After commenting earlier in the week on this Jon Paul Morosi story, I thought everyone might to check out this link to another story on the subject of alcohol and sports.
Alcohol was not all fun-and-games, however. Players overindulged before, during and after games. The scourge of alcoholism consumed the game. Owners tried shadowing their players off the field by hiring Pinkerton detectives. Some offered bonuses to those players who quit. Beer and other spirits, however, took their toll. ~ Huffington Post
Even though the current buzz is rightly so 24/7 Super Bowl related, this article concentrated on the link between baseball and alcohol offering a good mix of historic and contemporary support. After reading it, I’m surprised that sport wasn’t renamed alcoball back around the turn of the 20th century.
Joanne Kimberlin of The Virginian-Pilot has written an in-depth piece on prescription medication abuse in the US with a focus on the state of Virginia. It begins with an assessment of current conditions by Cathy Pederson, a Norfolk undercover drug agent who explains addicts no longer fit the old stereotypes.
More and more, she finds herself busting business executives, lawyers, teachers, gray-haired grandmothers, teenage girls – all caught in the grip of a blossoming addiction to opiates like OxyContin, Vicodin and Percocet. Pederson has noticed another common thread: “They didn’t meet opiates at a party. They didn’t start taking them for fun. There’s usually a car accident or a surgery somewhere in their background, and they became addicted to their pain meds.”
A sidebar gives the stats on the alarming number of people abusing prescription drugs, mostly pain killers.
Who are the drug abusers?
$50,000-plus The family income bracket reported by 42 percent of oxycodone abusers.
1 in 4 Troops admit abusing prescription drugs within a one-year period.
1 in 10 High school seniors say they’ve abused Vicodin.
40-49 The age bracket that accounts for about half of all prescription drug abuse.
9 million Americans currently abusing prescription drugs. Pain relievers are by far the most popular.
180 Estimated number of health care professionals arrested for prescription crimes in 2009 by a special unit of Virginia’s State Police.
The article is extremely detailed and informative covering the urgency and size of the problem, how it is occurring, and what authorities are doing about it. I found it odd but not surprising though that not once was methadone treatment discussed, especially since this is one of the most effective and accessible means known to treat long term addiction to opioids. It has been my experience that there is general misunderstanding of this treatment that many consider either taboo or just plain counterproductive despite the obvious benefits.
There’s an epidemic of opioid (pain med) drug abuse and addiction sweeping our nation and if we have any hope of keeping up with those that are “Jones-ing”… then we better start looking at methadone maintenance and medically assisted recovery programs as a solution instead of a stigma.
A recent article in the Boston Globe, Easy=True, describes a hot topic in psychology circles called “cognitive fluency” that I feel also makes a great recovery tool.
Cognitive fluency is simply a measure of how easy it is to think about something, and it turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard.
In a nutshell, the brain interprets easy things in a positive manner. People will gravitate to things that rhyme, simple fonts, and logical ordering while avoiding complex, disorderly, or just unfamiliar things because they seem difficult regardless of their real nature. I suggest reading the whole article, but the kicker that got me thinking about how cognitive fluency would relate to the struggles of early sobriety comes in the last few paragraphs.
“Having to come up with many good things about your spouse is terrible, because it becomes difficult and then you think she’s obviously not that wonderful,” Schwarz says. “Coming up with a few bad things about your spouse, that’s bad because it’s not that hard. Having to come up with a lot of bad things, since it’s hard, it means she’s not that bad at all. The difficulty that you have tells you that there are not many such things.”
In the same manner, obsessing over how hard it is to fight the cravings and how difficult a sober reality is to face can be overwhelming. Using cognitive fluency, it is easier to stay positive by making a short list of why sobriety is preferable and concentrating on the much easier list of why active addiction is bad.
Results like these suggest that feeling good about yourself may in part be a matter of having a hard time feeling bad, and that confidence and even success might be triggered by interventions that do nothing but make failure seem the more intimidating possibility. The human brain, for all its power, is suspicious of difficulty, but perhaps we can learn to use that.
In summary, early sobriety even though rewarding can be tough, but the alternative of active addiction is much worse. So if you’re going to worry about something, make it easy… and productive.
I have 15 years of uninterrupted sobriety and yet I still feel out of place sometimes when it comes to going to a new AA meeting. When I think about it though, it’s not the AA meeting itself that is unsettling but instead just the fact that I am sitting down with a complete group of strangers. Even a quilting bee could be unsettling if one feels out of place or as if everyone in the room but you know one another. Add discussing what can be a very personal and uncomfortable topic to the occasion and no wonder that a lot of people look to the web for advice about how to handle AA jitters.
I noticed that this odd-news post, Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting Etiquette Hints, from last year was getting an awful lot of traffic and decided it might be time to post something better than “one should refrain from robbing others at the meeting.” So here are my Top 5 pointers for AA newcomers:
1. Be early. Trust me coming in late is the best way to draw attention to yourself.
2. Don’t be afraid to smile and shake someone’s hand. First name and “glad to be here” is standard fare.
3. Listen more, talk less.
4. No phone, snacks, or games- no distractions.
5. Make it a goal to remember three names, then the next meeting is not full of strangers.
I am a perpetual newcomer to AA meetings since I do not have a regular group. I sometimes attend accompanying someone new to recovery to make them feel more comfortable- but I always get a lot out of the experience. I probably will never be an AA regular, but I can say without reservation that the things I learned in AA during my early sobriety formed the basis of my long term successful recovery. I highly recommend it to anyone with a drinking problem regardless of their circumstances.
If you are thinking about a meeting and feeling nervous, just go. Use the pointers or not, just go… and keep going back.
I’ve scheduled my trip to Japan for late February, so I’ve been doing some research and putting a few items on my trip agenda. Over the next few weeks I’ll share a few of my planned activities and stops, the first is to experience a fugu dinner. I’ll do this in Tokyo where I’ll have a few friends and colleagues from work to help me choose a reputable fugu establishment, and of course will skip the saki course. (In business and overseas travel I’ve figured out how to artfully turn down the “traditional” drink… I just say no thank you)
The embedded video above was shot near the Tsukiji Fish Market, one of the stops on last year’s TDA in Japan.
A universal ban on alcohol in major league clubhouses is long overdue. Until every team removes beer from the working quarters of its employees, each day on the baseball schedule will include the most unsettling of possibilities – that alcohol consumed in a clubhouse could contribute to injury or death on the road.
I like the idea, but believe that Mr. Morosi is being intellectually dishonest by suggesting that alcohol just be banned from clubhouses, especially after wrapping up his column describing alcohol consumption as a deadly societal problem.
You might say that organizations can’t watch their players 24 hours per day. And you would be right. Still, team decision-makers have a responsibility – to themselves and their communities – to reduce the likelihood that their players will become part of a societal problem that kills.
Is it OK if fans leave the park and kill somebody? How about when they leave the sports bar after watching the game? If it is a deadly problem why not just get rid of alcohol altogether in sports Mr. Morosi?
IF it’s time to ban all booze from clubhouses, why stop there?
Traveling through parts of Tennessee and Kentucky that are covered white with a winter coat this week I have seen close to a hundred whitetail deer. There wasn’t an overnight population explosion of this normally elusive forest dweller; it’s just the combination of additional foraging made necessary by the cold and degradation of their natural camouflage due to the snow makes them easier to spot. Now they seem to be everywhere. They are always there though, we just don’t see them… and yes, I am going to make this about drugs and alcohol.
In the forest of societal maladies including homelessness, truancy, infidelity, neglect, abuse, crime, incarceration, bankruptcy, disease, and distress there slinks another evasive creature- addiction. We have conditioned ourselves not to see the underlying problem, not to blame the drugs and alcohol that permeate our lives. I wish there was a way to block out all of these problems, just white them out. If we dealt with the drug and alcohol abuse that plagues this nation first, all the rest of the problems would become so much more manageable.
No new updates for tonight because I spent the time usually allocated for writing a TDA post speaking on the phone with my good friend Lisa Frederiksen. She is an accomplished author and public speaker; you can often catch some of her work from the blog Breaking the Cycles here at TDA that she so graciously allows me to cross post.
We try to talk at least every other month or so about recovery, addictions, blogging and writing. She has just recently returned from a trip to Mexico where she met with the Global Addiction Recovery Network, so we had plenty to discuss. If you’ve never read any of her stuff, I suggest checking out her blog. If you have an addict or alcoholic in the family or are yourself in recovery, I highly recommend her book If You Loved Me You Would Stop.
The TV show Bones is one of my favorites. It has strong, fun characters that carry each episode regardless of the strength of the story. The show is based off the books by author Kathy Reichs that chronicle the tales of forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan, a very smart recovering alcoholic. The TV version of Temperance is not an alcoholic however, but her FBI partner Seeley Boothe is portrayed as having a gambling problem and has a brother that is a recovering alcoholic. I read two of the books by Reichs while in Japan last year, but this is one of the rare cases where I actually like the video portrayal of a story better. Most entertaining are the Spock-like blunt comments that the nerdishly aloof character Temperance often makes in the TV version, she is sort of socially inept and doesn’t understand the need for white lies to cover awkward social situations.
Thanks to the magic of Hulu, at least for a few weeks I can offer the latest Bones episode. Note in the final scene, that Temperance gives a toast and then speaks openly about the Boothe’s brother being an alcoholic. While I’m sure this was meant to be another oblivious faux pas by the logical scientist, I wish that most people just did just the same. I find that most people go too far in trying to avoid the subject often embarrassing themselves trying not to mention the fact that someone is in recovery. There should be no stigma, only pride for facing adversity and discovering recovery.
Now that’s a headline! Actually though, what really happened is a pathetically intoxicated and disoriented Rip Torn broke into the lobby of a bank while carrying a loaded firearm in his possession. When described that way it becomes just another post for the TDA Stupid Drunk Tricks file. You can get the whole story here at The Register Citizen, which is the local paper of the county in Connecticut where the crime occurred.
He’s a great actor with a very long career, but IMHO Elmore “Rip” Torn has already been given one too many chances escaping justice in multiple DUI and drunken incidents. It’s time to put this recalcitrant drunk who has shown no desire for recovery into jail before he hurts someone innocent. I thought about embedding this video of a drunk Rip Torn under arrest with this story, but have become so disgusted after reading how many chances this guy has been given because of his wealth and fame that I need a break. So instead, I’ll highlight a much more intelligent and sober actor that also starred in one of Rip Torn’s funnier movies- please enjoy, Agent Frank the Pug from MIB II.
After commenting earlier in the week on this Jon Paul Morosi story, I thought everyone might to check out this link to another story on the subject of alcohol and sports.
