An Alcohol Class is Good Start if You Worry About Drinking Patterns

Are you an alcoholic? This is not such a simple question. Seemingly the answer should be yes, no or maybe. As a counselor for both in-class and online alcohol classes I firmly believe that people who have drinking problems are aware of them. Of course denial is the first stage of alcoholism – but that does not necessarily mean you are an alcoholic.

Every Day Drinkers

Is everyone who consumes alcohol every day an alcoholic? Is everyone who has a drinking problem an alcoholic? The answers to both of these questions are no.

If you have one beer or glass of wine every day you neither have a drinking problem nor are you an alcoholic. However, if you drink to the point of intoxication every day you most definitely have a drinking problem and should stop drinking and seek help immediately. The line is drawn when someone is unable to alter their drinking habits despite evidence of it's problems.

Drinking to the point of intoxication is a good sign you have a problem and could be an alcoholic. Other signs include: how much time you spend on alcohol - either thinking about it, purchasing it, or consuming it. In other words do your urges to drink increasingly consume your time and interfere with work, relationships, and other activities? Have people made comments to you about your drinking? Have they asked you to cut down or stop? Have you tried to stop and failed? Does your personality change when you drink? Do you become more moody or boisterous after a few drinks? Are you able to consume more alcohol than many of your friends? Does alcoholism run in your family?

If you or someone you care about might have a problem with alcohol,  I urge you to seek help as quickly as possible. If you prefer to maintain your anonymity or want to be on a flexible schedule, sign up for an online alcohol class. While change might feel scary, take small steps. Big changes come from changing one small thing. Start with an online alcohol class.

Go Sober for October

I am challenging all of my loyal readers to go sober for October. There are many good reasons why you should not touch a drop of booze for this entire month. Can you name some?




Not only is it beneficial for your health to give your liver a break and lighter on your wallet, put away up for that trip you've wanted to take, but how about the calories you safe for your waistline if those reasons are not enough.

For Your Health!

The best reason to give up drinking for a month is for your health. Not only do alcoholic beverages contain a lot of sugar but all alcoholic beverages are filtered through the liver. Many people drink every day. Alcohol is loaded with empty calories consider all of the empty calories you will save. One organ that will thank you is your liver. It does not like having to process poison from your body. Yes, alcohol is a poison.

Many people who take this challenge experience a slight weight loss, clearer skin and eyes, improved quality of sleep, and a feeling of wellness. If you haven't challenged yourself with an alcohol free month, try it. Your body will appreciate it.


For Your Wallet
Alcohol is expensive and getting more costly by the day. Three drinks at a bar a week will set you back about $20. That is $80 for the month or about $1,000 in savings if you abstain for a year.

Even if you drink at home you can figure on a $1 a drink. That is $12 a month or about $150 per year. You could use that money to buy something nice for yourself or perhaps take an 8-hour, level 1 alcohol class which may actually help you make the decision to quit drinking all together.

Alcohol Classes or Banning Booze on Campus?

This is the sixth in a series of blogs looking at the problem of binge drinking on college campuses. As a counselor for both in-class and online alcohol classes I have many college students attending our alcohol classes. Some are them are in class for minor in possession (MIP) violations, while others have incurred driving under the influence (DUI) or other alcohol-related problems.

Every one of these students attest to the fact that binge drinking is rampant on campus. So the question begs to be asked: what should be done? Should college campuses be dry? Should alcohol awareness classes be mandatory for incoming freshmen?

We know that adolescents have been given the clear message that alcohol consumption is not healthy. So, what is the motivation for a student to drink unsafe amounts of alcohol despite knowledge of its harmful effects?

There are a lot of alcohol education programs in the U.S., additionally there are even online alcohol classes available to this tech savvy generation. Students know that binge drinking is high risk behavior that drastically increases the possibility of harmful consequences such as sexual assault, violence, drunk driving, and future alcohol dependency. If those are not frightening enough how about the fact that for most, alcohol consumption is illegal!

These students know the risks and how they can get in trouble with school authorities and the law. So why do they they persist in binge drinking anyway? That will be the subject of the next entry into this blog series.

Drug Classes Teach About How to Avoid Gateway Drugs

How do you avoid using gateway drugs? Every drug class and drug counselor will tell you – abstinence. If you never try them you are guaranteed not to become addicted to a drug.

It has long been believed that tobacco is a gateway drug. Once your body experiences the joys and horrors of addiction to nicotine, you start to crave other addictive substances such as marijuana and alcohol. Often times, these substances are used together. How often do you see someone with a cocktail and a cigarette?  Once addicted to alcohol or marijuana, which are also considered to be gateway drugs, you are more likely to try more potent drugs such as cocaine or heroin. The theory is, "if you liked that, you will really like this." Besides, most of your friends are trying it.

Experts continue to claim marijuana is "the gateway drug". While I agree that marijuana is a gateway drug, I say that all drugs are gateway drugs! Think about that for a moment.

Drug use is a slippery slope and most people are unaware of or minimize how far they've slipped. We know that drug abuse kills but what we fail to consider is how drug abuse started out as a simple and fun way to hang out with friends. No one starts out with the goal of becoming addicted. Many drug users do not consider themselves addicted even though they think about the next time they will use, and look forward to it. Or feel a slight tension when they are not able to use. Whatever the case may be, I encourage you to stop immediately. If you stop now, then you never will become an addict. If you don’t, there is a good chance you will.

If you or someone you care about is using drugs, please seek help immediately. A good place to start is an anonymous online drug class. This will raise your awareness about your own use of gateway and/or stronger drugs.

Why Athletes Could Benefit from Drug Class

Professional athletes usually have very short careers. Even if one manages to sustain a long career they always end before the age of 50, usually before the age of 40, and many before the age of 30.

To stay on top for the few short years they have, athletes do whatever it takes to “stay in the game,” including taking performance enhancing drugs, anti-inflammatories  (like cortisone) as well as prescription medications to ease pain.

Athletes are drawn to prescription stimulants because these drugs give them a boost of focus and energy. Seeking a competitive edge, some players feign symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to get “legal” amphetamines.

Does Major League Baseball have a problem with stimulants? You bet it does!

The number of players getting “therapeutic use exemptions” from baseball’s amphetamines ban, quadrupled in recent years. While some players undoubtedly have a legitimate medical need for ADHD medications, it appears that others are merely looking for ways to evade the amphetamine ban.

I would like to see MLB and other organizations work harder toward keeping athletes from using prescription drugs. Just because it is available, and teams have on-staff physicians, does not mean that these should be doled out like Halloween candy. Therefore, I believe it would be very beneficial if MLB mandated drug classes for all players. They are our heroes after all.

Why Not Take a Drug Class?

As a counselor for both in-class and online drug classes I can tell you there is nothing funny about addiction. That said, I want to start this blog entry with a joke: "How can you tell an addict is lying? Her lips are moving."

The human brain is a powerful organ. It can convince the rest of the body to what it wants and when it wants. Deception and denial are sentinel features of active addiction.

Addiction leads people to commit crimes and to lie to loved ones and practitioners -- not to mention to themselves -- in order to satisfy the illness's obsession with chemicals or behaviors that deaden or otherwise alter feelings.

Think You’re Safe?

You may think just because you smoke a joint now and again for pop a Percocet here and there you are ok. Guess again! It's not just people addicted to the "hard stuff" who are in denial. There are millions of people equally addicted to legal substances, including but not limited to alcohol and nicotine.

If you think you are drinking, smoking or using drugs too often, I encourage you to take a drug class. Drug classes will not only educate you about the drugs and their effects on the human body, but help you gauge the nature of your use patterns. If you prefer to maintain total anonymity, there are online drug classes too.

Lung cancer kills 160,000 Americans each year, more than prescription painkillers and, despite the fact that it kills far more women than breast cancer, it gets much less attention. My mother, who died at 58 of lung cancer, never had to lie or commit crimes to buy her drugs, but the illness drove her to deception in myriad ways, not the least of which was to ignore her health. She smoked until the last weeks of her life and hid her cigarettes the way an alcoholic hides bottles or an addict hides a stash.

Those outside of the illness of addiction see the crimes and lies and conclude that "these people" must be morally depraved: thus the long-standing and persistent cultural conviction that addiction is a failure of willpower and morals. It can be tempting for physicians to take the lies personally and turn against their patients in anger.

Having lived with many people addicted to various drugs, including both my parents, I understand this temptation. After all, if we addicts respected you, wouldn't we tell you the truth?

Well, hell -- in active addiction, we can't spot the truth if it falls on us, which it often does. Distortion of reality is part of addiction. As the late author David Foster Wallace, himself a recovering alcoholic and nicotine addict, once said, addiction is the only illness that tells us we're not sick.

Social stigma throws up additional disincentives for an active addict to face the truth. For several years I was reluctant to admit to my physician that I was having a terrible problem with my medications: I knew if I mentioned the A-word I would be kicked out of the practice into a psychiatric hospital -- thus being forced to deal not only with the complications of drug withdrawal but also with I didn't know how much debilitating pain. Call me proud, but I also couldn't bear to see the look in the clinic staff's eyes when my chart was labeled with the Scarlet A.

In the end, after seeing my father die at 68 of gastrointestinal cancer that was untreatable because of his severe alcoholic cirrhosis, I decided I had to get help. I was able to hire a physician to manage an outpatient detox for me. I was lucky -- not everyone is so fortunate.

Facing the Truth

Dr. Capretto of Gateway told me it's hard to tell how many Pennsylvanians need addiction treatment and can't get it, but, according to a report from the Pennsylvania Recovery Organizations Alliance, in 2009 more than 800,000 people in our state couldn't get treatment because of financial constraints. Those who want to get sober who have neither the cash nor insurance to cover medically supervised detox and those on Medicare -- which, unbelievably, does not pay for treatment centers -- have to sweat it out on their own, a dubious and sometimes risky proposition, especially if they've been taking popular sedatives such as Xanax or Ativan, or even alcohol, withdrawal from any of which can cause life-threatening seizures if not monitored.

I'm not suggesting that society tolerate dishonesty or criminality. My point is that those caught up in addiction usually can't recognize that they're being dishonest. Instead of censure and punishment they need help healing from "this problem." Those who love people who are addicted also need help understanding addiction, so they can learn to protect themselves and to recover from the prolonged damage it can cause in families and communities.

Finally, we need to learn how to talk sensibly with our children about addiction prevention. Regina Labelle, chief of staff in President Barack Obama's Office of National Drug Control Policy, told the summit audience, "It's hard to talk to kids about prescription drug abuse."

But why? Kids are imaginative and intelligent creatures, and metaphor and story always work well to explain tough subjects. In my experience, speaking to them about addiction is a matter of letting them know that an internal switch exists inside the body and mind that gets flipped once we're exposed to chemicals or behavior that change or suppress one's feelings. With greater and more frequent exposure to drugs and alcohol, people with a genetic predisposition to addiction run the risk of flipping that switch permanently. Once the switch is soldered to "On," it can never be turned off. So it's important for kids to learn to deal productively with feelings and to be extremely careful about their exposure to these substances and behaviors.

I've been talking to my son about this disease that runs in his family for three years. He understands that when he goes to high school this month, he needs to be especially alert about drinking and drug use.

I'm not too worried. He's a competitive soccer player who, when injured, is vigilant even about how much ibuprofen he takes. He knows substances and behaviors can change feelings. He knows addiction can kill. So far, he wants to experience life as it is.

And this part of the message is equally important, and often forgotten: If the switch gets flipped, it's important to get help, no matter what it costs, and sooner rather than later. Effective help exists, and it saves lives.


Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/opinion/perspectives/addicts-are-not-low-lifes-649550/#ixzz246n3kAG3

Alcohol Classes Keep People Sober and Save Lives

The best way not to kill anyone after drinking and driving is to have never consumed a drink in the first place. I believe that alcohol awareness classes, administered often and at an early age, beginning at 11 or 12, will help reduce future alcohol consumption and drunk driving.

Less alcohol consumption means fewer DUIs and fewer fatal accidents caused by drinking and driving.

New research shows that in 2010, more than two-thirds of the 10,228 drunk driving deaths (7,145 or 70 percent) involved drivers with a blood alcohol content (BAC) of .15 or higher.

The most frequently recorded BAC among all drinking drivers in 2010 fatal crashes was .18, more than twice the legal limit in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. On average, there was one alcohol-related death every 51 minutes.

Not surprisingly, the age group with the highest percentage of drivers with BACs of .08 was 21 to 24 years old. The alcohol impairment rate among drivers in fatal crashes in 2010 was four times higher at night than during the day.

A higher percentage of fatal crashes involving alcohol-impaired drivers occurred on weekends (31 percent), compared to 16 percent during the week.

What do these statistics mean? I challenge my loyal readers to let me know. Do you think alcohol classes will help keep people sober and thus save innocent lives?

http://www.thecarconnection.com/news/1078518_most-drunk-driving-deaths-caused-by-drivers-with-twice-legal-bac-limit