In psych we had a guest speaker for a lecture on addiction. Kathy was a nurse who married a very cute resident that later disclosed he was addicted to pain killers. At one point he was taking 100 pills a day and still practicing medicine. Eventually she sent him to a 90 day rehab facility where he began his road to recovery. This is what turned her on to the issue of addiction. Today, still married, they run a very successful program for professionals dealing with addiction that have peoples lives in their hands: doctors, nurses, pharmacists, pilots, lawyers etc. They fly all over the world to give seminars and have appeared on Oprah twice. The lecture was engaging and it encompassed a whole new meaning for me considering I'd been working with addicts at Haymarket for my clinical rotation. Here are some of the key points she made. Remember it was a lecture on addiction but I found them interesting....
- 23.6 million people require treatment for addiction, only 2.5 million receive it
- Alcoholism has genetic predisposition. If you have an alcoholic father you are at 90% risk of becoming an alcoholic yourself
- The USA uses 3 times the amount of opioids of any other country
- Smoking pot permanently shrinks the hippocampus of the brain.
- For each year you smoke pot regularly, your IQ drops 1 point
- Alcohol affects more organs in your body than any other drug
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