Safe, effective drug/alcohol treatment
All across this country in small towns, rural areas and cities, alcoholism and drug abuse are destroying the lives of men, women and their families. Where to turn for help? What to do when friends, dignity and perhaps employment are lost?
The answer is Palm Partners Recovery Center. It’s a proven path to getting sober and staying sober.
Palm Partners’ innovative and consistently successful treatment includes: a focus on holistic health, a multi-disciplinary approach, a 12-step recovery program and customized aftercare. Depend on us for help with:
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If you or your loved one is in need of treatment for alcohol or drug addiction please give us a call at 800-951-6135.
We depend on our parents.
Dealing with an alcoholic is never easy, but when the alcoholic is your parent, the situation becomes even more difficult. Most children look up to their parents. They go to their parents for advice. Before a person has a family of their own, they rely on their parents to plan and host all holidays and other special occasions.
Sure, some people will tell you that coping with an alcoholic parent, once you are grown up and out of the house, is as easy as distancing yourself until they get help. The reality is much more complicated. For instance, it is becoming more and more common for adults in their 20’s or even 30’s to depend on their parents for financial assistance. Even if you are financially independent, you may get into a jam and need your parents help. You may have kids and want them to have a relationship with their grandparents. You may even be put into a position of helping your parents out financially because one or both of them needs help. Whatever the case may be, coping with an alcoholic parent is not easy.
Get Help.
As crazy as it may sound, sometimes coping with an alcoholic parent means getting help yourself. Usually, the children of an alcoholic have issues of their own that are caused by growing up in an unstable household. You may have trouble forming connections to other people, because your alcoholic parent made it difficult to trust and count on others. You may avoid confrontation because when you confronted your alcoholic parents as a kid, things could turn ugly. Even if you were out of the house before your parent started drinking heavily, you could feel abandoned and betrayed by your alcoholic parent.
Coping with an alcoholic is much easier and more effective if you become healthy first. There are many support groups and therapists that deal specifically with coping with an alcoholic parent. These groups can also be a good resource for advice on how to stop enabling an alcoholic parent and where to find help for them.
Set boundaries.
Although it’s not always easy, coping with an alcoholic parent means setting healthy emotional boundaries. Talk to them (when they are sober) about what you will and won’t tolerate. This is not about telling your parent what to do; it is about ensuring your own safety and well-being. Let them know that if they keep getting drunk, you will take action (such as leaving the house, not letting them watch the children on their own, or not taking their calls when they are intoxicated). Stay consistent about enforcing these boundaries. Inconsistency will only make your parent realize that you don’t mean what you say and lets them continue to pull the emotional triggers that keep you stuck in enabling their behavior. When you are coping with an alcoholic parent, it’s important to pick your moments when you talk to them. If your parent is drunk, any kind of talk will probably devolve into an argument, and it’s an argument you will rarely win. He or she may not even remember what you said the next day.
If you or your loved one is in need of treatment for alcohol or drug addiction please give us a call at 800-951-6135.
Photos by Wendy Maeda/Globe Staff
If you or your loved one is in need of treatment for alchol and/or drug addiction please give us a call at 800-951-6135.
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If your loved one is in need of treatment for alchol and/or drug addiction please give us a call at 800-951-6135.
Unfortunately, it isn’t uncommon for people to mix cocaine and alcohol.
Some people like to balance the “down” of alcohol with the “up” of cocaine. People who find they are getting too drunk may use cocaine in order to make themselves a little more sober and in order to continue drinking and socializing. Likewise, people may use alcohol to dampen the uncomfortable anxiety and hyperactivity that occur after cocaine use.
The combination of cocaine and alcohol can produce a sense of increased and prolonged euphoria than either substance could on their own. However, new research has shown that a third chemical, cocaethylene builds up in the livers among those who mix the two drugs. The chemical may be responsible for the increased effects of mixing cocaine and alcohol.
Few outside of the field of pharmacology have even heard of cocaethylene. But drug addiction clinics say they are becoming more and more concerned by the health risks that are associated with the chemical. This is the only known example of the body forming a third drug following the use of two others.
About one-sixth of the cocaine that is ingested undergoes a chemical process and is changed into cocaethylene in the body when taken with alcohol. When cocaine is taken intravenously, up to 24 percent of the cocaine is transformed.
Along with being toxic to the liver, cocaethylene causes a more significant rise in heart rate and blood pressure than cocaine itself, so it is even more toxic to the heart than cocaine by itself. That is why concurrent use of cocaine and alcohol has been associated with greater risk of sudden death than after cocaine alone. This is especially risky for people who have an underlying heart condition.
Many have blamed heart attacks in people under 40 on this chemical. Unfortunately, very little is known about cocaethylene, so few experts can agree on the exact nature of the threat to users. There is a growing suspicion, however, that combining cocaine and alcohol may be at least partially responsible in the increase in the number of people in their 30’s that are suffering from heart problems.
Others, however, claim that the increase in cardiac related deaths may simply be due to a better analysis of postmortem data, which has raised awareness of cardiac-related illnesses, rather than any external factor.
There is also emerging evidence about the dangerous social effects of combining alcohol and cocaine. Cocaine use allows drinkers to consume vast amounts of alcohol, and this effect has been blamed for an increase in sexually risky behavior among the young and rising incidences of violence. Many small studies of young people arrested for violent behavior have shown that the majority were on both cocaine and alcohol.
More research and bigger studies will need to be performed in order to determine the exact impact of combining cocaine and alcohol, and both its physiological and social effect. Until someone proves the link, it is likely that people will continue to mix cocaine and alcohol. For some, this could prove to be a deadly combination.
If your loved one is in need of treatment for alcohol or cocaine addiction please give us a call at 800-951-6135.
Source:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/nov/08/cocaine-alcohol-mixture-health-risks
http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/showwiki.php?title=Cocaethylene
