Approaching Your Child

Surveys have shown that most parents are tempted to say nothing, and hope that their child is only going through a phase. The fear of losing a child to something they do not understand, or are unable to control, is what keeps them in silent suffering. Only when the addiction comes to a head and manifests itself in the form of an arrest or a serious accident, or an unplanned pregnancy, do many parents finally step in. But by then it’s often too late.

It is for this reason that you should not think of your child’s drug use as a disease, but as a method he is using to try to solve his problems. Typical problems of young adults are: Difficulty learning in school or feeling stupid, having a hard time socializing and dealing with groups of people, feeling alone or afraid. Any of these things might be very tough to deal with and taking drugs or alcohol seems to make it easier. Although we all know (including the addict deep down), that using drugs or alcohol only masks and avoids the problems and is not a “solution” to his problems at all, but a much worse problem in itself.

It is in this manner you should approach your child. Treat the child like an adult and express your concerns in a calm manner. Communication is paramount – for parent and child - and this must start as soon as the problem is realized. A child in denial is a tough nut to crack, and all a parent can do is stand by the child, try to understand, and offer help.

Your child may try to convince you s/he can quit any time. He might also claim his friends are all doing it, or that it only happened once or twice. You, as a parent, will want to believe, but you must be strong without being authoritarian.

Only by staying close can a family come to terms with, and root out the problem of, addiction. It may take a drug rehabilitation program but family unity is of the utmost importance if the destructive cycle of drugs is to be beaten.

Some Facts about Children and Drugs

The human brain does not fully form until around the age of twenty, so if children start abusing drugs it can severely harm their physical, emotional and mental development.

Some drugs can cause children to suffer from panic attacks, seizures, and psychosis. In particular, Ecstasy has been linked to major organ failure, and LSD can cause permanent memory loss. Street drugs are very often impure and contain toxic elements, so ingestion can put a child at risk of overdose, toxic shock, seizures, traffic accidents, and death.

Substance abuse does not go away on its own. As an addict develops a physical tolerance to the substance, dosage must be increased or the drug changed, in order to reach the necessary “high.”

Is Your Child a Drug Addict?

The thought that one's child may be abusing drugs is not something most parents wish to contemplate. However, it’s an unfortunate fact that around twenty eight million Americans have at least one alcoholic or drug-addicted parent, and that by inference, their children are at least 34% more likely to suffer from an addiction than children who don't. If both parents suffer, that figure increases to 400%, an astonishing but true statistic.

If drugs aren’t part of your life, don’t think for a moment that your child is immune from their influence. Drugs can enter a child’s life through many routes and at any age, from simple experimentation or peer pressure, to being unable to cope with feelings of stress or depression. It is not always until children are in their teens that they might experiment with mind or mood altering substances.

Drug abuse and addiction is extremely serious. It devastates the lives of those who fall under its spell, and for those around them. The longer a child remains addicted, the less s/he will be able to develop biologically and mentally. Adolescence in particular is a time of rapid change in both of these areas, when children moving towards adulthood, and seeking out their own identity and independence. The temptation to experiment can be very strong, but comes with the risk of devastating consequences.

Picking the best drug treatment

Private residential drug treatment doesn’t succeed by accident. On the contrary, the most effective drug treatment programs are those administered with empathy and expertise. If you’re going to get better, it’s going to be because you find an exclusive California drug treatment center that can give you all the support you need to get better. Anything less than that just isn’t good enough. As should perhaps go without saying, drug treatment is never easy. With so much to lose, and so much more to win, you can’t afford not to find a drug treatment facility that’s exactly right for you.

How To Quit Cocaine Addict

The high from crack cocaine is intensely rewarding. But the experience is short-lived. Such immense well-being is unsustainable because its mechanisms don't subvert the systems of homeostatic feedback inhibition of the brain. So it's reckless to try crack cocaine at all - at least until one's death-bed - because its euphoric effect is so extraordinarily hard to forget. If one succumbs to curiosity, and finds out what one is missing, then the rest of one's life may pall in comparison. For there is nothing in life that's naturally so enjoyable as crack. Tragically, the user's family and loved ones may suffer the price of pleasure almost as severely as the addict.
So is a crackhead inescapably doomed to an early grave? Or are there ways (s)he can escape from the abyss?
Perhaps. Most of the GIs who got hooked on unmistakably physically addictive heroin in Vietnam kicked the habit when they returned to the USA. The veterans quit, often without undue difficulty, because most of the "conditioned cues and reinforcers" associated with narcotic drug-use in South-East Asia were missing back home.
Thus a complete change of environment, especially a holiday in the company of supportive family and (drug-free) friends, can help break a user's self-destructive cycle of coke-binges. The brain is given time to recover. Cue-elicited craving is a major cause of relapse in recovering coke-users. Indeed this cue-elicited craving may even increase during the first few months of withdrawal.
Good food, particularly an idealised stone-age diet [fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds, wholemeal bread, pasta, rice etc] should help. Regular vigorous exercise is useful as well [and probably Faith In Jesus, though this isn't always a realistic goal]. Another option is joining Cocaine Anonymous.
More controversially, "cocaine vaccines" may soon be licensed. They are designed to induce drug-specific antibodies in the bloodstream. In theory, cocaine-specific antibodies which sequester the drug before its passage into the brain will prevent the relapsing user getting high. Perhaps children "at risk" will be vaccinated at an early age. The possible coercive use of "vaccines against pleasure" raises profound ethical problems.
Cocaine addicts motivated to quit might consider a course of the antiepileptic drug vigabatrin (Sabril), though it isn't licensed in the USA. Vigabatrin is an irreversible inhibitor of gamma-aminobutyric acid transaminase (GABA-T). GABA-T the enzyme responsible for the catabolism of the inhibitory neurotransmitter gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA). Feedback inhibition between the "feel good" dopaminergic and GABA-ergic neurotransmitter systems explains vigabatrin's therapeutic "antidopaminergic" action. Vigabatrin is a relatively safe drug. Even so, its use sometimes causes colour vision defects; the most common adverse side-effects reported are sleepiness and fatigue.
A future option for cocaine addicts who want to quit may be taking a dual dopamine/serotonin releaser. PAL-287 is a rationally-designed drug aimed at treating stimulant dependence while having minimal "abuse potential" of its own. Much more research will be needed before it ever gets a product license.
Another future option may be the benztropine analog JHW007. It serves as a functional antagonist to cocaine. JHW007 has a high affinity for the dopamine transporter with minimal cocaine-like subjective and behavioural effects.
Some drug-pundits recommend Total Abstinence from chemical assistance: "Just Say No." The ex-addict is encouraged to renounce "unnatural" chemical highs altogether. This course of action may indeed be prudent given our bug-ridden genome and current crop of misbegotten street drugs. Unfortunately, opting to embrace godliness, hard work and clean living isn't always the recipe for a happy life either.
For many cocaine-users have a pre-existing psychiatric disorder - even by the touchstone of today's impoverished conception of mental health. In effect, such users are self-medicating, even if they ostensibly take cocaine hedonistically "for kicks". Such users need more effective medicine to flourish. So in place of cocaine, the option of taking one or more clinically therapeutic mood-brighteners [e.g. desipramine (Norpramin), a noradrenaline reuptake inhibitor; venlafaxine (Effexor), milnacipran (Ixel) or duloxetine (Cymbalta), dual-action serotonin and noradrenaline reuptake inhibitors; perhaps a glutamate-enhancing agent such as modafinil (Provigil); or more daringly, amineptine (Survector), a dopamine reuptake inhibitor; and/or anti-anxiety agents e.g. benzodiazepines] may be considered instead.
Alternatively, if the user wishes to Say No To Drugs completely, then a "natural", gentle mood-brightener and anti-anxiety agent, hypericum (St John's wort), may be taken indefinitely. Unfortunately, this traditional herbal medicine is not a dependable remedy for deep melancholic depression - coke-induced or otherwise.
S-Adenosyl-L-methionine (SAMe) is another natural antidepressant. But its efficacy in treating cocaine-induced depression is untested in controlled clinical trials.
Inevitably, present-day mood-brighteners, whether herbal or clinical, won't stand comparison with tomorrow's revolutionary designer-drugs. Nor do they deliver the rapturous but addictive rush of a fast-acting euphoriant. Contemporary therapeutic mood-boosters yield desperately little joy compared to the lifetime of genetically pre-programmed superhealth on offer to our descendants. But our legacy DNA didn't design us to be happy. So for now, the dirty chemical stopgaps licensed for use in contemporary clinical medicine are often better than nothing at all.