Get Real Real wrote:
rojo wrote:A very interesting article on former Craven HS and Portland State runner Ryan Santana can be found here:
http://wweek.com/editorial/3645/14513/The guy was a contender for the Oregon state high school crown in 2007 and started doing drugs just last fall. Now he's a homeless, drug addict with a big-time criminal record. Let's hope he can turn things around.
Please don't make crass comments without reading the article.
The one thing that I found odd about the article was there was no mention of his family. I've heard it's very hard on parents for a child to be on drugs but I just found it odd they weren't mentioned.
Anyone know Santana?
Wow, you really show your ignorance in your paragraph about parents.
As someone who is educated in counseling people in addiction recovery, I can tell you that the biggest myth about drug addiction is that it is the addict's fault.
While it is absolutely the addicts opportunity and therefore their responsibility to get clean or sober...and many drugs are super addicting... In almost all cases an addict uses due to a desire to self medicate emotional pain. What 3 year old says they want to grow up to be a prostitute and a heroin addict???
Yes in some cases there is a genetic predisposition towards addiction, and it runs in families...but so does incest and the pain and addiction incest often causes. Once it was discovered that a human beings brain physiology can be markedly changed by stress in the womb or in the first 6 years of life...the blame the addict approach withered in the early 80's.
Yeah, duh, it is painful for parents to have addicted children. The human mind is also prone to deny or minimalize personal responsibility in causing a child to turn to drugs or alcohol. The greatest cause of addiction is parental neglect or abuse.
Each situation is so different, and often subtle, so subtle that it can take years of therapy, with brilliant therapists to discover the most likely cause of an addicts descent into addiction. But it almost always has to do with neglect, abuse, or improper parenting (overly strict, rigid rules, anger addicted parents, violent parents etc.)
Generally blaming the addict never works. Tough love, isn't. Neither does coddling them. Sometimes the only thing to do is to wait them out until they decide they are done with it.
I've seen two heroin addicts who just decided one day, after decades, that they were done with the drug.
...The biggest addiction problems in the USA are alcohol (grossly under reported) and work. (Ask some Europeans.)
One would think with Dr. Drew in his second media decade you'd know more.