev Policy. 2020;15(1):1–8.

Polak, K., Haug, N.A., Drachenberg, H.E. et al. Gender Considerations in Addiction: Implications for Treatment. Curr Treat Options Psych 2, 326–338 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40501-015-0054-5

[readingsrantsrambles]

An Alternative to Police That Police Can Get Behind

In Eugene, Oregon, a successful crisis-response program has reduced the footprint of law enforcement—and maybe even the likelihood of police violence.

By Rowan Moore Gerety

The Atlantic - December 28, 2020

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/12/cahoots-program-may-reduce-likelihood-of-police-violence/617477/

Photographs by Ricardo Nagaoka

Should American cities defund their police departments? The question has been asked continually—with varying degrees of hope, fear, anger, confusion, and cynicism—since the killing of George Floyd on Memorial Day. It hung over the November election: on the right, as a caricature in attack ads (call 911, get a recording) and on the left as a litmus test separating the incrementalists from the abolitionists. “Defund the police” has sparked polarized debate, in part, because it conveys just one half of an equation, describing what is to be taken away, not what might replace it. Earlier this month, former President Barack Obama called it a “snappy slogan” that risks alienating more people than it will win over to the cause of criminal-justice reform.

Yet the defund idea cannot simply be dismissed. Its backers argue that armed agents of the state are called upon to address too many of society’s problems—problems that can’t be solved at the end of a service weapon. And continued cases of police violence in response to calls for help have provided regular reminders of what can go wrong as a result.

In September, for example, new details came to light about the death of a man in Rochester, New York, which police officials had initially described as a drug overdose. Two months before Floyd’s death, Joe Prude had called 911 because his brother Daniel was acting erratically. Body-cam footage obtained by the family’s attorney revealed that the officers who responded to the call placed a mesh hood over Daniel’s head and held him to the ground until he stopped moving. He died a week later from “complications of asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint,” according to the medical examiner. Joe Prude had called 911 to help his brother in the midst of a mental-health crisis. “I didn’t call them to come help my brother die,” he has said.

A few weeks after a video showing Daniel Prude’s asphyxiation was made public, police in Salt Lake City posted body-cam footage that captured the moments before the shooting of a 13-year-old autistic boy. The boy’s mother had called 911 seeking help getting him to the hospital. While she waited outside, a trio of officers prepared to approach the home. One of them hesitated. “If it’s a psych problem and [the mother] is out of the house, I don’t see why we should even approach, in my opinion,” she said. “I’m not about to get in a shooting because [the boy] is upset.” Despite these misgivings, the officers pursued the distressed 13-year-old into an alley and shot him multiple times, leaving him, his family has said, with injuries to his intestines, bladder, shoulder, and both ankles.

Neither these catastrophic outcomes nor the misgivings of police themselves have produced an answer to the obvious question: How should society handle these kinds of incidents? If not law enforcement, who should intervene?

One possible answer comes from Eugene, Oregon, a leafy college town of 172,000 that feels half that size. For more than 30 years, Eugene has been home to Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets, or CAHOOTS, an initiative designed to help the city’s most vulnerable citizens in ways the police cannot. In Eugene, if you dial 911 because your brother or son is having a mental-health or drug-related episode, the call is likely to get a response from CAHOOTS, whose staff of unarmed outreach workers and medics is trained in crisis intervention and de-escalation. Operated by a community health clinic and funded through the police department, CAHOOTS accounts for just 2 percent of the department’s $66 million annual budget.

When I visited Eugene one week this summer, city-council members in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Houston, and Durham, North Carolina, had recently held CAHOOTS up as a model for how to shift the work of emergency response from police to a different kind of public servant. CAHOOTS had 310 outstanding requests for information from communities around the country.

A pilot program modeled in part on CAHOOTS recently began in San Francisco, and others will start soon in Oakland, California, and Portland, Oregon. Even the federal government has expressed interest. In August, Oregon’s senior senator, Ron Wyden, introduced the CAHOOTS Act, which would offer Medicaid funds for programs that send unarmed first responders to intervene in addiction and behavioral-health crises. “It’s long past time to reimagine policing in ways that reduce violence and structural racism,” he said, calling CAHOOTS a “proven model” to do just that. A police-funded program that costs $1 out of every $50 Eugene spends on cops hardly qualifies as defunding the police. But it may be the closest thing the United States has to an example of whom you might call instead.

In 1968, Dennis Ekanger was a University of Oregon graduate student finishing up an internship as a counselor for families with children facing charges in the state’s juvenile-justice system when he started to get calls in the middle of the night. Through his work in court, word had spread that “I knew something about substance-abuse problems,” Ekanger told me recently. Anxious mothers were arriving at his doorstep desperate for help but afraid to go to the authorities. It was a turbulent time in Eugene, with anti-war protests on the University of Oregon campus and a counterculture that spilled over into the surrounding neighborhoods in the form of tie-dye, pot smoke, and psychedelic drugs.

The following year, Ekanger and another student in the university’s counseling-psychology program, Frank Lemons, met with a prominent Eugene doctor who agreed to help them mount a more organized response by recruiting local health-care providers to volunteer their time. Ekanger went to San Francisco to visit a new community health clinic in Haight-Ashbury that had pioneered such a model, offering free medical treatment to anyone who walked in. Back in Oregon, Ekanger and Lemons each put up $250 and signed a lease on a dilapidated two-story Victorian near downtown.

The White Bird Clinic opened its doors a few days later, with a mission to provide free treatment when possible and to connect patients to existing services when it wasn’t. But the city’s established institutions didn’t yet have a clue how to deal with people on psychedelic drugs. Teenagers who showed up in the emergency room on LSD were prescribed antipsychotic medications. Unruly patients got passed to the police and ended up having their bad trips in jail.

The forerunner to CAHOOTS was an ad hoc mobile crisis-response team called the “bummer squad” (for “bum trip”), formed in White Bird’s first year for callers to the clinic’s crisis line who were unable or unwilling to come in. The bummer squad responded in pairs in whatever vehicle was available. For a while, that was a 1950 Ford Sunbeam bread truck that did double duty as the home of its owner, Tod Schneider, who’d dropped out of college on the East Coast to drive out to Eugene.

It didn’t take long for the bummer squad to start showing up at some of the same incidents that drew a response from Eugene police. One day in the late 1970s, Schneider answered a call from a mother concerned about her son. “Mom, I think I made a mistake,” he’d told her. “I took some PCP, and I’m feeling weird.” Schneider showed up to the family’s home to find the teenager in “full psychotic PCP condition.” As Schneider got out of the truck, the boy came running out of a neighboring house naked and bloody, and tackled him. Another neighbor called the police, thinking they were witnessing an assault. “So police came out and figured out what was going on—they talked to me a little bit, and they just left,” Schneider told me. “The police realized … they didn’t know what to do with these people that was productive.”

White Bird continued its volunteer-run mobile crisis service—and its informal collaboration with the police—into the early 1980s. Bummer-squad volunteers periodically gave role-playing training to the police department, and some beat officers grew to appreciate Eugene’s peculiar grassroots crisis-response network.

In the late ’80s, Eugene was struggling to respond to a trio of convergent issues that still plague the city more than 30 years later: mental illness, homelessness, and substance abuse. Police in Eugene were caught in a cycle of arresting the same people over and over for violations such as drinking in public parks and sleeping where they weren’t allowed to.

“The police hated it; we were doing absolutely nothing for public safety, we were tangling up the courts, and we were spending a horrendous amount of money,” Mike Gleason, who was the city manager at the time, recalled. Gleason convened a roundtable with Eugene’s social-service providers, offering city funding for programs that could break the logjam. A local detox facility made plans to launch a sobering center where people could dry out or sleep it off. White Bird and the police department began a dialogue about a mobile crisis service that could be dispatched through the 911 system.

White Bird and the police were not a natural pairing. To the city’s establishment types, White Bird staffers were “extreme counterculture people.” Standing by as the bummer squad defused a bad trip was one thing; giving the team police radios was quite another. White Bird’s clinic coordinator at the time, Bob Dritz, wore a uniform of jeans and a T-shirt; for meetings with city officials, he’d occasionally add a rumpled corduroy jacket. With his defiantly disheveled appearance, Dritz seemed to be declaring, in the words of one colleague, “Look, I’m different from you people, and you have to listen to me.” White Bird staff members worried that working with the police would erode their credibility, and maybe even lead to arrests of the very people they were trying to help. But in the space of a couple of months, Dritz and a counterpart at the police department drafted the outlines of a partnership. The acronym Dritz landed on was an ironic nod to the discomfort of working openly with the cops.

Things were slow at first. Jim Hill, the police lieutenant who oversaw CAHOOTS at the police department, recalls sitting at his desk listening to dispatch traffic on the radio. “I would literally have to call dispatch and say, ‘How come you didn’t send CAHOOTS to that?’ And they go, ‘Oh, yeah, okay.’” Before long, though, CAHOOTS was in high demand.

CAHOOTS teams work in 12-hour shifts, mostly responding without the police. Each van is staffed by a medic (usually an EMT or a nurse) and a crisis worker, typically someone with a background in mental-health support or street outreach, who takes the lead in conversation and de-escalation. Most people at White Bird make $18 an hour (it’s a “nonhierarchical” organization; internal decisions are made by consensus), and some have day jobs elsewhere.

One Tuesday night this summer, the medic driving the van was Chelsea Swift. Swift grew up in Connecticut and, like White Bird’s co-founder a generation before her, was introduced to harm-reduction work in Haight-Ashbury, where she sold Doc Martens to the punks who staffed the neighborhood needle-exchange program. Swift’s childhood had been marked by her mother’s struggle with opiate addiction and mental illness. She never thought she’d be a first responder, or could be. She was too queer, too radical. “I don’t fit into that culture,” she told me. And yet, she said, “I am so good at this job I never would have wanted.”

Around 6 p.m., Swift and her partner, a crisis worker named Simone Tessler, drove to assist an officer responding to a disorderly-subject call in the Whiteaker, a central-Eugene neighborhood with a lively street life, even in pandemic times. When we arrived, a military veteran in his 20s was standing with the officer on the corner, wearing a backpack, a toothbrush tucked behind his ear. The man said he’d worked in restaurants in Seattle until the coronavirus hit, then moved to Eugene to stay with his girlfriend.

That day, he’d worked his first shift at a fast-food restaurant. Soon after he got home, a sheriff’s deputy working for the county court knocked on the door to serve him a restraining order stemming from an earlier dispute with his girlfriend. He did not take the news well. The deputy called for police backup, and when it arrived, the man agreed to walk a block away to wait for CAHOOTS and figure out his next move. He had to stay 200 feet away from the place where he’d been living, and he couldn’t drive. “I been drinking a bit, and—I’m not gonna lie—I want to keep drinking,” he said. He needed somewhere to stay, and a way to move his car to a place where he could safely leave it overnight with his stuff in the back.

Swift and the officer talked logistics while Tessler leaned against the wall beside the man and chatted with him. She told him that she’d worked in restaurants before joining CAHOOTS.

The Eugene Mission, the city’s largest homeless shelter, had an available spot, the officer explained, thumbs tucked inside the shoulder straps of his duty vest. You can show up drunk if you commit to staying for 14 days and agree not to use alcohol or drugs while you’re there.

The man hesitated, thinking through other options. He had enough cash for a motel room, as long as it didn’t require a big deposit. The officer prepared to leave so CAHOOTS could take over. Swift, Tessler, and the veteran took out their phones and began looking up budget motels along a nearby strip, settling on one with a military discount and a low cash deposit.

“Do you know how to drive stick?” the man asked. Tessler and Swift exchanged blank looks, then continued to spitball. Did the man have AAA? Was another CAHOOTS unit free to help? I felt a lump rising in my throat. I’d wanted to keep my reporterly distance, but I was also a person watching a trivial problem stand in the way as calls stacked up at the dispatch center. I drove the car three blocks to the motel with Swift in the front seat.

“So much of what people call CAHOOTS for is just ordinary favors,” she said. “We’re professional people who do this every day, but what was that? We were helping him make phone calls and move his car.”

A couple of hours later, CAHOOTS received a call from a sprawling apartment complex on the north side of town. Tessler and Swift showed up just as the last hint of blue drained from the sky. The call had come from a concerned mother who lived in Portland, 100 miles away from her 23-year-old daughter; she believed that her daughter was suicidal. The young woman’s grandmother, who lived nearby, stood in the parking lot and gave Tessler and Swift a synopsis: Her granddaughter was bipolar, with borderline personality disorder. She’d run away at 17 after her diagnosis, and never seemed to fully accept it, traveling across the West with a series of boyfriends, sleeping in encampments. She’d been back in Eugene for a few months now, the longest the family had ever gotten her to stay.

Tessler walked around the corner and knocked. “It’s CAHOOTS.” No answer.

“Can you come and talk to us for a minute?”

The door was unlocked from the inside and left slightly ajar.

The apartment was dark. A tiny Chihuahua mix barked frantically. A tearful voice called out from the bedroom, “I just want a hug. Are you going to take me away?”

Tessler crouched down in the bedroom doorway. “I’m not gonna take you anywhere you don’t want to go.”

“I’m really sorry I’ve caused all this,” the young woman said, sitting up.

Swift grabbed a handful of kibble from a bowl on the floor to quiet the dog. “My family tries to put me away a lot,” the young woman explained. Breathing fast between sobs, she seemed both overwhelmed by grief and adrenaline and primed to answer questions she’d come to expect in the midst of a crisis.

Unprompted, she told the CAHOOTS team her full name, letter by letter. “I know my Social Security number, and I know I’m a harm to myself and others.” She took a deep breath. “I’m just feeling really sad and alone, and I don’t know how I got here.”

Tessler turned on a light, and Swift went out to the parking lot to summon the young woman’s grandmother.

“Nana! Nana!” The young woman dissolved into her embrace.

Swift surveyed the bathroom scene that had prompted the call. An open pack of cigarettes lay on the wet floor along with a belt and an electrical cord. There was a straw in a bottle of gin on the edge of the tub, a six-pack on the toilet, and half a dozen pill bottles strewn across the bathroom sink and countertop. Swift unfolded a soggy piece of paper marked “Patient Safety Plan Contract” that identified seeing San Francisco as the one thing the young woman wanted to do before she died.

As Swift took her vitals, the young woman’s tearful reunion with her grandmother continued. “I love your blue eyes, Nana,” she said.

“I love your brown ones.”

CAHOOTS brought her to the emergency room, and she was discharged less than 24 hours later.

On my first morning in Eugene, I spent a couple of hours in Scobert Gardens, a pocket-size park on a residential block not far from the Mission. Many of the park’s visitors are part of Eugene’s unhoused population, which accounts for about 60 percent of CAHOOTS calls. Everyone I met in Scobert Gardens had a CAHOOTS story. One man had woken up shivering on the grass before dawn, after the park’s sprinklers had soaked him through; CAHOOTS gave him dry clothes and a ride to the hospital to make sure he didn’t have hypothermia. A woman had received first aid after getting a spider bite on her face while sleeping on the ground. Another man hadn’t had a place to stay since he got out of prison more than a year ago. When he had a stroke in the park earlier this summer, a friend called CAHOOTS. “If you go with the ambulance, it will cost you big money, so a lot of people go the CAHOOTS route,” the man explained.

Earlier this year, Barry Friedman, a law professor at NYU, posted a working paper on policing that highlighted the mismatch between police training and the jobs officers are called on to do—not just law enforcer, but first responder, mediator, and social worker. Reducing the number of instances in which police are called to assist Eugene’s unhoused population reduces the number of calls for which their skill set is a poor match. But if the goal is eliminating unnecessary use of force, helping people without housing is hardly sufficient.

In a 2015 analysis of citizen-police interactions, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that traffic stops accounted for the majority of police-initiated contact: 25 million people reported traffic stops, versus 5.5 million people who reported other kinds of contact. And police are regularly involved in incidents that escalate partly because of a failure to consider mental-health issues. In October, Walter Wallace Jr.’s family members and a neighbor called 911 because he was arguing with his parents; according to the family’s attorney, Wallace had bipolar disorder. Two Philadelphia police officers arrived, found Wallace with a knife, and fatally shot him, despite his mother’s attempts to intercede. (Police and district-attorney investigations are ongoing, and no arrests have been made.) Near Eugene, police in the neighboring city of Springfield in March 2019 killed Stacy Kenny, who had schizophrenia, in an incident that began with a possible parking violation. None of the officers involved was criminally charged, though a lawsuit brought by the Kenny family resulted in the largest police settlement in Oregon history. Springfield also committed to overhauling police-department policy and oversight practices around use of force.

In July 2015, police responded to the home of Ayisha Elliott, a race and equity trainer and the host of a podcast called Black Girl From Eugene. Elliott’s 19-year-old son had been experiencing a mental-health crisis, she told me, which was the result of a traumatic brain injury. At 2:43 a.m., Elliott called Eugene’s nonemergency number and asked for CAHOOTS, not realizing that the service ran only until 3 a.m. In a subsequent call, to 911, Elliott’s ex-husband indicated that Elliott was in danger; authorities say it was this second call that led dispatchers to send police to the scene. Elliott greeted the officers on the front porch, and explained that she needed help getting her son to the hospital. Instead, in an incident that escalated over the course of 15 minutes, her son became agitated and began to yell. Elliott attempted to shield him from officers as they ordered her to stand back. Police say her son charged as they tried to separate him from his mother. Her son was punched in the face and tased. Elliott herself was pulled to the ground, resulting in a concussion, she said. She was arrested for interfering with a police officer. (She was released the following morning.) She and her son sued the city of Eugene as well as individual police officers in federal court, for excessive use of force and racial discrimination, among other claims; the court found against the plaintiffs on all counts. Elliott told me the experience didn’t change her view of the police so much as confirm it. “I realized that it didn’t matter who I was; I’m still Black.”

Together with the fatal police shooting that year of a veteran who had PTSD, the incident helped focus public attention on Eugene’s response to mental-health crises. In its next annual budget, the city included $225,000 to make CAHOOTS a 24/7 service for the first time. (Both the mayor’s office and the police department say the increase in funding was not related to a specific incident.)

Yet CAHOOTS is still limited by the rules that govern its role in crisis response. Its teams are not permitted to respond when there’s “any indication of violence or weapons,” or to handle calls involving “a crime, a potentially hostile person, a potentially dangerous situation … or an emergency medical problem.”

Many 911 calls unfold in the gray area at the limits of CAHOOTS’s scope of work; in Eugene, the same dispatch system handles both emergency and nonemergency calls, in part because so many callers fail to grasp the distinction. One call I went on with Swift and Tessler was to check on the welfare of a young man with face tattoos who was reportedly acting strangely on the University of Oregon campus. The fire department and the police had been out to see him, without incident, but also without resolution: The man was still there, unsettling passersby, who kept calling him in as a potential threat to himself and others.

By the time CAHOOTS arrived, the man was lying on the grass with a small burning pile of latex gloves next to his head. When Swift jumped out of the van, alarmed, he sat halfway up and poked at the fire with a kitchen knife, then lay back down. Had the cops been called again, I thought, the incident might have played out differently, and landed in the next day’s paper: “A young man setting objects on fire was shot after brandishing a knife.” But that’s not how it went. Swift grabbed the knife, threw it well out of reach, and began talking to him.

At 11 a.m. on a Friday, I met Jennifer Peckels, one of the few cops in Eugene who walk their beat, to tag along as she patrolled a quadrant of restaurants and curbside gardens downtown. Born and raised in Eugene, Peckels is now in her fifth year on the force. Many of her interactions downtown are with a core group of people experiencing homelessness, mental-health crises, and addiction, or some combination thereof.

Across the street from the library, Peckels recognized a woman who was sitting on a bench, crying inconsolably. When Peckels approached her, the woman explained in breathless bursts that her daughter’s surrogate parents were telling lies about her. She feared she might never see her daughter again. Over the radio, Peckels called in the woman’s location to dispatch. “CAHOOTS will come help you—they gotta help the fire department, then they gotta help a suicidal subject, and then they’ll come. You’re on the list.”

“I’m suicidal,” the woman said.

“Do you have any means to hurt yourself?” Peckels asked.

The woman explained that she was afraid she would start drinking again. She began to slap herself in the face. “I’m tired of Eugene,” she said, gesturing across the street at a statue of Rosa Parks seated on a pair of bronze bus seats. “I got threatened to be arrested for sitting next to Rosa Parks, and I said ‘Fuck the police.’ I haven’t done anything wrong here except be loud and drink in public!”

“You know, when I get upset, I do this breathing exercise,” Peckels suggested.

Together, they inhaled for four seconds, then held their breath. The woman closed her eyes and, by the exhale, appeared calmer for the first time. “You’re on the list,” Peckels repeated. The woman wanted to know when CAHOOTS was coming, but Peckels had no way of knowing. We continued walking.

The most common complaint about CAHOOTS you’ll hear in Eugene is that its response times are too slow. Last year, across roughly 15,000 calls in the city, the average time between receipt of a call and the arrival of a CAHOOTS team was an hour and 56 minutes, compared with an hour and 11 minutes across 46,000 calls for the police department. Having more CAHOOTS units on the street could serve to reduce Eugene Police Department response times as well, by freeing up officers to do what Peckels called “police work.” She said it’s not uncommon for reports of even very serious crimes that are no longer in progress—such as rapes or burglaries—to sit in the dispatch queue for hours while officers race to work through a backlog of calls.

White Bird and the EPD are trying to come to an agreement about the best way to quantify CAHOOTS’s contributions. CAHOOTS has circulated its own estimate, saying it responds to 17 percent of all calls handled by dispatchers. Yet the police department contends that most of those calls wouldn’t have gotten a police response to begin with, because many of the requests that CAHOOTS receives—to check on a person who seems heavily intoxicated, or for transport to a medical appointment—aren’t really “police calls.” According to the police department’s analysis, the true diversion rate is between 5 and 8 percent. Which number is the “right” one to evaluate CAHOOTS’s contributions to the city?

I asked Eugene’s chief of police, Chris Skinner, about the prospect of increasing CAHOOTS’s capacity to respond to calls. He told me he thinks of the benefit to the police as a question of probability: “The less time I put police officers in conflicts with people, the less of the time those conflicts go bad.” That, in a sense, is the same argument made by activists who have mentioned alternatives such as CAHOOTS in their demands to shrink the footprint of policing nationwide.

Before the coronavirus pandemic hit, Eugene voters approved a payroll tax projected to bring in $23 million a year for 126 community-safety positions. Originally, two-thirds of that money was slated to pay for positions in the police department; as several police officials I spoke with pointed out, Oregon has among the lowest number of police officers per capita of any state in the country. Now, in response to Black Lives Matter protests, Mayor Lucy Vinis told me, the city council is consulting with community organizations to revise that plan. “Until this challenge around ‘Defund the police,’” Vinis said, “I don’t think that the police department ever really looked at CAHOOTS as depriving them of funds: It was really excellent service for a very low price.”

Anecdotally, at least, Eugene’s citizens have come to appreciate the CAHOOTS approach to crisis response, perhaps too keenly. CAHOOTS exists in a society where many feel that the risk of police violence outweighs the potential benefit of calling 911, and where an encounter with EMS can wreck a household’s finances. Last December, a CAHOOTS team showed up to a fatal drug overdose hours after the victim’s friend had called in for help. The caller had avoided language that would have brought a faster police or EMS response.

Brenton Gicker, who has worked for CAHOOTS for 12 years and as an emergency-room nurse for the past five, told me that callers have sometimes omitted key details to bypass police. “They’ll say, ‘My friend is bipolar; he’s in a manic episode. I’d like CAHOOTS to talk to them.’ And we show up, and they’ve set the kitchen on fire, or they’re running around naked, stabbing holes in the wall.”

CAHOOTS has undoubtedly saved lives in Eugene. The question for cities hoping to emulate its success is how its approach might be adapted and scaled up. Eugene is a small, homogenous city (its population is 83 percent white). The proud hippie culture that helped give birth to the White Bird Clinic, the bummer squad, and eventually CAHOOTS continues to thrive there. The city supports a robust network of homeless shelters, crisis centers, and mental-health and drug-treatment providers that have a long history of working with CAHOOTS, which makes it easier to connect people in need with services that can help. Los Angeles has 23 times as many people as Eugene, living in dozens of far-flung neighborhoods, each with its own landscape of language, history, and social services. In October, L.A.’s city council voted unanimously to develop a CAHOOTS-like program of unarmed crisis responders. It will face different challenges.

When the pandemic struck, it revealed just how reliant CAHOOTS is on the city’s safety net—and just how fragile that net is, even in progressive Eugene. CAHOOTS was the rare social-service provider in the city that was able to carry on its regular operations. The Buckley Center closed its sobering program; the Eugene Mission continued to serve residents but closed the door to new arrivals for months; social-service agencies asked their caseworkers to work from home, which made it harder to help clients who don’t have stable addresses, schedules, or cellphones.

For a stretch, measures taken to stop the spread of the virus among Eugene’s poorest residents made up for the absence of some of the usual services. Federal CARES Act funding enabled Lane County to open a new 250-bed homeless shelter in buildings on its fairgrounds. To Gicker, the new shelter was a revelation. “This is the first time ever in my CAHOOTS experience where I can take somebody somewhere to sleep with no questions asked: They don’t have to be a battered woman; they don’t have to be experiencing a mental-health crisis; they don’t have to be ill or injured. I don’t have to sell it in some way.”

The CARES Act money ran out in June, however, and the fairground shelter closed. CAHOOTS was back to having very few places to take people in need of a bed. Similar bottlenecks exist for inpatient drug treatment and mental-health facilities. Eugene might have more social services than some American cities, but it’s still an American city. If it can’t manage the cries for help, how will larger, more diverse cities that lack Eugene’s long-standing interagency collaborations or progressive attitudes fare? In rural areas, gaps in service are even more pronounced. Earlier this year, officials from another jurisdiction called White Bird’s director of consulting, Tim Black, to announce with excitement that they’d received funding to “bring CAHOOTS here” in a matter of months. Black replied, “Where are you going to bring someone if not to the hospital or the jail?”

Around 5 p.m. on a Wednesday, I was halfway through the day shift with another CAHOOTS team, Tatanka Maker and Brian Troutz, when it was called to a parking lot just south of Washington Jefferson Park. A woman in her 50s stood at the lot’s edge, surrounded by a swirl of trash. She was barefoot and had a sheath of plastic wrapped around her midriff. This was someone the CAHOOTS team had known for years.

An employee of a nearby aquarium shop had made the call to CAHOOTS, and Maker approached him to get a sense of the situation. “She’s been trespassing since nine,” the employee said.

“I’m packing up,” the woman replied. She picked up armfuls of newspaper and takeout containers, then dropped them just as quickly, as though she’d spotted something else in the pile that she’d been looking for.

“That’s not an option any longer,” Maker said, addressing the woman by her first name. “You can pack one bag of important stuff, and then we’ll take off.”

“Where are we going?” the woman asked.

“Somewhere else,” Maker said.

Troutz brought a clean garbage bag from the van. Maker began guessing what she might want to put inside: “Do you want this sleeping bag?”

Imploring her to cooperate, Maker said she could bring a second garbage bag along too.

“If you don’t come to the van right now, they’re gonna take you to jail and throw it out,” Maker said. But the woman was stuck in another world.

“Can I focus on getting this done?” she asked, annoyed.

At last, Maker and Troutz succeeded in leading the woman to the van. They’d avoided an arrest, but it was a temporary victory. The woman had only just gotten out of jail. Before that, she’d been in and out of the state mental hospital for years. Space constraints, insurance issues, and time limits on residential programs all contributed to the difficulty of finding a place where she could receive long-term mental-health services and drug treatment.

Lacking a better option, Maker and Troutz opted to take her to White Bird. The clinic was closed, but a large shaded parking lot sits behind it.

“This is one of those cases where there is no perfect place to take her, but it’s better to take her out of the part of town where she’s been causing some trouble,” Maker said. The van stopped, and the woman got out and took a seat on a discarded couch in the parking lot.

“You know those orange cones they put on the highway?” Maker said when we got back in the van to head to the next call. “Last summer, there was a day that she spent 10 hours meticulously climbing up the embankment, grabbing them, and throwing them over the edge.” The police, the fire department, and CAHOOTS had all responded multiple times, she said. “We ended up bringing her to White Bird that day too.”

This article is part of our project “The Cycle,” which is supported by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge.

[singhamelia]

Save Marriage From Divorce On Your Own Stupefying Cool Ideas

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[janeromas]

Ways You Can Help A Drug Addict

Family and friends who try to help a drug addict get a lot of mixed messages:

“You’re one of the single greatest influences in your loved one’s life.”

“You didn’t cause it, you can’t cure it and you can’t control it.”

The first statement and the “three Cs” of addiction recovery are often both true, making it a challenge to know how to help a drug or alcohol addict.

So how do you help an addicted loved one if you’re influential but aren’t in control? How do you stay close to a drug addict but avoid enabling? Here are a few suggestions from two women who have come face-to-face with the harsh realities of addiction.

What You Can’t Do to Help an Addicted Loved One

Make Them Quit

You can stage an intervention. And you may be successful. But you cannot force someone with a substance abuse problem to quit. Even in states that allow involuntary treatment, you can’t make someone get sober or stay sober in the long-term.

“You can keep throwing money at them, telling them what to do and trying to lift them up, but they have to commit to it,” says Eve Goldberg, a mom who lost her 23-year-old son, Isaac, to an opiate overdose in 2013. “I’ve learned you have to let go. You can’t control them or the situation, and the sooner you accept your lack of control, the sooner they can face the natural consequences of their actions.”

Do the Work of Recovery for Your Loved One

Even if the person you care for goes to drug rehab, you can’t do the work of recovery for them. You can’t hold their hand in recovery support groups or do the 12 Steps for them. You also can’t prevent relapse.

After Eve’s son completed addiction treatment, everything was going well. He had a job and was rebuilding his life. He told his mom “I’m never going back to that bad place again.”

Months later, he spiraled back into active addiction. She tried to talk to him about the signs she was seeing. But he didn’t want to admit to using. One night, Eve heard unusual breathing from his bedroom. When she checked on him, she couldn’t wake him up. After six weeks in a coma, the doctors told Eve that Isaac was gone.

Eve was well-educated about addiction. She stayed close to Isaac and kept the lines of communication open. Unfortunately, “Even if you see the signs, you can’t always do something about it.” Addiction hijacks the brain, leading people to hide, lie, and manipulate to maintain their drug abuse. Isaac didn’t want to die. He wanted to get better. But there is simply no logic in addiction.

Carole Bennett, MA, is the author of Reclaim Your Life: You and the Alcoholic/Addict and Is There a Dry Drunk in Your Life? and a counselor in private practice. After dealing with her own family’s substance abuse for over 20 years, she learned, “You shouldn’t babysit someone’s recovery. You can be a participant in their healing, but from arm’s length.”

For many, even those who ultimately maintain their recovery long-term, relapse is a common part of the process. Like other chronic diseases, it’s not unusual for those struggling with addiction to need multiple episodes of treatment. “Someone can go to meetings, have a sponsor and be a poster child for AA but still relapse,” says Bennett. “It’s a vicious cycle, and the person has to be willing to reach out for help to stop it.”

Accept Behavior That Violates Your Boundaries

To avoid enabling your loved one, you have to set boundaries. This is how to help a drug or alcohol addict. Once you’ve laid out your boundaries clearly with the person you care about, allowing those boundaries to be violated destroys your credibility and perpetuates your loved one’s addiction.

“If you don’t follow through with consequences when someone violates one of your boundaries, your word is like quicksand,” says Bennett. “If you say what you mean and mean what you say, even if they’re mad at first, they’ll respect you in the long-term.”

Boundaries can be basic. For example, the person has to be clean and sober if they’re in your home. If the boundary is broken, Bennett recommends calmly saying, “We talked about this, and this doesn’t work for me,” or, “I love you, but I can’t go down this road anymore.”

Then you should follow through with the consequence. Holding firm to your boundaries may mean disengaging for a period of time—or indefinitely.

Always Bail Out Your Loved One

If you’re trying to help a person struggling with addiction, you may want to or think you need to save them in certain situations. For example, substance abusers often struggle with their finances and sometimes get into trouble with the law. Many friends and family members of addicted loved ones try to help by bailing them out of jail, offering them money or paying for bills or lawyers. But if a drug addict knows they will always be saved, then they have less incentive to stop using.

It’s never easy to see an addicted loved one suffer. Your instinct is to help, but helping them doesn’t mean always bailing them out of difficult situations.

Of course, if an addicted loved one is really struggling to survive, then it would be necessary to take action, but it’s also important for drug abusers to face the consequences of their actions. Reaching rock bottom is often when someone decides they can’t continue feeding their addiction.

“Sometimes love is letting them hit bottom,” Bennett says. For evidence, she suggests going to an open AA meeting. “More often than not, you’ll hear people say, ‘Thank God my parent kicked me out/said no.’ As difficult as it is, you don’t have the power to fix it. Only they do.”

What You Can Do to Help an Addicted Loved One

Get Educated about Addiction

You can’t help fight an enemy you don’t understand. Learn about addiction. This means understanding addiction as best you can: the signs, the addiction treatment programs, and the relapse triggers. Follow this learning up by talking to your loved ones about drugs and alcohol from an early age. While education is no guarantee of healthy choices, it can be a powerful tool in preventing drug abuse and finding a way into recovery.

If your loved one goes into treatment, participate in any family programs that are offered. The education and encouragement that a drug rehabilitation center provides can help you support your loved one and take care of your own needs at the same time. Then continue to be a source of support and accountability post-treatment. This is often critical since this a time when drug cravings and triggers heighten the relapse risk. Bennett strongly recommends putting into place a family recovery contract when a loved one returns home from treatment or sober living. It’s “a plan for ones in recovery to incorporate doable, realistic goals AND consequences for falling short of those goals.”

She notes, “If the ‘addict’ doesn’t live at home, a recovery contract is important with fewer stipulations, but not imperative.”

Help a Loved One Find Treatment

It’s difficult to know how to help a drug addict without creating a co-dependent relationship. If you try to fix everything for them, then they won’t be able to develop their own coping skills. But avoiding co-dependency doesn’t mean you can’t offer reliable support to an addicted loved one.

One thing you can do to help a drug addict is to find a suitable therapist or treatment center for them. Research treatment facilities and counselors in your area who specialize in addiction. This is where being educated about addiction helps; you can do research on medical detox and inpatient treatment vs. outpatient treatment, and you can feel confident asking questions when you inquire about their programs.

Offering an addicted loved one money may enable their addiction, whereas helping to fund therapy sessions can do the opposite. For many drug addicts, mental health issues are what lead to addiction. Substance abuse can also worsen their mental health, so for many addicts, mental health treatment is necessary.

3. Take Care of Yourself

A critical lesson for Eve, mother of the son who struggled with opiate addiction, was the importance of being good to herself, regardless of whether her son was doing well. You can’t control another person, but you can make healthy decisions for yourself. This is necessary if you want to have any hope of being able to support and encourage your loved one.

For some people, groups like Al-Anon provide a safe place to get education and fellowship with others who are facing similar struggles. Others prefer seeing a therapist privately or joining a different type of support group.

Whatever your path looks like, “You have to keep putting one foot in front of the other, keep looking forward, not back,” Eve says. “There’s no way to make sense of it. There’s no reason why my son should’ve died. Give yourself over to a higher power—for me, it was the only way I could live my life.”

There’s a lot of pain and grief involved when you love someone with a substance abuse problem. Your other family members and friends may not grieve in the same way as you and may have their own ideas about how to handle the situation. 

Talk about It with Your Loved One and Others

Talking about addiction can be healing both for the person trying to overcome it and you, their loved one. An addicted person may be reluctant to come to you and ask for help, but open dialogue is your best chance to be there for them when they need you most. “Work on building a good relationship, without judging or accusing,” Eve suggests. “You have to step back, you can’t be on top of them all the time, or they won’t trust that they can come to you.”

When you’re trying to take care of yourself, nothing is more toxic to your healing than shame. Eve had many friends who struggled with addiction in their family but were too ashamed to talk about it. “We made a decision as a family to be up front about our struggles,” she says. “The more you talk about it, the more you realize everyone has a story, everyone has been affected by addiction in some way.”

For Eve, speaking her son’s name and telling his story is one way to keep his memory alive. “I still cry when I tell Isaac’s story, even two years later. And I can see people’s faces cringe when I talk about my dead child. They don’t know how to handle it,” she says. “But I can’t worry about making them uncomfortable. He’s still my son and I won’t pretend he didn’t exist.”

Get Addiction Treatment 

The realities of addiction are painful. It’s hard to hear that a loved one’s life is at risk and you can’t fix it. But once you accept certain realities, you may discover there’s empowerment beyond the powerlessness. It’s not always obvious how to help a person struggling with addiction, but there are steps you can take to help both them and you. Nashville recovery a number of addiction treatment programs that can help make a difference in addiction recovery.

Once you’ve taken those steps, you can take solace in knowing you did all you could in the face of a devastating disease.

[techcrunchappcom]

New Post has been published on https://techcrunchapp.com/demi-lovato-on-new-love-new-management-and-finally-learning-to-cry-bustle/

Demi Lovato On New Love, New Management, And Finally Learning To Cry - Bustle

Demi Lovato imagined herself in the middle of the ocean. As the 27-year-old tread water, long black hair skimming over dark waves, she was given a command: Raise your hand if you want to lose weight. Because Lovato is a pop star who has produced nine Top 20 Billboard singles under the scrutiny of 86 million Instagram followers and a BMI-obsessed tabloid press — and because she has dealt with eating disorders for more than a decade — Lovato raised her tattooed and extravagantly nail-arted hand.

While Lovato kept herself suspended in the open water with one limb, she was given another directive: Raise your hand if you’re willing to do something about your eating disorder. Because Lovato was, at that point in 2018, not in an ocean but in treatment for that eating disorder — as well as for addiction issues that led to an opioid overdose — Lovato obliged the counselor’s command and lifted her other hand. Which, of course, left her with no paddles to keep her from drowning in the metaphorical ocean. So Lovato made the choice to pull down her salute to thinness.

“I used to have people watching me the night before a photo shoot to make sure that I didn’t binge or eat and be swollen the next day,” Lovato says right before her late-June Bustle cover shoot. “It’s just a totally different world now. … I don’t prepare for photo shoots, even. I can eat Subway for breakfast.” Lovato delivers this news from a table in the Los Angeles house she rents with her boyfriend, actor Max Ehrich. She is resplendent in full glam but sans bra under a Selena Quintanilla shirt. Lovato left her high-rise apartment in March when another tenant tested positive for COVID-19, and she initially moved in with her mother and stepfather before realizing it’s “a little difficult to be in a new relationship at your family’s house.” Behind Lovato, in her temporary living room, sits a surgically masked team of people who do not spend their time monitoring her weight.

The new squad is led by Scooter Braun, whom Lovato approached in 2019, a year after her overdose. It was time to move on from longtime manager Phil McIntyre, who had worked with Lovato since she was a teenager. “In the past,” Lovato says, “I projected my own abandonment issues onto other people, especially male figures that I looked up to as father figures. I had to reflect on, ‘What do I want my relationship with my manager to look like without enmeshing my own father issues onto him?’” (Lovato’s estranged birth father, who she has said was abusive and suffered from mental health issues, passed away the week after Father’s Day in 2013.)

Braun honed his ability to manage trauma and talent in a gantlet of wounded musicians. “I’ve been through that with Justin,” Braun says, not needing to clarify the surname of Bieber, who very publicly grappled with his own substance use and mental health issues, which manifested in behavior including mop bucket urination and monkey abandonment. “I’ve been through that with Ariana, you know?” (Grande has talked about exhibiting symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder following the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing. The next year, her ex, rapper Mac Miller, passed away after accidentally overdosing on fentanyl, cocaine, and alcohol.) “I felt like, because I’ve been through that a couple of times with people who started off very young,” Braun says, “I can understand [Demi’s] struggles a little bit.”

In Lovato’s meeting with Braun, he says, “my intention was to be respectful and decline.” He simply didn’t feel he could take on another client. “She was nervous,” Braun says. (“I was nervous because I wanted him to manage me so bad, and I was terrified of rejection,” Lovato explains. “Also, having gone through such a public overdose, I didn’t know if anyone would want to manage me after that.”) Then Braun had a revelation. “What I saw is that she needed someone who didn’t need her. And about halfway through the meeting, [my partner Allison Kaye and I] both looked at each other and instinctually kind of laughed. And then Allison texted me and goes, ‘You’re thinking the same thing I am.’ I knew I could help her. I knew Allison could help her. I knew that we were in a position, in our lives and our careers, that if Demi needed to take three years off, she can do that. And if Demi needs us to go and have an honest conversation and get her out of something, it doesn’t affect my reputation.”

The implication is that Lovato is the kind of person who repeatedly finds herself needing to get out of something. “The people that are there with me every single day,” Lovato says, “I have to feel very connected with them and that I can trust them. That I can be totally vulnerable, transparent, and honest. And if I’m having a panic attack in the middle of a photo shoot or something that I can sit in the dressing room with whomever is there, and they can help me with it.”

Asking for help instead of forgiveness feels like a newer approach for Lovato, whose problems, in the past, seemed to be hastily dealt with when they erupted in public. But she is also singular among celebrities in her fame bracket in her willingness to go into detail about her low points. In 2015, Lovato chastised a tattoo artist for inking a “drunken teenage girl” after the woman went on Instagram to complain about Lovato’s behavior during an inebriated tattoo session. Earlier this year, Lovato went on the Ellen DeGeneres Show to explain that her eating disorder fueled a 2018 relapse, describing how her old management team gave her watermelon with fat-free whipped cream every year on her birthday in lieu of cake. Lovato’s mother Dianna De La Garza wrote a bracingly revealing memoir of her own anorexia, depression, and substance use issues, Falling With Wings. The autobiography features anecdotes like the time Lovato texted her “I’m sorry ahead of time.” (De La Garza was somewhat relieved to learn this apology was merely in reference to Lovato physically attacking a backup dancer and not a suicide note. Lovato wrote the foreword to the book.) When Lovato finished her first attempt at rehab, triggered by the 2010 punching incident, she took the advice to give her first interview just three months after completing treatment. “It was too soon, in my opinion,” Lovato says now. “But nobody knew any better, because we were looking to people in the [recovery] field for guidance.”

“I just felt like here’s someone who is so sweet, so nice and has obviously been through some shit,” Braun says. “And she made mistakes along the way, but also as a child was put in positions…” He doesn’t need to say what the positions were.

To put herself into more advantageous situations, Lovato says, “I had to learn the hard way from ignoring my needs and wants for so many years.” Really, she says, she didn’t even know what those desires were. Self-destructive behavior was, Lovato says, “just doing something because I didn’t know what to do.”

Before quarantine, it was very difficult for me to cry. I had programmed the thought into my head when I was 16 that I’m only going to cry if people pay me to.

2020 was supposed to be Lovato’s post-relapse comeback year, beginning with the wrenching Grammys debut of torch single “Anyone” and her Super Bowl performance of the national anthem, both delivered in head-to-toe angelic white. Lovato acted opposite Will Ferrell in the June Netflix comedy Eurovision Song Contest, has been hired to host a Quibi interview show, and will release a four-part YouTube docu-series that promises to “show fans her personal and musical journey over the past three years.” Lovato had also planned to release her album and go on tour, endeavors that are now postponed until those kinds of droplet-spreading events are less potentially deadly. Now, Lovato’s project is Lovato. She is painting Hawaiian eucalyptus trees and Black Lives Matter-inspired portraits of George Floyd — “I’m kind of embarrassed about how that turned out because it doesn’t look anything like him,” Lovato says, accurately — and working with a vast constellation of dietitians and coaches and spiritual advisers, one of whom she says warned her this pause was coming. “She was like, ‘Don’t panic when your work stops. It’s going to slow down drastically,’” Lovato says of the prophecy. “So I was kind of prepared in a weird way, and I just adapted. I think the universe — God — shifted that to happen in my life.”

God recently re-entered Lovato’s life, courtesy of Braun, who took her to church for the first time in years this winter. Tears are another recent re-addition. “Before quarantine, it was very difficult for me to cry. I had programmed the thought into my head when I was 16 that I’m only going to cry if people pay me to.” Now, Lovato says, “I started doing all this work, allowing myself to feel the pains of all the losses that I’ve had or the adversities or traumas that I’ve faced. I think my ability to be vulnerable and be more intimate with people has really heightened.”

The pandemic has been a graceless slam on the brakes for everyone lucky enough to safely abstain from public life and quarantine with their existential problems. Lovato has experienced hard stops before, in the form of multiple rehab stays. But this is the first time the halt was not a reaction to her own behavior. It’s an opportunity instead of a rebuke. A chance to feel for herself, not for an audience or a paycheck. After acknowledging the sacrifices of frontline workers and expressing sympathy for the sick and dead, Lovato admits the time has been “really good” for her. “It’s very common for people to only really work on themselves when crisis happens or when they notice that they’re slipping into old patterns or behaviors,” Lovato says. “So to be able to walk into this experience without a personal crisis and just be like, I can do the work on myself now because I have the time. … It was a beautiful thing.” As an added benefit, she says, “I wasn’t in rehab; I was outside in the world with Netflix. So when I was too tired of therapy, I’d put on Schitt’s Creek.” (For those who haven’t experienced inpatient rehabilitation facilities, there’s generally no Wi-Fi there.) “I was given this opportunity,” Lovato says of quarantine. “And I was like, I’m going to adapt. I’m going to shift to this. I’m going to learn from it.”

The day before we spoke, Lovato wrote a letter to her father. Though they never reconciled before his death, it was a love note, albeit a backhanded one. “I am who I am because of you,” Lovato wrote. “And I’m grateful for that. Because of your absence, I am an independent woman now. Because you were a pathological liar, I am honest to a fault.”

Like many things Lovato says, the content of the statement feels at odds with its delivery: a deluge of raw truth relayed with the bright tone and smile of the former Disney star. Though Lovato had an eating disorder before she became famous, she says, “I kind of looked around and had a moment where I was like, ‘Wow. This is so terrifyingly normalized.’” So many beautiful people around her were grinning through self-abuse. Lovato’s exploits with substance use became increasingly well-documented, and when she got help, she wanted to both explain that the slender bodies people saw on TV were not “normal” and destigmatize the painful consequences of trying to look like that. “When I went to treatment in 2010,” Lovato says, “I came out of the experience with the choice of talking about my struggles or my journey with the possibility of helping people, or keeping my mouth shut and going back to Disney Channel. And I was like that doesn’t feel authentic to me. So I chose to tell my story. And I had this, like, savior complex, where I thought, ‘Oh, I made this pact with God when I was young’” — in which Lovato would become a successful singer in exchange for doing His work — “and now I have to save people.”

In 2013, Lovato published Staying Strong: 365 Days a Year, a New York Times best-selling book of anodyne daily wisdom like, “If you spend too much time living in the past, you aren’t able to live in the now. Make an effort to move forward today.” After procrastinating until just before her publisher’s deadline, Lovato wound up writing the book in what she describes as a matter of days. “But it was more people-pleasing than anything, and then I realized through all of that people-pleasing that I wasn’t being authentic.” Earning praise for her relationship with recovery and rehabilitation was a way of “fueling those patterns that I had and that were bringing me to destruction,” Lovato says. “I think that’s what you’re hearing when you read back that book. … I binged on recovery, where I switched my addiction from the actual addictions to the recovery.” Now, Lovato tries to balance an impulse to expose with a refusal to flay herself doing so. “I have to set boundaries in interviews so I don’t treat them like therapy sessions,” she says pointedly. “But I’m able to hear my progress through the words that I’m saying when I read them back.”

You can see the impact of Lovato’s honesty in celebrity culture, and the need for continued public processing. It’s hard to imagine Taylor Swift revealing her own eating disorder in Netflix documentary Miss Americana without Lovato’s precedent. Meanwhile, Beyoncé was lauded for being transparent in the Netflix doc Homecoming about her disciplined Coachella rehearsal diet: “No bread, no carbs, no sugar, no dairy, no meat, no fish, no alcohol.” (Beyoncé perhaps needlessly clarified, “I’m hungry.”) Previously, Lovato says, “I would have prepared for something like Coachella or a photo shoot. I don’t look like Beyoncé. But I can’t risk my mental health because I have things in my history that Beyoncé doesn’t or may not have. For me, it’s a riskier thing.”

Lovato’s friend Jameela Jamil met her more than a decade ago, when Lovato was a teenager and Jamil was a radio host. Jamil has watched Lovato navigate radical honesty as a celebrity and let it inspire her own activism around eating disorders and body image. “She is revolutionary in how open and forthcoming she is with her truth,” Jamil says. “It comes at huge cost and risk; once you open the door into your personal life, people feel entitled to you. And people project this savior complex onto you, which is impossible to maintain.

“She takes on so much scrutiny and does it boldly in the name of making sure her fans aren’t harmed the way she was growing up,” Jamil continues. “Nobody else has done what she’s done. I can’t stress it enough when I tell people she’s a big part of where I drew strength to really start speaking my mind.”

Jamil was motivated by Lovato to self-advocate, but Lovato says during that time, “Even though I had a big singing voice, I didn’t have a big speaking voice for myself. I didn’t express my needs… And then after a while of your needs and your wants being ignored, you burst.”

To keep from bursting, Lovato needed to finally figure out what she wants. “I want a career that has nothing to do with my body,” she says, imagining the possibility of being neither an object nor a statement against objectification. “I want it to be about my music and my lyrics and my message. And I want a long-lasting career that I don’t have to change myself for. Music brought me so much joy when I was younger, and I lost that joy throughout the hustle and bustle of the music industry. I got miserable. And I don’t ever want it to be like that again. That’s what I want.”

The question, then, is who Lovato is when she’s not experiencing trauma. Will she become a “normal” star instead of one constantly fighting the normalized standards of stardom? When a singer so publicly tied to her pain is happy and sober and at peace and with God, are the tragedies just bad things she experienced, or are they a part of her? “I don’t think there’s a correct answer to this question,” Lovato says slowly. “I know these things happened to me. They shaped me into who I am. So maybe it’s a bit of both.” As Lovato says this, she lifts her right and left hands, palms open to all possibilities. She smiles. She’s still afloat.

Top image credit: Carolina Herrera pants; Totême courtesy of Farfetch tank; Zero + Maria Cornejo cardigan; Jennifer Fisher earrings; Jordan Road necklace.

Video credit: Mara Hoffman dress; Olgana Paris shoes; Jennifer Fisher ring; Lana Jewelry earrings.

Photographer: Angelo Kritikos

Hair: Paul Norton

Makeup: Rokael Lizama

Manicurist: Natalie Minerva

Stylist: Siena Montesano

Set Designer: Kelly Fondry

Art Director: Erin Hover

Fashion Direction: Tiffany Reid

Bustle followed current guidelines from the CDC and put measures in place to maximize the safety of our talent and crew.

[truemedian]

Demi Lovato On New Love, New Management, And Finally Learning To Cry

Demi Lovato imagined herself in the middle of the ocean. As the 27-year-old tread water, long black hair skimming over dark waves, she was given a command: Raise your hand if you want to lose weight. Because Lovato is a pop star who has produced nine Top 20 Billboard singles under the scrutiny of 86 million Instagram followers and a BMI-obsessed tabloid press — and because she has dealt with eating disorders for more than a decade — Lovato raised her tattooed and extravagantly nail-arted hand. While Lovato kept herself suspended in the open water with one limb, she was given another directive: Raise your hand if you’re willing to do something about your eating disorder. Because Lovato was, at that point in 2018, not in an ocean but in treatment for that eating disorder — as well as for addiction issues that led to an opioid overdose — Lovato obliged the counselor’s command and lifted her other hand. Which, of course, left her with no paddles to keep her from drowning in the metaphorical ocean. So Lovato made the choice to pull down her salute to thinness. “I used to have people watching me the night before a photo shoot to make sure that I didn't binge or eat and be swollen the next day,” Lovato says right before her late-June Bustle cover shoot. “It’s just a totally different world now. … I don't prepare for photo shoots, even. I can eat Subway for breakfast.” Lovato delivers this news from a table in the Los Angeles house she rents with her boyfriend, actor Max Ehrich. She is resplendent in full glam but sans bra under a Selena Quintanilla shirt. Lovato left her high-rise apartment in March when another tenant tested positive for COVID-19, and she initially moved in with her mother and stepfather before realizing it’s “a little difficult to be in a new relationship at your family's house.” Behind Lovato, in her temporary living room, sits a surgically masked team of people who do not spend their time monitoring her weight. The new squad is led by Scooter Braun, whom Lovato approached in 2019, a year after her overdose. It was time to move on from longtime manager Phil McIntyre, who had worked with Lovato since she was a teenager. “In the past,” Lovato says, “I projected my own abandonment issues onto other people, especially male figures that I looked up to as father figures. I had to reflect on, ‘What do I want my relationship with my manager to look like without enmeshing my own father issues onto him?’” (Lovato’s estranged birth father, who she has said was abusive and suffered from mental health issues, passed away the week after Father’s Day in 2013.) Braun honed his ability to manage trauma and talent in a gantlet of wounded musicians. “I've been through that with Justin,” Braun says, not needing to clarify the surname of Bieber, who very publicly grappled with his own substance use and mental health issues, which manifested in behavior including mop bucket urination and monkey abandonment. “I've been through that with Ariana, you know?” (Grande has talked about exhibiting symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder following the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing. The next year, her ex, rapper Mac Miller, passed away after accidentally overdosing on fentanyl, cocaine, and alcohol.) “I felt like, because I've been through that a couple of times with people who started off very young,” Braun says, “I can understand struggles a little bit.” Sleeper set; Maryam Nassir Zadeh shoes; Jennifer Fisher earrings; Jordan Road necklace. In Lovato’s meeting with Braun, he says, “my intention was to be respectful and decline.” He simply didn't feel he could take on another client. “She was nervous,” Braun says. (“I was nervous because I wanted him to manage me so bad, and I was terrified of rejection,” Lovato explains. “Also, having gone through such a public overdose, I didn’t know if anyone would want to manage me after that.”) Then Braun had a revelation. “What I saw is that she needed someone who didn't need her. And about halfway through the meeting, both looked at each other and instinctually kind of laughed. And then Allison texted me and goes, ‘You're thinking the same thing I am.’ I knew I could help her. I knew Allison could help her. I knew that we were in a position, in our lives and our careers, that if Demi needed to take three years off, she can do that. And if Demi needs us to go and have an honest conversation and get her out of something, it doesn't affect my reputation.” The implication is that Lovato is the kind of person who repeatedly finds herself needing to get out of something. “The people that are there with me every single day,” Lovato says, “I have to feel very connected with them and that I can trust them. That I can be totally vulnerable, transparent, and honest. And if I'm having a panic attack in the middle of a photo shoot or something that I can sit in the dressing room with whomever is there, and they can help me with it.” Asking for help instead of forgiveness feels like a newer approach for Lovato, whose problems, in the past, seemed to be hastily dealt with when they erupted in public. But she is also singular among celebrities in her fame bracket in her willingness to go into detail about her low points. In 2015, Lovato chastised a tattoo artist for inking a “drunken teenage girl” after the woman went on Instagram to complain about Lovato’s behavior during an inebriated tattoo session. Earlier this year, Lovato went on the Ellen DeGeneres Show to explain that her eating disorder fueled a 2018 relapse, describing how her old management team gave her watermelon with fat-free whipped cream every year on her birthday in lieu of cake. Lovato’s mother Dianna De La Garza wrote a bracingly revealing memoir of her own anorexia, depression, and substance use issues, Falling With Wings. The autobiography features anecdotes like the time Lovato texted her “I’m sorry ahead of time.” (De La Garza was somewhat relieved to learn this apology was merely in reference to Lovato physically attacking a backup dancer and not a suicide note. Lovato wrote the foreword to the book.) When Lovato finished her first attempt at rehab, triggered by the 2010 punching incident, she took the advice to give her first interview just three months after completing treatment. “It was too soon, in my opinion,” Lovato says now. “But nobody knew any better, because we were looking to people in the field for guidance.” “I just felt like here's someone who is so sweet, so nice and has obviously been through some shit,” Braun says. “And she made mistakes along the way, but also as a child was put in positions…” He doesn’t need to say what the positions were. To put herself into more advantageous situations, Lovato says, “I had to learn the hard way from ignoring my needs and wants for so many years.” Really, she says, she didn’t even know what those desires were. Self-destructive behavior was, Lovato says, “just doing something because I didn't know what to do.” Before quarantine, it was very difficult for me to cry. I had programmed the thought into my head when I was 16 that I'm only going to cry if people pay me to. 2020 was supposed to be Lovato’s post-relapse comeback year, beginning with the wrenching Grammys debut of torch single “Anyone” and her Super Bowl performance of the national anthem, both delivered in head-to-toe angelic white. Lovato acted opposite Will Ferrell in the June Netflix comedy Eurovision Song Contest, has been hired to host a Quibi interview show, and will release a four-part YouTube docu-series that promises to “show fans her personal and musical journey over the past three years.” Lovato had also planned to release her album and go on tour, endeavors that are now postponed until those kinds of droplet-spreading events are less potentially deadly. Now, Lovato’s project is Lovato. She is painting Hawaiian eucalyptus trees and Black Lives Matter-inspired portraits of George Floyd — “I'm kind of embarrassed about how that turned out because it doesn't look anything like him,” Lovato says, accurately — and working with a vast constellation of dietitians and coaches and spiritual advisers, one of whom she says warned her this pause was coming. “She was like, ‘Don't panic when your work stops. It's going to slow down drastically,’” Lovato says of the prophecy. “So I was kind of prepared in a weird way, and I just adapted. I think the universe — God — shifted that to happen in my life.” God recently re-entered Lovato’s life, courtesy of Braun, who took her to church for the first time in years this winter. Tears are another recent re-addition. "Before quarantine, it was very difficult for me to cry. I had programmed the thought into my head when I was 16 that I'm only going to cry if people pay me to." Now, Lovato says, “I started doing all this work, allowing myself to feel the pains of all the losses that I've had or the adversities or traumas that I've faced. I think my ability to be vulnerable and be more intimate with people has really heightened.” Loewe courtesy of Net-A-Porter dress; Jennifer Fisher ring; Lana Jewelry earrings. The pandemic has been a graceless slam on the brakes for everyone lucky enough to safely abstain from public life and quarantine with their existential problems. Lovato has experienced hard stops before, in the form of multiple rehab stays. But this is the first time the halt was not a reaction to her own behavior. It’s an opportunity instead of a rebuke. A chance to feel for herself, not for an audience or a paycheck. After acknowledging the sacrifices of frontline workers and expressing sympathy for the sick and dead, Lovato admits the time has been “really good” for her. “It's very common for people to only really work on themselves when crisis happens or when they notice that they're slipping into old patterns or behaviors,” Lovato says. “So to be able to walk into this experience without a personal crisis and just be like, I can do the work on myself now because I have the time. ... It was a beautiful thing.” As an added benefit, she says, “I wasn’t in rehab; I was outside in the world with Netflix. So when I was too tired of therapy, I'd put on Schitt's Creek.” (For those who haven’t experienced inpatient rehabilitation facilities, there’s generally no Wi-Fi there.) “I was given this opportunity,” Lovato says of quarantine. “And I was like, I'm going to adapt. I'm going to shift to this. I'm going to learn from it.” The day before we spoke, Lovato wrote a letter to her father. Though they never reconciled before his death, it was a love note, albeit a backhanded one. “I am who I am because of you,” Lovato wrote. “And I'm grateful for that. Because of your absence, I am an independent woman now. Because you were a pathological liar, I am honest to a fault.” Like many things Lovato says, the content of the statement feels at odds with its delivery: a deluge of raw truth relayed with the bright tone and smile of the former Disney star. Though Lovato had an eating disorder before she became famous, she says, “I kind of looked around and had a moment where I was like, ‘Wow. This is so terrifyingly normalized.’” So many beautiful people around her were grinning through self-abuse. Lovato’s exploits with substance use became increasingly well-documented, and when she got help, she wanted to both explain that the slender bodies people saw on TV were not “normal” and destigmatize the painful consequences of trying to look like that. “When I went to treatment in 2010,” Lovato says, “I came out of the experience with the choice of talking about my struggles or my journey with the possibility of helping people, or keeping my mouth shut and going back to Disney Channel. And I was like that doesn't feel authentic to me. So I chose to tell my story. And I had this, like, savior complex, where I thought, ‘Oh, I made this pact with God when I was young’” — in which Lovato would become a successful singer in exchange for doing His work — "and now I have to save people.” In 2013, Lovato published Staying Strong: 365 Days a Year, a New York Times best-selling book of anodyne daily wisdom like, “If you spend too much time living in the past, you aren’t able to live in the now. Make an effort to move forward today.” After procrastinating until just before her publisher’s deadline, Lovato wound up writing the book in what she describes as a matter of days. “But it was more people-pleasing than anything, and then I realized through all of that people-pleasing that I wasn't being authentic.” Earning praise for her relationship with recovery and rehabilitation was a way of “fueling those patterns that I had and that were bringing me to destruction,” Lovato says. “I think that's what you're hearing when you read back that book. … I binged on recovery, where I switched my addiction from the actual addictions to the recovery.” Now, Lovato tries to balance an impulse to expose with a refusal to flay herself doing so. “I have to set boundaries in interviews so I don't treat them like therapy sessions,” she says pointedly. “But I'm able to hear my progress through the words that I'm saying when I read them back.” You can see the impact of Lovato’s honesty in celebrity culture, and the need for continued public processing. It’s hard to imagine Taylor Swift revealing her own eating disorder in Netflix documentary Miss Americana without Lovato’s precedent. Meanwhile, Beyoncé was lauded for being transparent in the Netflix doc Homecoming about her disciplined Coachella rehearsal diet: “No bread, no carbs, no sugar, no dairy, no meat, no fish, no alcohol.” (Beyoncé perhaps needlessly clarified, “I’m hungry.”) Previously, Lovato says, “I would have prepared for something like Coachella or a photo shoot. I don't look like Beyoncé. But I can't risk my mental health because I have things in my history that Beyoncé doesn't or may not have. For me, it's a riskier thing.” Lovato’s friend Jameela Jamil met her more than a decade ago, when Lovato was a teenager and Jamil was a radio host. Jamil has watched Lovato navigate radical honesty as a celebrity and let it inspire her own activism around eating disorders and body image. “She is revolutionary in how open and forthcoming she is with her truth,” Jamil says. “It comes at huge cost and risk; once you open the door into your personal life, people feel entitled to you. And people project this savior complex onto you, which is impossible to maintain. “She takes on so much scrutiny and does it boldly in the name of making sure her fans aren’t harmed the way she was growing up,” Jamil continues. “Nobody else has done what she’s done. I can’t stress it enough when I tell people she’s a big part of where I drew strength to really start speaking my mind.” Jamil was motivated by Lovato to self-advocate, but Lovato says during that time, “Even though I had a big singing voice, I didn't have a big speaking voice for myself. I didn't express my needs… And then after a while of your needs and your wants being ignored, you burst.” To keep from bursting, Lovato needed to finally figure out what she wants. “I want a career that has nothing to do with my body,” she says, imagining the possibility of being neither an object nor a statement against objectification. “I want it to be about my music and my lyrics and my message. And I want a long-lasting career that I don't have to change myself for. Music brought me so much joy when I was younger, and I lost that joy throughout the hustle and bustle of the music industry. I got miserable. And I don't ever want it to be like that again. That’s what I want.” The question, then, is who Lovato is when she’s not experiencing trauma. Will she become a “normal” star instead of one constantly fighting the normalized standards of stardom? When a singer so publicly tied to her pain is happy and sober and at peace and with God, are the tragedies just bad things she experienced, or are they a part of her? “I don't think there's a correct answer to this question,” Lovato says slowly. “I know these things happened to me. They shaped me into who I am. So maybe it's a bit of both.” As Lovato says this, she lifts her right and left hands, palms open to all possibilities. She smiles. She's still afloat. Top image credit: Carolina Herrera pants; Totême courtesy of Farfetch tank; Zero + Maria Cornejo cardigan; Jennifer Fisher earrings; Jordan Road necklace. Video credit: Mara Hoffman dress; Olgana Paris shoes; Jennifer Fisher ring; Lana Jewelry earrings. Photographer: Angelo Kritikos Hair: Paul Norton Makeup: Rokael Lizama Manicurist: Natalie Minerva Stylist: Siena Montesano Set Designer: Kelly Fondry Art Director: Erin Hover Fashion Direction: Tiffany Reid Bustle followed current guidelines from the CDC and put measures in place to maximize the safety of our talent and crew. Read More Read the full article

[bountyofbeads]

In Indian Country, a Crisis of Missing Women. And a New One When They’re Found. https://nyti.ms/2EPhav7

Indigenous activists say that generations of killings and disappearances have been disregarded by law enforcement and lost in bureaucratic gaps concerning which local or federal agencies should investigate.

There is not even a reliable count of how many Native women go missing or are killed each year. Researchers have found that women are often misclassified as Hispanic or Asian or other racial categories on missing-persons forms and that thousands have been left off a federal missing-persons database.

In Indian Country, a Crisis of Missing Women. And a New One When They’re Found.

The federal government is trying to catch up with a crisis of missing Native American women. But no one is addressing the problems that arise when they’re found.

By Jack Healy, Photographs by Adriana Zehbrauskas | Published Dec. 25, 2019, 3:00 a.m. ET | New York Times | Posted December 25, 2019

GALLUP, N.M. — Prudence Jones had spent two years handing out “Missing” fliers and searching homeless camps and underpasses for her 28-year-old daughter when she got the call she had been praying for: Dani had been found. She was in a New Mexico jail, but she was alive.

It seemed like a happy ending to the story of one of thousands of Native American women and girls who are reported missing every year in what Indigenous activists call a long-ignored crisis. Strangers following Dani’s case on social media cheered the news this past July: “Wonderful!” “Thank you God!” “Finally, some good news.”

But as Ms. Jones visited Dani in jail, saw the fresh scars on her body and tried to comprehend the physical and spiritual toll of two years on the streets, her family, which is Navajo, started to grapple with a painful and lonely epilogue to its missing-persons saga.

“There’s nothing for what comes after,” said Ms. Jones, 48, who has five daughters. “How do you heal? How do you put your family back together? The one thing I’ve found is there’s no support.”

Indigenous activists say that generations of killings and disappearances have been disregarded by law enforcement and lost in bureaucratic gaps concerning which local or federal agencies should investigate.

There is not even a reliable count of how many Native women go missing or are killed each year. Researchers have found that women are often misclassified as Hispanic or Asian or other racial categories on missing-persons forms and that thousands have been left off a federal missing-persons database.

From state capitals to tribal councils to the White House, a grass-roots movement led by activists and victims’ families is casting a national spotlight on the disproportionately high rates of violence faced by Indigenous women and girls.

Several states, including New Mexico, have set up task forces. President Trump signed an executive order last month creating a task force to improve cooperation among Balkanized law enforcement agencies and address problems with basic data collection.

Some tribal officials praised the move, but other activists criticized it as a hollow, belated gesture that failed to include tribes or survivors in its membership, and would do nothing to give tribes more authority to prosecute sex traffickers or others who prey on women and girls. They said its focus on rural reservations has also overlooked the large numbers of Native people in cities who become targets of violence.

Tara Sweeney, assistant secretary for Indian Affairs in the Interior Department, said the task force had already met with survivors and Indigenous leaders in Arizona, Alaska, South Dakota and Washington State and was committed to including their voices in its recommendations.

“We need to do something,” she said.

But for all the official promises to help, families like Dani’s say they get little assistance in navigating a patchwork of tribal, state and federal law-enforcement agencies to find their missing relatives or heal their families if they are found.

“Nothing happens afterwards — that’s the scary thing,” said Annita Lucchesi, whose group, the Sovereign Bodies Institute, has tallied numbers of missing and murdered from a jumble of police reports, news clippings, family contacts and social media posts. “Maybe a victim advocate from their tribe might offer some assistance. But that’s a case-by-case basis.”

Activists describe the crisis as a legacy of generations of government policies of forced removal, land seizures and violence inflicted on Indigenous people. Hundreds of the missing never return, and families said they have struggled to find counseling and treatment for those who do. Some are trying to cope with the trauma of being trafficked. Some are confronting addiction or grappling with violence they suffered on the streets. Some had fled abuse at home and do not have a safe place to welcome them back.

There are also authorities and counselors who have failed to screen located Navajo women and girls as victims of sex trafficking, said Amber Kanazbah Crotty, a Navajo Nation Council delegate who has been studying the issue.

On the Yakama reservation in Washington State, Larise Sohappy’s family spent three weeks looking for her after she went missing in August 2018. Ms. Sohappy, 36, said she had been “lost in my addiction” after being in an abusive relationship.

Her family rejoiced after relatives and tribal police found her, but Ms. Sohappy said she felt humiliated to suddenly be known as a Missing Person reading local newspaper articles about her family’s search. One day, she walked into a convenience store in Toppenish and saw her own “Missing” poster on the wall. But when she tried to enroll in a tribal substance-abuse clinic, she said, she was told there was a two-week wait.

“I kind of stopped trying,” Ms. Sohappy said.

She said her drinking got worse and she grew more despondent until one night in November, when she texted a suicide hotline as a last plea for help. This time, it worked. She is now in an outpatient treatment program in Portland, Ore., and taking classes in medical billing.

“While I was gone I felt like nobody loved me and nobody cared about me,” she said. “We’re overlooked as a people.”

A lack of support or follow-up from social workers or victims’ advocates makes it more likely that women and girls will go missing repeatedly. Some are written off as habitual runaways, activists said. In Washington State, Ms. Lucchesi has collected data showing that 83 percent of missing girls had been reported missing more than once.

“We see these kids going missing over and over again until eventually they don’t come back,” she said.

The crisis has turned families into search parties and parents into private detectives. They draw grids across rural reservations and fan out through chaparral and sagebrush. They crack into their children’s social media accounts to search for a telltale direct message.

Around the Navajo Nation, volunteer activists set up their own version of an Amber Alert to supplement the spotty official alert systems. They pin “Missing” posters to the bulletin boards of grocery stores.

They provide a live accounting of missing-persons cases. From January to October, 86 Navajo men and women have gone missing nationwide, said Meskee Yanabah Yatsayte, a missing-persons advocate for the Navajo Nation since 2013. She said 55 of them had been found safe, 21 were found dead and 10 were still missing.

Ms. Yatsayte said the focus on missing women and girls had also ignored a parallel crisis among men and boys, and she has urged tribal leaders and other government officials to widen their focus.

Dani went missing from Gallup in September 2017 after years of drug use and personal and legal problems. Court records show she had lost custody of her two young children and been arrested several times earlier that year on charges that included burglary and fleeing the police in a stolen truck after a police officer reported seeing her and another man — both apparently on drugs — trying to break into a self-storage unit.

Dani’s family, which asked that she not be identified by her full name because of concerns about her privacy and mental condition, called the police and began papering streetlights with “Missing” posters.

Her twin sisters, Ashley and Renee, 20, posted on her Facebook account in the hopes that Dani would log in and notice. The family followed sightings and rumors of her to Las Vegas and Southern California.

The charges against Dani were dropped, and she was released from jail after she was found not competent. It was the only psychological examination she has received, Ms. Jones said.

Dani has told her family little about what happened during the two years she was missing, living mostly on the streets and in homeless camps. “It was hard,” she said one afternoon.

If she spoke in straight lines before, her thoughts now meander. She arranges and rearranges shampoo and soaps on the windowsill of the motel room she shares with her mother and her sister Ashley. She collects scraps of dirty fabric and sometimes forgets she is no longer 26.

“28, honey,” Ms. Jones reminded her one night. “It’s been two years.”

When missing children are located, police officers and child-protection investigators are often tasked with following up. But Dani is a legal adult, though one with no Medicaid coverage or bank account.

Ms. Jones said she and Dani’s sisters have tried to welcome her back with love and comfort. But Dani has resisted when Ms. Jones suggested going to the packed walk-in clinic at the Indian Health Service hospital, and Ms. Jones worries that if she pushes too hard for counseling or drug treatment or the doctor, Dani will slip away.

One chilly afternoon, she did. She had not returned to the motel on Route 66 where the family now lives, and it was getting dark fast.

So Ms. Jones set out to find her daughter again, swinging her gray Chevy by landmarks that might have drawn her. They passed a street preacher sermonizing to a group of homeless people. An ex-boyfriend’s house.

“I didn’t see her,” said Ashley, sitting in the back seat.

“Shoot,” Ms. Jones murmured. “We might get her. We might not.”

Then, they pulled into an alley and there she was, talking to two friends in a car. Ashley approached and told her, gently, “I like your hair.”

Ashley and her twin, Renee, said they grew up being mothered by Dani and their two other older sisters, carried around on her back at family parties. “I’m the big sister now,” Ashley said. They struggled with not knowing whether Dani was alive or dead, and now, loving her despite not knowing who, exactly, their sister is.

“She’s there, but she’s not the same Dani,” Renee said. “You can kiss her and talk to her, but the Dani who’s here isn’t there as much.”

One night, the four women sat on the double beds in the motel room, looking at old photos of themselves riding horses, at parties and Disneyland, and talking about their hopes of leaving Gallup for a fresh start with relatives in the Eastern United States. Then Dani started pacing the room, twirling a cigarette as she edged toward the door.

Her mother looked up: “Stay close, O.K.?”

______

John Eligon contributed reporting from Kansas City, Mo.

[nightmareonfilmstreet]

The Shape of Things – HALLOWEEN H20: Twenty Years Later

The dictionary definition of cash-in is described thusly: ‘to take advantage of or exploit (a situation)’. Ever since the motion picture industry became a going concern, it has unapologetically cashed-in on the success of its product. Take, for example, Bride of Frankenstein, Curse of the Cat People, Dracula: Prince of Darkness, or even Halloween II. While not necessarily superior to their predecessors, each is a wonderful film in its own right, beloved by genre fans. But there’s little doubting that they only exist due to the resounding success of the original; a studio, production company, writer or director merely sought to exploit this.

By the early 1990s, the horror film entered something of a fallow period. While it’s erroneous to suggest that there was nothing of value produced – Candyman and Army of Darkness, for example, both arrived in 1992 – it seemed there was very little to entice the teenage demographic to the cinema. Films such as Jacob’s Ladder saw a shift towards more mature themes and the psychological horrors of Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs only exemplified this approach. Merely a decade earlier, the slasher film was in its Golden Age, but as the 80’s wore on, tastes began to change. The teens who flocked to cinemas to take in scenes of gratuitous gore and nudity had all but grown up and moved on while the calibre of output took something of a nose-dive. As the 90’s dawned, purveyors of the slasher were still gamely toiling away. Amid the dreck, there was still a gem or two waiting to be discovered, but seeking out a cinema prepared to show Slumber Party Massacre III or Popcorn was a singularly tricky proposition. For all intents and purposes, the slasher had ceased to exist.

At the same time, a young actor named Kevin Williamson was pursuing a second career as a screenwriter. While attending a class at UCLA he managed to sell his first script, Killing Mrs. Tingle. He soon discovered, however, as the script languished on a shelf, that selling a screenplay did not necessarily equate to said screenplay evolving into a motion picture. But Williamson had an ace up his sleeve. After watching a news special about the serial killer Daniel Rolling, the writer began to sketch out the opening scene for a screenplay that he titled Scary Movie. Having found its way to Dimension Films, the genre arm of Miramax, the script landed on the lap of actress Drew Barrymore. Impressed by the mix of scares, irreverence, and an unapologetic celebration of the genre, she quickly signed on. After cajoling director Wes Craven, still licking his wounds after the failure of Vampire in Brooklyn, the film, now re-titled Scream was an instant hit, catapulting the slasher film and the horror genre back into the spotlight.

  “The resurgence of the slasher offered the opportunity for a new chapter [of The Halloween saga] to be written…”

  The autumnal period between late August and early December proved to be the most fertile ground for new slasher films. October 1997 and November 1998 saw the release of the first two installments in the I Know What You Did Last Summer franchise. The first in the Urban Legend series opened in September 1998, while the latest in the Chucky saga premiered only a month later. Kevin Williamson’s latest genre stab, a mix of high school anxiety crossed with body snatching paranoia in The Faculty rounded out the year, along with Gus Van Sant’s (nearly) shot-for-shot remake of proto-slasher, Psycho. Sandwiched between this new raft of slashers, and teen horrors, was another attempt to bring back a horror titan from the supposed dead. On August 5th, 1998, US audiences once again welcomed back Michael Myers in Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later.

Another product under the Dimension Films banner, Halloween H20 is in many ways the ultimate cash-in, seeking potential box office from two revenue streams, the nascent slasher boom and fans of the Halloween franchise. But it’s too simplistic to dismiss the film as nothing more than an attempt to jump the bandwagon.

For a start, the franchise had hit rock-bottom with Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers five years previously and with the coffers full, here was an ideal opportunity to redress the balance. Was it cynical? Possibly. But the fact of the matter is fans will always want to see more of their favorite anti-heroes. The resurgence of the slasher offered the opportunity for a new chapter to be written and Dimension duly charged Kevin Williamson with the job. His treatment, by way of some heavy exposition, linked the entire story together, from John Carpenter’s original to the forthcoming installment (with the exception of Halloween III: Season of the Witch). After consideration, it was decided to eschew several elements of Williamson’s story including any reference to the series beyond Halloween II. Hence, the alleged working title of Halloween 7: The Revenge of Laurie Strode became Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later. What remained of Williamson’s treatment was a slightly reworked version of the opening sequence, the academy setting and, most important, Laurie Strode.

      Halloween H20 is very much Laurie Strode’s story. Twenty years on she is still coming to terms with the events of Halloween night. Except, of course, she’s not really at all. Her coping strategy is to anesthetize the events with prescription drugs and alcohol. While she has a rudimentary command over her waking nightmares, she has no control over her unconscious mind. This is where we first meet Laurie (now Keri Tate), writhing on the bed in the grip of what we suppose is one of the countless times she awakens screaming. Her son John attempts to reassure her that she’s safe and well.

Of course, when John opens the medicine cabinet, and we see row upon row of prescription bottles. The truth about Keri’s mental condition is etched on his face as he taps several white pills into the palm of his hand. This is how Keri starts the day. This is how Keri starts every day. And when John pointedly mentions that they’re out of Percodan, Keri reacts with a smile and a change of subject. This is Keri back in control, but it’s a thin facade amid the opioid crisis taking place under the Tate roof.

Keri’s relationship with her son is only superficially matriarchal, but the dynamic between the two shifts continuously. As a single mother, responsible for a large number of children as the headmistress of a private academy, she unconsciously draws upon her vocational skills to scold or cajole him. He tries to make light of the increasing tension between them, by half-seriously suggesting: “Today is the day you are going to realize that I am seventeen years old and your overprotection and paranoia is inhibiting my growing process.” Keri’s face darkens though when John pushes to be allowed to leave the academy on a camping trip. When the subject of the anniversary of the Haddonfield murders arises, however, the dynamic shifts again and it is John who assumes the role of adult, drawing a line under the conversation, reminding her that “We’re through with all that.”

  “Keri is floundering […] struggling to reconcile the disparate threads of her life through a thin veneer of normality…”

  Despite the self-medication, or possibly because of it, the visions of Michael Myers remain. In a window reflection, for example, (she briefly mistakes her lover and colleague Will Brennan for Michael), or when a silhouetted figure approaches (Will again). Despite his attention and concern – Will is a counselor at the academy – and an offer to listen to Keri talk on a non-professional level about a problem her problems, Keri brushes him off, ordering another large glass of wine when he briefly excuses himself.

In Williamson’s treatment, Keri reveals the extent of her turmoil to the character Jake (a fellow teacher, who becomes Will in the final script), when he confronts Keri about her substance abuse: “I can go to all the little 12 step meetings in the world, and I can say, “Hi, I’m Keri, and I’m an alcoholic.” And everyone can hold me and tell me everything is going to be fine with Keri once she quits drinking but what you seem to be missing from your loving and non-judgemental point of view is that Keri doesn’t exist. At the end of the day, the Halloween mask comes off and it’s Laurie Strode who has to find a way to get to sleep at night without a butcher knife slicing into her dreams.”

It’s a revealing moment, but in the context of the final film perhaps a little too heavy-handed. Although the audience is mutually complicit in the knowledge that Michael Myers is coming for Keri, she only divulges information about her past and the persistent fear that Michael will one day come to finish the job. Finally disclosing her past, two-thirds of the way through the film, it also becomes abundantly clear that Keri’s alcoholism and addiction to prescription drugs aren’t wholly to blame for her visions and hallucinations, but an exacerbation of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that she hasn’t even begun to address.

      As Halloween approaches, Keri’s alcohol and chemical dependency increase to ward off the encroaching dread that this may be the year Michael finally finds her. And yet, like the Ouroboros – the snake eating its own tail – Keri increasingly uses Michael as a crutch to indulge in her addictions. And when Keri scolds John for going off campus, arguing that all she asks for is one day for him not to disobey her, his response is as cutting as it is final: “If you want to stay handcuffed to your dead brother, that’s fine. But you’re not dragging me along. Not anymore.”

Keri is floundering during the first half of the film and struggling to reconcile the disparate threads of her life through a thin veneer of normality. Like Michael Myers, she also wears a mask. Michael’s is both literal and figurative, concealing any trace of humanity. But Keri’s mask is slipping. Twenty years of hiding, of maintaining a fictional life have taken their toll. Ironically, it’s a work of fiction that brings Keri to the realization that she must face her deepest fear. In a parallel to John Carpenter’s original, during a class discussion on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the notion of fate, Molly Cartwell, the love interest of John, provides the moment of revelation: “Victor reached a point in his life where he had nothing left to lose. The monster saw to that by killing off everybody that he loved. Victor finally had to face it. It was about redemption. It was his fate.”

Another key moment follows when Keri finally allows John to go on the camping trip, telling him: “It’s good for you, it’s good for me.” A mother’s intuition is described as “the deep intuitive blood bond a mother can have with her child”, and it’s never more obvious than during this brief exchange. Keri is ostensibly giving John his freedom when her true motive is to move him out of harm’s way, sensing that Michael is closing in. John, meanwhile, is fully aware that something is amiss, but his plans have changed anyway, which will incur horrific consequences.

  “Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later remains a curiously underappreciated installment in the series.”

  Where Halloween H20 starts to falter is during the latter part of the film. The scenes which feature Michael Myers stalking John and his friends follow slasher conventions to the letter. They’re required to because this is what convention dictates, so it’s no surprise when the most sexually-active couple inevitably dies in line with the puritanical trope. The killing of young Sarah Wainthrope is particularly brutal, though not in a gore-fuelled sense. Instead, we’re made to watch Michael’s impassive masked face as he brings the knife down again and again on the unfortunate Sarah.

Elsewhere, components designed to ramp up the tension are all present. Near escapes, wounds that temporarily slow but don’t stop Michael, keys dropped at the vital moment and a handful of fun, but inconsequential call-backs to Carpenter’s original. It’s all somewhat by-the-numbers until Keri finally comes face to face with Michael. In that brief moment, Keri is Laurie Strode again. She’s no longer the headteacher of a private academy, an addict or a victim; she’s a mother, and she’s a fighter. Laurie is the one holding the gun, and when she tells Will to save himself because she won’t leave her son, we believe her. The dynamic has shifted once again.

Inevitably, it’s Will who finds the sharp end of Michael’s kitchen knife. In a moment of impetuous heroism, he snatches the gun away from Laurie and shoots Michael, only to discover he’s ‘killed’ the campus security guard Ronnie Jones. Shamefully, LL Cool J is given very little to do with a poorly-written attempt at comic relief, aside from reading aloud his attempts at adult fiction to an unseen girlfriend on the end of the phone.

    Laurie, finding unimaginable strength and resolve, finally sends her son out of harm’s way and goes to face her familial demon. In the final reckoning, Laurie, in her own meta moment, seemingly understands the rule of a killer returning for one last scare and following a brief, and almost touching moment of silent reconciliation between siblings, removes the head of the beast.

There’s plenty of truth to Jamie-Lee Curtis’s performance in Halloween H20, and it’s likely because Curtis herself was at the time addicted to alcohol and painkillers (she became sober the year following H20‘s release). Watching the film through fresh eyes after learning of her addiction struggles Curtis’ performance takes on an even greater sense of urgency and pathos. The pain etched upon her face isn’t acting, it’s the anguish of the actor.

With this being the twentieth anniversary of the release of Halloween H20, there has been plenty of reappraisal of the film, with many citing the phrase ‘cash-in’ and dismissing Steve Miner’s film outright for daring to be made in the wake of the Scream phenomenon. H20 seems to fall foul of some of the most vitriolic ire when discussing the late-90s slasher releases, and yet, aside from Scream, probably has the most compelling point to make. It’s undoubtedly a more straightforward film than it’s more celebrated sub-genre cousin, which may go some way to explaining why it receives the most criticism. But it’s no more glossy than any of its contemporaries, and the return of Jamie Lee Curtis in the role of Laurie Strode elevates it above similar material.

Dismiss it as a cash-in all you want. Despite the unfortunate timing of its release, Halloween H20 was actually trying to say something, however heavy-handedly, about the nature of PTSD and its effects on the individual. While Curtis has since revisited the role that she’ll forever be associated with, in the weakest of the series, Halloween: Resurrection and the forthcoming Halloween reinvention from Blumhouse – a film that revokes all but the original film’s place in the canon – Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later remains a curiously underappreciated installment in the series.

  The post The Shape of Things – HALLOWEEN H20: Twenty Years Later appeared first on Nightmare on Film Street - Horror Movie Podcast, News and Reviews.

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[addictionfreedom]

Crystal Meth Recovery Stories

Contents

More about the reality

Has revealed that

For over 5 years. about 18

That more apparent and nation's leading

Their struggle … listen

Story from mom … “my

If you're at a place where you're thinking about recovery, or maybe you're even considering a particular treatment program, here are some stories and advice …

A small sign outside the one-story … crystal meth addiction. "A lot of my friends who also had crystal meth addiction were going down to South Florida. I would ask them, ‘What is down there?’" Lombardo learned through word of mouth …

I once spent an entire day crouched down on my bedroom floor holding a flashlight and picking through my carpet. An entire day. I can't even tell you how many little rocks, crumbs, pieces of dirt, and granules of salt I ate hoping to find the specks of crystal meth I was convinced I had dropped the …

Apr 17, 2015 … Drug cocktails multiply dangers of crystal meth. After a private school education, she lived in London for two years where she says cocaine use …

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The media glamorizes crystal meth, but for those addicted, it's a life-ruining substance. Learn more about the reality of meth through their stories.

Jasmine first tried crystal meth at age 13, and it quickly took over her life. But after treatment at Phoenix House, she's clean and sober and back in school.

Recovering crystal meth addict shares astonishing images and hard-hitting story after getting clean. A man who battled with the highly addictive drug made famous by Breaking Bad has revealed that addiction is a risk for everyone – not a matter of stupidity

And if that means helping to rally the community for marches and protests, …

I have been in the program now for over 5 years. about 18 months of that was a mess of regular relapsing, then I started actually putting in the work …

The reality meth addiction can be found in the stories of the people who've lived through the struggle. These stories are proof that recovery is possible.

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Each year, the number of meth labs operating in Oklahoma continues to drop. Despite that, the number of drug distribution cases has increased, showing the meth problem in our state is far from over. The members of The Recovery Church …

Jun 7, 2016 … In a journal recounting her arduous journey to recovery Sarah gave a … While Sarah's story can be seen as a shining beacon of hope for the many … Tony Abbott called the deadly scourge of crystal methamphetamine a …

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A federal judge denied the bid for release of a man accused of selling crystal methamphetamine … crime involves at least 50 grams of pure meth or 500 grams of a meth mixture. — Follow courts reporter Justin Story on Twitter at …

Oroville library: 10-11 a.m. Computer Comfort; 10:30 a.m. Babies Love Books; 4 5 p.m. School-age children’s story and craft time … 2185 Baldwin Ave. Weekly. Crystal Meth Anonymous: 5:30-6:30 p.m. Oroville Family Resource Center, …

Misery and Pain leads to one of two things: Death or Perseverance This is the story of Emily's crystal meth addiction and ultimate triumph over what could have been seen as a lost cause.

Winnipeggers struggling with crystal meth now have a place to meet and … the hour organizers had planned for as everyone shared stories and got to know each other. "There’s guys with years of recovery that were there who were …

Crystal Meth Addiction Stories tells how some people recover from drug addiction and why others fail.

Nick Stoneman is the face of Queensland’s ice epidemic. He’s young, he’s smart, but he let the drug crystal meth … His alarming story comes as the number of ice users seeking help at Moonyah, the Salvation Army’s Recovery …

Jan 8, 2013 … Could this be the end of me and my romance with Crystal Meth? I was lucky to meet a recovering user (who I still thank to this very day) for …

In a chat with … like he relied on meth, that perhaps he had ‘a special or unique self-control’ which others lack. But he warned people on the thread: ‘I didn’t take long and I was addicted.’ Sharing his amazing recovery story on Reddit …

Aug 2, 2014 … Life as a crystal meth addict. Rob's bedroom is neat. It is in a neat new house, tightly packed alongside other neat new houses, on the fringe of …

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Haney, who has been sober for nearly eight years, now is a manager at Mandalay Recovery Village … Agents find meth in toys and even liquefied into lotion and shampoo bottles that are turned back into crystal meth in the states. “This …

A week-long investigation led to the arrest of three Crystal Springs men and the seizure of approximately $15,000 worth of crystal meth … A story of bravery and hope. Jessica Bowman takes us to the third annual Tribute to Courage and …

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Marking National Recovery Month, a Bend mother has just written … "A Very Fine House, A Mother’s Story of Love, Faith and Crystal Meth." Stoefan introduces readers to her dream of a perfect future for her family — a future torn apart when …

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Crystal Meth Addiction Stories tells how some people recover from drug addiction and why others fail.

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But now a Manitoba woman is sharing the story … to crystal meth. "It was pretty sad, looking back at it now," said Koop, now 20 and in her 11th month of treatment at the Adult and Teen Challenge facility near Brandon, a faith-based …

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Aug 26, 2015 … A look back at Andre Agassi's brush with crystal methamphetamine, which he wrote about in his autobiography 'Open'.

Aug 31, 2015 … Shawn's Story of Recovery … A Family Recovery story from mom … “my drugs of choice were pain pills at age 21 and crystal meth at age 28.

When her first band, Wild Orchid, broke up in 2001, the platinum-selling singer compensated by doing crystal meth. Her drug-induced flight from … Today she’s sober and credits her recovery in large part to the fact that she didn’t publicly …

The post Crystal Meth Recovery Stories appeared first on Freedom From Addiction II.

[therecoversite]

The Cost of An Addiction

New Post has been published on https://www.therecover.com/the-cost-of-an-addiction/

The Cost of An Addiction

(Photo: Jennifer Corbett, The News Journal)

Heroin has a cost, and it’s not always monetary.

For Kim Jones it was her career, her family, her 401(k) and even her class ring. “Nothing was sacred,” the Middletown mother of three recalled. “I thought, ‘This is going to be the way that I die.’ … To me, that sounded like the better option for my family because if I was dead, then they didn’t have to worry about where I was or what I was doing.”

No longer able to hold her job steady, after being employed professionally at AstraZeneca for 10 years, the now 42 year old said she lived from one high to another. “Out of a bottle or out of a needle” searching for answers and self esteem.

Jones recalls standing in her parents driveway, looking her 9-year old son in the eyes as he begged her not to leave him. She had recently divorced and written over custody of her children to parents and was about to move from Delaware to Fort Lauderdale. She had met a man she called her “drug fueled” Prince Charming.

“He said, ‘Mommy, please don’t leave me’ I looked him in the eye and said ‘You’re going to be fine,’” Jones tells, tears welling up in her eyes. “And then I got in the car and drove away. That was my rock bottom, breaking my son’s heart.”

Experts have tried to assess for years the cost of the opioid epidemic, but there are many costs that cannot be accounted for in dollars and cents. Living on the streets, Federal prison time, the never ending destroying and then rebuilding of relationships over the course of an addiction.

Actually determining the value of human life and other costs related to addiction is not an easy task, and the price paid by users and society is monumental, and growing. In a report released from the White house this month, the council of economic advisors have estimated that each person in the US living with a prescription opioid disorder, with heroin use included, costs society roughly $30,000 each year.

The council estimates nationally the cost of the heroin and opioid epidemic to be $504 billion in 2015. This was determined by the factored burdens to the criminal justice system, health care systems, workforce and finally, the thousands who die every year from heroin, fentanyl and opioid related overdoses.

State agencies can’t speak for what the epidemic costs locally and the costs are adding up:

$508 to respond to each call for service for New Castle County Paramedics, with an average of nine overdoses a day in Delaware’s largest county.

  $49 for each dose of naloxone to save a life, with some overdoses requiring multiple doses of the antidote. In 2016, emergency responders administered naloxone 2,334 times statewide. That comes to nearly $115,000.

  An additional $2 million allocated this year to the state Department of Health and Social Services to cover addiction treatment.

  308 lives lost in Delaware last year to drug-related overdoses, and another 215 suspected overdoses reported this year. Over the extended Thanksgiving weekend, 11 in Delaware died of overdoses.

  “Once you’re addicted, you’re not doing it because it’s fun,” said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, co-director of The Opioid Policy Research Collaborative at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management in Massachusetts. “Once you’re addicted, you’re doing it because you have to.”

Simultaneously more children are being funneled into the foster care system as addict parents struggle to take care of their own blood. Hepatitis-C, HIV and other blood borne illnesses are on the rise. On top of that the criminal justice has been flooded with thousands of drug related cases and the following prison sentences.

Every child born exposed to substances like heroin and opiate – a staggering 431 last year in Delaware alone – and the cost of of a 16 day hospital stay to an addicted newborn is $66,700. Opposed to a $3,500 bill that comes with a health child according to date from a 2015 National Institute on Drug Abuse. Infants born exposed to the opioid family cost the state of Delaware alone $29 million dollars last year.

In 2016, the Department of Services for Children, Youth and their families reported a 22% increase in substance exposed babies, and in turn the state has began to enforce the new policies regarding the education and treatment of women suffering from addiction. But while dealing with their recovery, there are little options for housing where children are able to live with their mother.

But things are changing for some of the lucky women at the home named Connections which is a women and children sober living home. It’s one of the only places in Delware that can mothers can recover with their children. Women relearn how to be parents in an intimate and comfortable setting. It houses 22 women and children currently.

“A lot of women want to get treatment but don’t have anyone to help out with their children,” Said Crystal Abbott, a 35 year old mother of four in active recovery. She works as the house manager at the Connections home. “Many women don’t want to get treatment for fear of letting go of their kids.”

At 18, Crystal Abbott was already a mother of two with no way to support herself. Anxiety medication she was prescribed helped her dealing with the challenges of being an overwhelmed single mother. That’s what started her prescription pill abuse and a battle with addiction.

Abbott is now an example for new mothers, with three years in recovery under her belt. She goes on to say “It is achievable to get back to normal again,” she said, “But we didn’t choose to be this way. It’s not fun. We don’t enjoy it while we’re going through it. We just need someone to help us through”

Kim Jones is one of the lucky ones, statistically. She was inspired by a prison counselor while inside the Dansbury, Connecticut Federal Correction institution. She helped her realize that she would not be fulfilled by cashing stolen checks to support her substance abuse problem.

Delaware prisons Department of Corrections allocates $7.2 million or just 2% of the annual budget for substance abuse treatment. But from the departments annual report from 2016 shows that nearly 50% of inmates indicated an alcohol or drug problem.

Decline rates could be as high as 70% among offenders with substance abuse disorder according to a DEA report on Delaware in early 2017. This is an “Alarming rate given that the Delaware prison system did not have an accredited opioid treatment program, nor did it allow medication assisted treatments except for cases with pregnant female inmates” the report stated.

Medication assisted treatment is a controversial way some doctors have chosen to combat the opioid addicted. Methadone, Suboxone or Buprenorphine help starve off cravings and lower the chances of relapse and is considered the standard care among addiction experts.

Delaware’s state prison system spends more than one million each month on prescription medications in relation to the rise of Hepatitis C infectants. That levels out to be about $20,000 per patient per month according to state records.

“The driver in all of these public health crises is the over-prescription of opioids,” said Kolodny, who will speak at The News Journal’s Imagine Delaware forum Monday. “If we really want to curb the epidemic and stop people from dying, we have to ensure effective treatment is easier to access than pain pills, heroin and fentanyl.”

Although Delaware is trying to make its treatment options more comprehensive and inclusive, many say they don’t know where to go for help. And overdose numbers suggest this is true as well.

Almost 48% of Delawares’ 308 overdose deaths in 2016 were people over the age of 40, 87% of those dead were white and more than two thirds were men.

In New Castle County emergency responders are dispatched once ever 80 mins for an overdosed patient. Sometimes it is an overdose, or it’s a call for someone under cardiac arrest, a symptom that veils the one of the symptoms of an overdose.

Between the beginning of this year and the first week of November 2017, Delaware’s Christiana Fire Company responded to 262 overdose related emergencies. A cost of $75,000 price tag was attached to those calls, firefighters responded to the person in need with basic care, and transportation in one of the departments seven ambulances.

It averages out to $286 per call, but that cost doesn’t account for the additional price of Naloxone, the overdose reversing medication that is used more and more by first responders. Nor does it account for the breathing treatments that may be needed to stabilize an unconscious person. “Though our costs for services have increased and the demand for our services continues to grow, our funding has shrunk,” Chief Rich Perillo of the New Castle Fire Department said. “We continue to do more with less and are apparently expected to do so, as no real options or serious financial assistance have been considered or offered.”

Last year 73 of the 1,595 Naloxone recipients were considered “repeat offenders” having been given one or more doses of Naloxone before, according to the Delaware office of Emergency services. The state Department of Health and Social Services has requested $100,000 to cover the cost of naloxone for first responders statewide in the coming budget year.

ICU Doctor Sandra Gibney argues that Delaware’s 308 overdose deaths would have prevented if the patients had not received “handoff care” or if the patients had followed through with another real person instead of a brochure. The state Health Department has requested $328,500 to fund 20 additional sober living beds – housing that plays a direct role in the success of men, women and children leaving treatment or detox.

The federal Drug Enforcement Administration called heroin the “primary drug threat” to Delaware as federal, state and local law enforcement reported increases in heroin trafficking, heroin seizures, abuse and overdose deaths, according to its 2017 analysis. In Sussex County alone an estimated two thirds of criminal cases are attributed to the rise in heroin and opioid use.

The burden is felt by all law enforcement that now carry Naloxone as another mandatory tool on their belt. New Castle county police have used Naloxone to save 30 lives but the department has recorded 284 suspected heroin overdoses in the 11 months of this year alone.

There isn’t an easy Band-Aid for the public health crisis that many law enforcement agencies see daily – those in need call 911, triggering a response that reaches front-line police officers and paramedics, all the way to state prosecutors and Superior Court judges.

State Attorney General Matt Denn warns that not every person is going to be helped in the same way, and it will require innovative thinking and expanding treatment options. “This is not going to be fixed for free,” he said. “The state is going to have to make some investments”

[therecoversite]

The Cost of An Addiction

New Post has been published on https://therecoverdev.wpengine.com/the-cost-of-an-addiction/

The Cost of An Addiction

(Photo: Jennifer Corbett, The News Journal)

Heroin has a cost, and it’s not always monetary.

For Kim Jones it was her career, her family, her 401(k) and even her class ring. “Nothing was sacred,” the Middletown mother of three recalled. “I thought, ‘This is going to be the way that I die.’ … To me, that sounded like the better option for my family because if I was dead, then they didn’t have to worry about where I was or what I was doing.”

No longer able to hold her job steady, after being employed professionally at AstraZeneca for 10 years, the now 42 year old said she lived from one high to another. “Out of a bottle or out of a needle” searching for answers and self esteem.

Jones recalls standing in her parents driveway, looking her 9-year old son in the eyes as he begged her not to leave him. She had recently divorced and written over custody of her children to parents and was about to move from Delaware to Fort Lauderdale. She had met a man she called her “drug fueled” Prince Charming.

“He said, ‘Mommy, please don’t leave me’ I looked him in the eye and said ‘You’re going to be fine,’” Jones tells, tears welling up in her eyes. “And then I got in the car and drove away. That was my rock bottom, breaking my son’s heart.”

Experts have tried to assess for years the cost of the opioid epidemic, but there are many costs that cannot be accounted for in dollars and cents. Living on the streets, Federal prison time, the never ending destroying and then rebuilding of relationships over the course of an addiction.

Actually determining the value of human life and other costs related to addiction is not an easy task, and the price paid by users and society is monumental, and growing. In a report released from the White house this month, the council of economic advisors have estimated that each person in the US living with a prescription opioid disorder, with heroin use included, costs society roughly $30,000 each year.

The council estimates nationally the cost of the heroin and opioid epidemic to be $504 billion in 2015. This was determined by the factored burdens to the criminal justice system, health care systems, workforce and finally, the thousands who die every year from heroin, fentanyl and opioid related overdoses.

State agencies can’t speak for what the epidemic costs locally and the costs are adding up:

$508 to respond to each call for service for New Castle County Paramedics, with an average of nine overdoses a day in Delaware’s largest county.

  $49 for each dose of naloxone to save a life, with some overdoses requiring multiple doses of the antidote. In 2016, emergency responders administered naloxone 2,334 times statewide. That comes to nearly $115,000.

  An additional $2 million allocated this year to the state Department of Health and Social Services to cover addiction treatment.

  308 lives lost in Delaware last year to drug-related overdoses, and another 215 suspected overdoses reported this year. Over the extended Thanksgiving weekend, 11 in Delaware died of overdoses.

  “Once you’re addicted, you’re not doing it because it’s fun,” said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, co-director of The Opioid Policy Research Collaborative at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management in Massachusetts. “Once you’re addicted, you’re doing it because you have to.”

Simultaneously more children are being funneled into the foster care system as addict parents struggle to take care of their own blood. Hepatitis-C, HIV and other blood borne illnesses are on the rise. On top of that the criminal justice has been flooded with thousands of drug related cases and the following prison sentences.

Every child born exposed to substances like heroin and opiate – a staggering 431 last year in Delaware alone – and the cost of of a 16 day hospital stay to an addicted newborn is $66,700. Opposed to a $3,500 bill that comes with a health child according to date from a 2015 National Institute on Drug Abuse. Infants born exposed to the opioid family cost the state of Delaware alone $29 million dollars last year.

In 2016, the Department of Services for Children, Youth and their families reported a 22% increase in substance exposed babies, and in turn the state has began to enforce the new policies regarding the education and treatment of women suffering from addiction. But while dealing with their recovery, there are little options for housing where children are able to live with their mother.

But things are changing for some of the lucky women at the home named Connections which is a women and children sober living home. It’s one of the only places in Delware that can mothers can recover with their children. Women relearn how to be parents in an intimate and comfortable setting. It houses 22 women and children currently.

“A lot of women want to get treatment but don’t have anyone to help out with their children,” Said Crystal Abbott, a 35 year old mother of four in active recovery. She works as the house manager at the Connections home. “Many women don’t want to get treatment for fear of letting go of their kids.”

At 18, Crystal Abbott was already a mother of two with no way to support herself. Anxiety medication she was prescribed helped her dealing with the challenges of being an overwhelmed single mother. That’s what started her prescription pill abuse and a battle with addiction.

Abbott is now an example for new mothers, with three years in recovery under her belt. She goes on to say “It is achievable to get back to normal again,” she said, “But we didn’t choose to be this way. It’s not fun. We don’t enjoy it while we’re going through it. We just need someone to help us through”

Kim Jones is one of the lucky ones, statistically. She was inspired by a prison counselor while inside the Dansbury, Connecticut Federal Correction institution. She helped her realize that she would not be fulfilled by cashing stolen checks to support her substance abuse problem.

Delaware prisons Department of Corrections allocates $7.2 million or just 2% of the annual budget for substance abuse treatment. But from the departments annual report from 2016 shows that nearly 50% of inmates indicated an alcohol or drug problem.

Decline rates could be as high as 70% among offenders with substance abuse disorder according to a DEA report on Delaware in early 2017. This is an “Alarming rate given that the Delaware prison system did not have an accredited opioid treatment program, nor did it allow medication assisted treatments except for cases with pregnant female inmates” the report stated.

Medication assisted treatment is a controversial way some doctors have chosen to combat the opioid addicted. Methadone, Suboxone or Buprenorphine help starve off cravings and lower the chances of relapse and is considered the standard care among addiction experts.

Delaware’s state prison system spends more than one million each month on prescription medications in relation to the rise of Hepatitis C infectants. That levels out to be about $20,000 per patient per month according to state records.

“The driver in all of these public health crises is the over-prescription of opioids,” said Kolodny, who will speak at The News Journal’s Imagine Delaware forum Monday. “If we really want to curb the epidemic and stop people from dying, we have to ensure effective treatment is easier to access than pain pills, heroin and fentanyl.”

Although Delaware is trying to make its treatment options more comprehensive and inclusive, many say they don’t know where to go for help. And overdose numbers suggest this is true as well.

Almost 48% of Delawares’ 308 overdose deaths in 2016 were people over the age of 40, 87% of those dead were white and more than two thirds were men.

In New Castle County emergency responders are dispatched once ever 80 mins for an overdosed patient. Sometimes it is an overdose, or it’s a call for someone under cardiac arrest, a symptom that veils the one of the symptoms of an overdose.

Between the beginning of this year and the first week of November 2017, Delaware’s Christiana Fire Company responded to 262 overdose related emergencies. A cost of $75,000 price tag was attached to those calls, firefighters responded to the person in need with basic care, and transportation in one of the departments seven ambulances.

It averages out to $286 per call, but that cost doesn’t account for the additional price of Naloxone, the overdose reversing medication that is used more and more by first responders. Nor does it account for the breathing treatments that may be needed to stabilize an unconscious person. “Though our costs for services have increased and the demand for our services continues to grow, our funding has shrunk,” Chief Rich Perillo of the New Castle Fire Department said. “We continue to do more with less and are apparently expected to do so, as no real options or serious financial assistance have been considered or offered.”

Last year 73 of the 1,595 Naloxone recipients were considered “repeat offenders” having been given one or more doses of Naloxone before, according to the Delaware office of Emergency services. The state Department of Health and Social Services has requested $100,000 to cover the cost of naloxone for first responders statewide in the coming budget year.

ICU Doctor Sandra Gibney argues that Delaware’s 308 overdose deaths would have prevented if the patients had not received “handoff care” or if the patients had followed through with another real person instead of a brochure. The state Health Department has requested $328,500 to fund 20 additional sober living beds – housing that plays a direct role in the success of men, women and children leaving treatment or detox.

The federal Drug Enforcement Administration called heroin the “primary drug threat” to Delaware as federal, state and local law enforcement reported increases in heroin trafficking, heroin seizures, abuse and overdose deaths, according to its 2017 analysis. In Sussex County alone an estimated two thirds of criminal cases are attributed to the rise in heroin and opioid use.

The burden is felt by all law enforcement that now carry Naloxone as another mandatory tool on their belt. New Castle county police have used Naloxone to save 30 lives but the department has recorded 284 suspected heroin overdoses in the 11 months of this year alone.

There isn’t an easy Band-Aid for the public health crisis that many law enforcement agencies see daily – those in need call 911, triggering a response that reaches front-line police officers and paramedics, all the way to state prosecutors and Superior Court judges.

State Attorney General Matt Denn warns that not every person is going to be helped in the same way, and it will require innovative thinking and expanding treatment options. “This is not going to be fixed for free,” he said. “The state is going to have to make some investments”

[therecoversite]

The Cost of An Addiction

New Post has been published on https://therecoverdev.wpengine.com/the-cost-of-an-addiction/

The Cost of An Addiction

(Photo: Jennifer Corbett, The News Journal)

Heroin has a cost, and it’s not always monetary.

For Kim Jones it was her career, her family, her 401(k) and even her class ring. “Nothing was sacred,” the Middletown mother of three recalled. “I thought, ‘This is going to be the way that I die.’ … To me, that sounded like the better option for my family because if I was dead, then they didn’t have to worry about where I was or what I was doing.”

No longer able to hold her job steady, after being employed professionally at AstraZeneca for 10 years, the now 42 year old said she lived from one high to another. “Out of a bottle or out of a needle” searching for answers and self esteem.

Jones recalls standing in her parents driveway, looking her 9-year old son in the eyes as he begged her not to leave him. She had recently divorced and written over custody of her children to parents and was about to move from Delaware to Fort Lauderdale. She had met a man she called her “drug fueled” Prince Charming.

“He said, ‘Mommy, please don’t leave me’ I looked him in the eye and said ‘You’re going to be fine,’” Jones tells, tears welling up in her eyes. “And then I got in the car and drove away. That was my rock bottom, breaking my son’s heart.”

Experts have tried to assess for years the cost of the opioid epidemic, but there are many costs that cannot be accounted for in dollars and cents. Living on the streets, Federal prison time, the never ending destroying and then rebuilding of relationships over the course of an addiction.

Actually determining the value of human life and other costs related to addiction is not an easy task, and the price paid by users and society is monumental, and growing. In a report released from the White house this month, the council of economic advisors have estimated that each person in the US living with a prescription opioid disorder, with heroin use included, costs society roughly $30,000 each year.

The council estimates nationally the cost of the heroin and opioid epidemic to be $504 billion in 2015. This was determined by the factored burdens to the criminal justice system, health care systems, workforce and finally, the thousands who die every year from heroin, fentanyl and opioid related overdoses.

State agencies can’t speak for what the epidemic costs locally and the costs are adding up:

$508 to respond to each call for service for New Castle County Paramedics, with an average of nine overdoses a day in Delaware’s largest county.

  $49 for each dose of naloxone to save a life, with some overdoses requiring multiple doses of the antidote. In 2016, emergency responders administered naloxone 2,334 times statewide. That comes to nearly $115,000.

  An additional $2 million allocated this year to the state Department of Health and Social Services to cover addiction treatment.

  308 lives lost in Delaware last year to drug-related overdoses, and another 215 suspected overdoses reported this year. Over the extended Thanksgiving weekend, 11 in Delaware died of overdoses.

  “Once you’re addicted, you’re not doing it because it’s fun,” said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, co-director of The Opioid Policy Research Collaborative at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management in Massachusetts. “Once you’re addicted, you’re doing it because you have to.”

Simultaneously more children are being funneled into the foster care system as addict parents struggle to take care of their own blood. Hepatitis-C, HIV and other blood borne illnesses are on the rise. On top of that the criminal justice has been flooded with thousands of drug related cases and the following prison sentences.

Every child born exposed to substances like heroin and opiate – a staggering 431 last year in Delaware alone – and the cost of of a 16 day hospital stay to an addicted newborn is $66,700. Opposed to a $3,500 bill that comes with a health child according to date from a 2015 National Institute on Drug Abuse. Infants born exposed to the opioid family cost the state of Delaware alone $29 million dollars last year.

In 2016, the Department of Services for Children, Youth and their families reported a 22% increase in substance exposed babies, and in turn the state has began to enforce the new policies regarding the education and treatment of women suffering from addiction. But while dealing with their recovery, there are little options for housing where children are able to live with their mother.

But things are changing for some of the lucky women at the home named Connections which is a women and children sober living home. It’s one of the only places in Delware that can mothers can recover with their children. Women relearn how to be parents in an intimate and comfortable setting. It houses 22 women and children currently.

“A lot of women want to get treatment but don’t have anyone to help out with their children,” Said Crystal Abbott, a 35 year old mother of four in active recovery. She works as the house manager at the Connections home. “Many women don’t want to get treatment for fear of letting go of their kids.”

At 18, Crystal Abbott was already a mother of two with no way to support herself. Anxiety medication she was prescribed helped her dealing with the challenges of being an overwhelmed single mother. That’s what started her prescription pill abuse and a battle with addiction.

Abbott is now an example for new mothers, with three years in recovery under her belt. She goes on to say “It is achievable to get back to normal again,” she said, “But we didn’t choose to be this way. It’s not fun. We don’t enjoy it while we’re going through it. We just need someone to help us through”

Kim Jones is one of the lucky ones, statistically. She was inspired by a prison counselor while inside the Dansbury, Connecticut Federal Correction institution. She helped her realize that she would not be fulfilled by cashing stolen checks to support her substance abuse problem.

Delaware prisons Department of Corrections allocates $7.2 million or just 2% of the annual budget for substance abuse treatment. But from the departments annual report from 2016 shows that nearly 50% of inmates indicated an alcohol or drug problem.

Decline rates could be as high as 70% among offenders with substance abuse disorder according to a DEA report on Delaware in early 2017. This is an “Alarming rate given that the Delaware prison system did not have an accredited opioid treatment program, nor did it allow medication assisted treatments except for cases with pregnant female inmates” the report stated.

Medication assisted treatment is a controversial way some doctors have chosen to combat the opioid addicted. Methadone, Suboxone or Buprenorphine help starve off cravings and lower the chances of relapse and is considered the standard care among addiction experts.

Delaware’s state prison system spends more than one million each month on prescription medications in relation to the rise of Hepatitis C infectants. That levels out to be about $20,000 per patient per month according to state records.

“The driver in all of these public health crises is the over-prescription of opioids,” said Kolodny, who will speak at The News Journal’s Imagine Delaware forum Monday. “If we really want to curb the epidemic and stop people from dying, we have to ensure effective treatment is easier to access than pain pills, heroin and fentanyl.”

Although Delaware is trying to make its treatment options more comprehensive and inclusive, many say they don’t know where to go for help. And overdose numbers suggest this is true as well.

Almost 48% of Delawares’ 308 overdose deaths in 2016 were people over the age of 40, 87% of those dead were white and more than two thirds were men.

In New Castle County emergency responders are dispatched once ever 80 mins for an overdosed patient. Sometimes it is an overdose, or it’s a call for someone under cardiac arrest, a symptom that veils the one of the symptoms of an overdose.

Between the beginning of this year and the first week of November 2017, Delaware’s Christiana Fire Company responded to 262 overdose related emergencies. A cost of $75,000 price tag was attached to those calls, firefighters responded to the person in need with basic care, and transportation in one of the departments seven ambulances.

It averages out to $286 per call, but that cost doesn’t account for the additional price of Naloxone, the overdose reversing medication that is used more and more by first responders. Nor does it account for the breathing treatments that may be needed to stabilize an unconscious person. “Though our costs for services have increased and the demand for our services continues to grow, our funding has shrunk,” Chief Rich Perillo of the New Castle Fire Department said. “We continue to do more with less and are apparently expected to do so, as no real options or serious financial assistance have been considered or offered.”

Last year 73 of the 1,595 Naloxone recipients were considered “repeat offenders” having been given one or more doses of Naloxone before, according to the Delaware office of Emergency services. The state Department of Health and Social Services has requested $100,000 to cover the cost of naloxone for first responders statewide in the coming budget year.

ICU Doctor Sandra Gibney argues that Delaware’s 308 overdose deaths would have prevented if the patients had not received “handoff care” or if the patients had followed through with another real person instead of a brochure. The state Health Department has requested $328,500 to fund 20 additional sober living beds – housing that plays a direct role in the success of men, women and children leaving treatment or detox.

The federal Drug Enforcement Administration called heroin the “primary drug threat” to Delaware as federal, state and local law enforcement reported increases in heroin trafficking, heroin seizures, abuse and overdose deaths, according to its 2017 analysis. In Sussex County alone an estimated two thirds of criminal cases are attributed to the rise in heroin and opioid use.

The burden is felt by all law enforcement that now carry Naloxone as another mandatory tool on their belt. New Castle county police have used Naloxone to save 30 lives but the department has recorded 284 suspected heroin overdoses in the 11 months of this year alone.

There isn’t an easy Band-Aid for the public health crisis that many law enforcement agencies see daily – those in need call 911, triggering a response that reaches front-line police officers and paramedics, all the way to state prosecutors and Superior Court judges.

State Attorney General Matt Denn warns that not every person is going to be helped in the same way, and it will require innovative thinking and expanding treatment options. “This is not going to be fixed for free,” he said. “The state is going to have to make some investments”