No one wants to see a loved one suffer. We always want to help the people we care about and protect them as much as we can, but if that person is struggling with addiction, our help may be doing more harm than good. It’s never easy to tell the difference between helping someone through…
Eight states have now made recreational marijuana legal, and many other states are moving in that direction by making medical marijuana more easily accessible. Advocates of marijuana legalization consider this a positive thing because it leads to more personal freedom, hurts the profits of drug cartels, allows police to spend their time on better things…
Substance use is extremely common. Most Americans drink alcohol at least occasionally, most have at least tried marijuana and a substantial minority use it regularly, and every day, people take prescription painkillers after medical procedures and stop taking them when their prescription ends. Why is it then, that roughly 10 percent of the population uses…
Media coverage of the opioid epidemic in the US has often mentioned the link between addiction and unemployment. Many states that have seen a sharp rise in unemployment in recent years have also had the highest rate of overdose deaths, with West Virginia and Ohio leading the nation. Are addiction and unemployment actually related, or…
There are some huge disparities among addiction rates in different states. For example, in West Virginia, about 52 out of every 100,000 people died of a drug overdose in 2016, the highest rate in the US, while in Virginia, the rate was just under 17 in 100,000. That’s still relatively high, but the disparity is…
LifeRing Secular Recovery is a network of support groups for people who want to overcome addiction. LifeRing is a relatively new mutual support organization, started in 2001. You can participate in LifeRing meetings in person or online. Meetings and materials are free and the organization runs on donations and sales from some materials. Although LifeRing…
There are many different kinds of mutual aid groups for addiction. There is SMART Recovery, Refuge Recovery, LifeRing, Celebrate Recovery, and others. Despite the growth of new options in recent decades, 12-step programs remain the most popular option by far. Someone struggling with addiction can find a 12-step meeting in almost any part of the…
Celebrate Recovery is a specifically Christian 12-step program designed to offer relief from “hurts, hangups, and habits.” The program began in 1991 as a way to help people struggling with addiction or codependency. Since then, its scope has expanded and there are now meetings in churches all over the United States. According to the Celebrate…
Refuge Recovery is a program for addiction recovery based on the Buddhist tradition. Refuge recovery adapts the principles of Buddhism, including the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, specifically to fight addiction. It works on the assumption that Buddhist ideas, which were developed to end human suffering in general, are also applicable to the…
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