No parents should have to bury their children. I can’t think of anything more painful. A dear friend from my days in the auto racing business called with dreadful news last week-his 44 year old son had committed suicide. The dreadful action was the culmination of two years of struggle, pain and isolation.
My friend was nearly inconsolable when he met with me the day after. He is one of those people who is always smiling, always has something good to say to you and will offer the shirt off his back to anyone in need.
There was none of that.
“What do I do now?” he asked holding his head in his hands.
“(My son) had two really hard years, but we recently spend a lot of time together and I told him ‘let me help we can go through this together.’ But he never told me what was wrong.” His wife was numb. She tried her best to hold back tears and not show the obvious pain she was experiencing. Her son, her first born, did not let her into his inner self either. She tried to console her husband.
The young man’s younger sister likewise tried to process the event, looked to me and asked, “Do people who commit suicide automatically go to hell?”
Suicide is a brutal, abrupt and devastating solution to a problem. When there is no possible alternative, no remedy, no way to turn, people take their own lives. In the case of my friend’s son, it was a triple threat that led to the end of his life-depression, alcoholism and addiction to crack cocaine.
No one knew the root of the depression, as he would not share with anyone, including his girlfriend of the last ten years. She explained that he always drank too much and it was just the last couple of years that he had been doing the crack. Like so many countless thousands of wives and girlfriends, she didn’t know what to do about it.
She wanted to keep the relationship, so she became an enabler. And, like those countless thousands of others, she didn’t know that she could turn to groups like Al-anon to get help. Like his family, she is left asking questions, such as, “What could I have done differently?”
Left to their own devices, people always search for their own solutions. My friend’s son was no different. There had been trips to treatment centers, but all treatment options must have been rejected. I was told repeatedly that he tried, but always failed. I was trying to fit the pieces together.
I knew this young man since his childhood. He had a remarkable talent for restoring classic cars, as his bodywork was superb and even his father, who was a master of the trade, said he learned from his son.
We worked hard and played hard, so his road to alcoholism and the point of where his life was out of control was rather long and slow. He had some scrapes with the law and had gotten into trouble, but he had a kind of boyish charm and he’d give you that smile.
Somewhere along the line something happened. The alcohol would no longer numb the pain inside. He could tolerate large amounts of beer and liquor; nothing brought relief.
His girlfriend said he started the crack cocaine one day and never stopped. She said he became depressed and could not sleep. Up to the moment of his death, he had not slept for eight days. Even when he did sleep, according to his mother, it was not like he had slept at all.
She tried to help him through it, but his answer to her was always, “You don’t understand.”
His girlfriend said she could no longer take it, and had not been seeing him for three months.
The toxic effects of heavy, long-term alcohol use, coupled with the highly-addictive and damaging effects of crack cocaine, led to a troubled and tortured mind. He knew something was wrong, but he refused to allow anyone inside. One day he just ran out of answers and saw no other options.
His parents wanted me to do the funeral. To ease the pain of the moment, we allowed ourselves to reminisce. But it always got back to their son and they kept asking questions like, “Will God forgive him?” They are both people of faith and were clinging to the hope that God would be merciful..
Can you get through to a crack user and help them free themselves from their own trap?
Why don’t crack abusers simply listen to common sense and stop lying all the time? Do they know what their doing? Crack abuse is an elaborate and complex trap, here is how you can help another recognize it and break free from addiction.
The Golden Rules of Ending Crack Abuse
- Help them reconnect with their own reality. Getting them to see how their actions affect those who loved them, is a huge step toward rehab. But be ready to offer them a ticket for recovery
- Get them to confront their own illusions and dreams. The drug abuser is hiding within their own illusions. Helping them find real ways to achieve their goals is the first step into reality
- Ask them how often they think or dream about using. They have to take control of their thoughts again and end their obsession and compulsions to use
- Drug residues lodge deeply in the brain. Ending their cravings for cocaine means getting those drug residues fully out of their bodies. Drug residuals don’t leave on their own
- Getting on a path that returns them to take personal responsibility without caving them in with the weight of obligation. All recovery is done step by step. Do you know how to navigate another out of addiction?
Getting another to end their drug abuse works better when no opinions are entered into the recovery plan. Warning, the following do not work. Giving them more drugs; excusing their behavior; waiting for them to overcome their addiction on their own. Abusers will need help overcoming their problems. Here are the facts.
Crack abusers have to overcome 3 major barriers.
1. Drug cravings; 2. Guilt; 3. Depression
Remember they need help to work out their recovery and overcome their cravings, guilt and depression.
Drug abuse lowers awareness and lowers natural abilities. That’s why recovery can be difficult. A drug abuser has to increase their abilities to overcome their abuse problems.
Crack Cocaine Abuse doesn’t have to be a one way road to loss of family trust, insanity, criminality and finally death. If you have a loved one who has been overcome by crack and has abused the drug, there is something that should be done to end the cycle of addiction.
Many cocaine abusers believe they are in control and can handle it by themselves. This overconfident attitude is a cocaine side effect – it’s a delusion created by smoking crack. We call it denial.
Crack Abuse Causes Denial Problems
- artificial feelings of self confidence
- elevated stress
- burnout of adrenal glands creating tiredness and weakness
- nervous hysteria
- drug induced temporary toxic psychosis
How does one breakthrough those barriers to recovery?
First, helping another overcome crack addiction is done by understanding why drug abusers resist help: it’s because they don’t have a better solution to their problems. They think because they don’t have a better solution, no one else could either. They don’t realize they lack skills and knowledge — that’s why they are now abusing. Drug abusers need to gain more skill and effectiveness.
Drugs Do Two Things
- Hide problems from people
- Cut short perception of reality
For example, a person who has a headache either doesn’t want to feel the headache or not allow the headache to affect them. Usually people try to forget about it, don’t think about it, do something else, etc. In this example of a person having a headache, they are simply trying to not experience the headache. The drug, let’s say aspirin, doesn’t cure the headache.
Now, compare aspirin to crack abuse and you’ve got the similar results of an atomic bomb in your living room leaking radioactive material into the house. That’s the effect of a crack abuser on his or her family.
Drugs reduce awareness, Drugs increase delusion
When helping another overcome crack abuse, you’ve got to realize that they aren’t really tracking with reality – no matter what they say or seem to be like. A person regularly abusing drugs will have other things going on in their minds in addition to everyday situations. They either don’t face factors in their lives or alter the importance of situations.
The Coca-Cola Company’s marketing genius over the past century has perpetuated an American myth, a horse and buggy Gilded Age saga formulated in a laboratory and shrouded in secrecy equal to that of the National Security Agency. The company would have us believe that a little known folksy pharmacist, Dr. John Stith Pemberton, while poring over his steaming cauldrons, created the mystery syrup in 1886 to which carbonated water was added and presto! The most famous soda fountain drink in the history of the world was born.
In reality John Pemberton, a highly respected Atlanta businessman with an extraordinary gift for medical chemistry, imitated a French ‘coca wine’ formula originally cooked up by a European chemist. Referring to it as an “invigorator of the brain,” Pemberton claimed it could cure a variety of ailments from indigestion to nervous disorders and sexual dysfunction. When the city of Atlanta introduced Prohibition in 1886, he substituted sugar syrup for the alcoholic wine and called it Coca-Cola. When Atlanta’s prohibition ended in 1887, he put the kick back in Coke, calling it “French Wine Coca.”
With due respect to Dr. Pemberton, a severely wounded Civil War veteran addicted to morphine, whose bones rest in a Columbus, Georgia cemetery, if you dig up a Corsican fellow by the name of Angelo Mariani, you will uncover another chemist whose lifelong interests lay in various mind altering concoctions. Dig deeper and you will discover the truth about Coke, the birth and evolution of which the Coca-Cola Company has given very different sworn testimony.
Although Angelo Mariani came from the mountainous island of Corsica, a dazzling uncut emerald in the Mediterranean, he decided to make Paris his home, and it is there he experimented with different coca leaves, which he imported from South America, green housing thousands of plants for his research.
In the course of many drug-induced mind journeys, Mariani discovered that steeping the purest coca leaves in Bordeaux wine disguised the bitterness of the leaf, and produced an elixir he named “Vin Mariani.” The wine became the most popular ‘tonic’ of Europe’s royals and aristocracy for three decades. Even our American President, Ulysses S. Grant imported it. And no wonder since it also contained pure Kola nut caffeine, which enhanced the effects of the cocaine. Hence, Mr. Mariani became a very rich man.
Unfortunately for Pemberton, bad health and bad luck followed him to his grave. Prior to his death in 1888, he had engaged in some fuzzy maneuvering with a renowned entrepreneur who purchased the recipe for about $200. When the United States Eighteenth Amendment went into effect in 1920, national Prohibition nixed the use of alcohol and it was again removed from the formula. But the cocaine remained. In copying Mariani’s brainchild, John Pemberton had produced the soda fountain beverage that bears no resemblance to what is guzzled by the millions of gallons today.
The original wine ingredients had always been a secret, and so too were those of Coca-Cola. If you ask the company when exactly the cocaine was removed (early in the 20th century), they will tell you it never existed. Where did the name come from? As for phosphoric acid content, I remember my father using Coke to clean his car engines. You’d have to be a Kola nut to believe company hyperbole, or hire multiple lawyers to challenge it and lose. Yet, because of its storybook mystique and widespread presence in the remotest backwaters of the planet, Coca-Cola remains today the most valuable liquid gold on earth.
In American society substance abuse is becoming an increasingly difficult issue to address. What once was predominately a problem of our larger urban cities is swiftly crossing all socio economic barriers and plaguing our homes, neighborhoods, small towns, and rural areas as well. Crack cocaine became a major social problem in the early eighties, where we witnessed a massive wave of addiction, abuse, and homicide as the drug hit our streets! The nineties came with Crystal Methamphetamines, a synthetic drug that can be manufactured in the privacy of your own home, with low cost products that can be purchased at the neighborhood pharmacy. In looking at the aftermath of the drug culture it is clear that drugs are fatally destructive! many have lost loved ones, fathers, mothers, and even their own lives, due to an association with drug abuse of some type. The statistics are pilling up as we see lives lost to the drug trade daily.
What is is so appealing about drugs? What draws so many into a lifestyle that makes no promises for anything short of death and destruction? Addiction is a very complex disease that goes against the very nature of human existence! A healthy human psyche is abounding in possibilities, always seeking to conquer new territories, to grow, to expand, to become all one can be! Addiction robs an individual of his/her natural essence in that it captures the soul and enslaves the mind to the addictive agent! Ultimately addiction changes the way the brain processes information.
The brain is a communications center consisting of billions of neurons, or nerve cells. Networks of neurons pass messages back and forth to different structures within the brain, the spinal column, and the peripheral nervous system. These nerve networks coordinate and regulate everything we feel, think, and do. Neurons, neurotransmitters, receptors, and transporters, make up this vast network of brain cells!The brains reward system is communicated by a chemical release of Dopamine. When dopamine is at a high level in the brain, it produces a euphoric sensation of heightened pleasure. All of the commonly abused drugs target the brains reward system, by flooding the brain circuit with dopamine. It is this false sense of euphoria that cause an individual to lie, steal, and even kill to experience the sensation again. The moment a chemical enters the body, it alters the chemical makeup of the brain, and over time a dependency develops.
The following is a brief description of the most commonly abused drugs and their effects;
Marijuana- The parts of the brain that control emotions, memory, and judgment are affected by marijuana. Smoking it can not only weaken short-term memory, but can block information from making it into long term memory. It has also been shown to weaken problem solving ability.
Alcohol- Alcohol is no safer than drugs. Alcohol impairs judgment and leads to memory lapses. It can lead to blackouts. It distorts vision, shortens coordination, and in addition to the brain can damage every other organ in the body.
Cocaine- Cocaine, both in powder form and as crack, is an extremely addictive stimulant. An addict usually loses interest in many areas of life, including school, sports, family, and friends. Use of cocaine can lead to feelings of paranoia and anxiety. Although often used to enhance sex drive, physical effect of cocaine on the receptors in the brain reduce the ability to feel pleasure (which in turn causes the dependency on the drug).
Inhalants- Inhalants, such as glue, gasoline, hair spray, and paint thinner, are sniffed. The effect on the brain is almost immediate. And while some vapors leave the body quickly, others will remain for a long time. The fatty tissues protecting the nerve cells in the brain are destroyed by inhalant vapors. This slows down or even stops neural transmissions. Effects of inhalants include diminished ability to learn, remember, and solve problems.
Ecstasy- Extended use of this amphetamine causes difficulty differentiating reality and fantasy, and causes problems concentrating. Studies have found that ecstasy destroys certain cells in the brain. While the cells may re-connect after discontinued use of the drug, they don’t re-connect normally. Like most drugs, this one impairs memory and can cause paranoia, anxiety, and confusion.
LSD -While some people use LSD for the sense of enhanced and vivid sensory experience, it can cause paranoia, confusion, anxiety, and panic attacks. Like Ecstasy, the user often blurs reality and fantasy, and has a distorted view of time and distance.
Tobacco- Tobacco is a dangerous drug, putting nicotine into your body. Nicotine affects the brain quickly, like other inhalants, producing feelings of pleasure, like cocaine, and is highly addictive, like heroin.
Methamphetamine- Known on the street as meth, speed, chalk, ice, crystal, and glass, methamphetamine is an addictive stimulant that strongly activates certain systems in the brain.
Ritalin- This drug is often prescribed to treat attention deficit disorder. It is becoming an illicit street drug as well. Drug users looking for a high will crush Ritalin into a powder and snort it like cocaine, or inject it like heroin. It then has a much more powerful effect on the body. It causes severe headaches, anxiety, paranoia, and delusions.
According to the National Association for Perinatal Addiction Research and Education (NAPARE), about 1 out of every 10 newborns in the U.S. is exposed in the womb to one or more illicit drugs. The most frequent ingredient in the mix is cocaine. In major cities of the USA such as New York, Los Angeles, Detroit and Washington many hospitals report that the percentage of newborns showing the effects of drugs is 20% or even higher. By the latest estimates, more than 1 million women use cocaine in the USA.
Anomalies associated with maternal cocaine use during pregnancy
Anomalies associated with maternal cocaine use during pregnancy can range from minor ones i.e., fetal cocaine syndrome: low birth weight, prematurity, irritability, microcephaly (baby’s head is abnormally small), large fontanelles (the spaces where bones of the skull come together, but are not completely joined), prominent glabella (protrusion of the area between the eyes), marked periorbital and eyelid edema, low nasal bridge (a flattening of the top part of the nose), short nose, and small toenails, to major ones, i.e., segmental intestinal atresia (narrowing or absence of a portion of the intestine), sirenomelia (the term comes from “siren” or “mermaid” because of the characteristic fusion of the lower extremities that results from a failure in the development of a normal vascular supply to lower extremities), limb-body wall complex (presence of an abdominal wall defect, a short umbilical cord, abnormal curvature of the spine, limb anomaly, and craniofacial defect) and limb reduction defects (which involve missing tissue or bone in any part of a limb or limbs and can range in severity from missing fingers and toes to the complete absence of one or both arms and/or legs), congenital anomalies of the genitourinary system in infants, prune belly anomaly (when the intestinal pattern is evident through the thin protruding abdominal wall in the infant), neonatal necrotizing enterocolitis, neonatal myocardial infarction and myocardial calcification). Let us focus one of the most rare but most horrific anomalies associated with maternal cocaine use during pregnancy, gastroschisis.
Gastroschisis
Gastroschisis is a congenital disorder in which a defect is present in the wall of the abdomen of the embryo. Typically there is a small abdominal cavity with herniated abdominal organs that usually appear on the right side of the abdomen. There is no membranous sac covering the organs. The intestines may be swollen and look shortened due to exposure to the liquid that surrounds the fetus during pregnancy. Since the 1970s noteworthy trends have been observed in gastroschisis prevail. Overall, gastroschisis rates have increased over time in several regions around the world. Prevalence of gastroschisis displays wide variation by geographic location, both within and between countries. One study indicated that gastroschisis was more likely to occur in rural areas than urban ones. Birth prevalence in the United States for gastroschisis ranges between 1.22 and 5.11 per 10,000 live births (National Birth Defects Prevention Network).
Risk factors
Most studies focusing on the maternal age have found much higher rates of gastroschisis for very young mothers. The gender of the infant is associated with the risk for gastroschisis. Males are more likely than females to have gastroschisis. Maternal alcohol use has been linked to higher rates of gastroschisis, as has recreational drug use (cocaine, amphetamine, or LSD). Nevertheless scientific evidence indicates that not all people are equally susceptible to birth defects. Genetic and nutritional factors may combine with other environmental factors to increase the risk. This combination of factors makes it extremely difficult to conduct epidemiologic studies in populations of people when the entire collection of risk factors is not well understood or identified.
Cocaine and gastroschisis
Cocaine causes blood vessels to constrict, reducing the vital flow of oxygen and other nutrients. Because fetal cells multiply fleetly in the first months of the pregnancy, the proper blood supply of the embryo is set back by the mother’s early and continuous use of cocaine. The heavy maternal cocaine use during the later months of pregnancy can lead to an embolism, or clot, that lodges in a fetal vessel and completely disrupts the blood supply to an organ or limb. The result: different kind of deformities (shriveled arm or leg, missing section of intestine or kidney etc. Fortunately such bold defects are very rare. Thus the link between maternal cocaine use and increased gastroschisis risk is of particular interest because cocaine is a vasoconstrictor. One hypothesis offered for the etiology of gastroschisis is that it is a vascular disruption defect.
Diagnosis
The possibility of prenatal diagnosis either through echosonogram or any other method available allows the mother to be referred to an adequate center where a caesarean section or induced natural birth can be performed before term (as natural birth is recommended and just as safe as with a normal baby), preferably within 2 weeks of term, and allow the immediate surgery to be performed on the newborn. The main cause for lengthy recovery periods in patients is the time taken for the infants’ bowel function to return to normal. The morbidity is closely related to the presence of other malformations and complications of the wound or the intestine. Patients frequently require more than one surgery. The fetal abdominal wall can be seen by ultrasound from 9 postmenstrual weeks although the defect cannot not been confidently diagnosed until after the 12th week of pregnancy.
