Our alternative is to increase and lengthen our sentences for people who have serious drinking problems, and so far the Legislature hasn't been willing to do that, and I'm not sure society wants a person — even if they have their second or third DWI — to be put in prison for 25 years.
Every so often I’d run into family members who’d let the situation go in the belief that treatment was futile until the drinker themselves decided they ‘wanted’ to quit.
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Anyway, it’s clear from this and a host of other examples that for some offenders at least, simple incarceration is never enough.
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If you work in public health, you can breathe a sigh of relief. Now when people in need show up, whether it’s at the clinic, in the ER, or in the hospital, there are funds to help defray the cost.
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How do you find room for new attitudes when the old ones are still omnipresent in the background?
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Given that addiction by its nature puts many treatment clients into direct conflict with the law, I don’t see how we can afford to ignore these issues.
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It’s always been fun for the public to speculate on what drove someone to literally disappear inside the bottle.
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…the preoccupation with overdose death rates inadvertently distracted the public from a much larger and more enduring medical and social problem: an expanding population of persons with chronic Substance Use Disorders (SUDs).
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Of course, people who work in treatment know that there’s already solid base of regular users, millions of them, including daily smokers.
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I hate to see drunk driving convictions overturned for procedural errors, because I suspect that eventually, those fatality stats will reverse course and begin to climb again.
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“It’s still about pre-natal care,” I recall one (nurse) explaining.
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For many people, however, including helping professionals, it’s tempting to just give up
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