Tonight, we’ll have a chance to meet David Sheff, in person, here in Newport Beach, CA, just across the street from Morningside Recovery’s Newport Beach, CA Balboa Peninsula corporate offices, speaking about his own path that led to his most recent book, Clean, in which Sheff details our country’s failure to arrest the tide of addiction as it “directly relates to the belief—as persistent as it is wrong—that addiction is a moral failing,” that, instead, addiction must be understood as a disease.
Earlier this week Sheff wrote in The Huffington Post, and in The Clinton Foundation’s blog, quoting Thomas McLellan, a former Deputy Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, as asking: “What would you do if there was a sniper on your campus murdering one student a year? You wouldn’t accept it as a given. You wouldn’t rest until you caught him.” David Sheff himself goes further, asking why teens may consider “pharmaceuticals as safer than street drugs”. Sheff then notes that “pills” are the #1 killer of teens…
OxyContin, a widely abused drug, can cause heart attacks because it relaxes heart valves and allows blood to “backflow,” leading to an overabundance of blood in the ventricle or atrium. You hear of addicts’ hearts exploding? It’s when the heart pushes the excess blood out at such a force that it tears the aorta. Prescription opiates also slow breathing. Or stop it. Mix pills with alcohol – and most kids who take them do (pill-and-booze parties are common) – and the risk of overdose increases. And there’s another common effect of pain-pill misuse: OxyContin, Vicodin, and similar opiates are expensive and sometimes hard to find, so many users gravitate to what can be a cheaper and more accessible opiate: heroin.
