This website is dedicated to the helping those with drug addiction and their families.

LEARN THE TRUTH ABOUT DRUG REHAB!

HAS TRADITIONAL DRUG REHAB FAILED YOU?
LEARN WHY. CALL US AT 1-800-893-7060

What you need to know to find drug rehab help.

As a person who is addicted to drugs or as a loved one of someone in this condition, and realizing that you need help to end the cycle of addiction, you need to know the what type of drug rehab there is. The methods of drug rehab are relatively new and evolving and there are MANY MORE programs that do not offer a solution to this problem than there are that do. 

Around thirty years ago the hospital, social work and mental health professions were faced with providing treatment for addiction.  The need for solutions became overwhelming because of increasing use of addictive drugs. Insurance companies began to offer benefits to pay for addiction treatment.  However, there was no real solution available to these professionals.  They had not received any training in their professional's university that even spoke about addiction, in fact, as near as ten years ago, there were less than two hours of training available within any medical school curricula and none in the other professions.  The medical education was centered on providing other drugs as substitutes for the drug of choice, such as methadone, but these were not solutions that looked at this problem as something that could be treated. 

Since the need for drug rehab outweighed the availability to provide care for this problem, these professions depended on the only existing group that had some successes with this problem, those who were knowledgeable in the 12-steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.

The abuses that were afflicted upon alcoholics by the psychiatrist and psychologist in the 1930’s resulted in the creation of Alcoholics Anonymous. Due the field of the mental health not understanding addiction, they saw it as a component of a mental illness, the inebriates were being taken off of the streets and given electro-shock therapy and other institutionally harmful practices that only made the problem worse.  The members of AA were determined to help each other stay sober so that they would no longer be abused by this inappropriate form of drug rehab.. 

These same professionals were asked to provide effective drug rehab but due to their very ineffective technique, they brought the 12-step support programs into the drug rehab setting.  There are other reasons why this approach was also doomed to failure.  First of all, AA is not drug rehab.  It is a support system for mutually addicted person to share their hope and faith so that they can live a clean and sober life, one day at a time.  In fact, the Big Book, which is the definitive text developed by the founders of the 12-step approach, warns against using this method as a fee for service and as a form of care within a drug rehab center.  These founders knew that this was not a treatment, but for lack of any other ideas, America began to have drug rehab centers built in every neighborhood that used the 12-steps as their only form of clinical treatment. 

Since the results from these types of centers were no better than the successes of those that stop their addiction on their own, which is about 10%, these centers began to change the alter the definition of addiction.  They all supported the idea that it is an incurable, chronic and progressive disease, however, when funding sources began to realize that so very few of their graduates were free of continued use, they changed the definition to a disease of relapse.  This was a convenient way of not taking responsibility for the millions of dollars that were being spent on curing addiction, but instead, providing massive amounts of evidence that people continued to use drugs, no matter how long they were in these types of treatment. 

By now, these types of programs have become so institutionalized and supported by university research, that most of the “professionals” in the alcohol and drug field have been convinced that this is a terrible, deadly disease and only offer programs that curb the devastating effects of continued, uncontrollable use. 

As a parent or loved on of someone that is addicted, or as someone that is in the throws of an addiction, having programs that will temporarily lessen the effects of addiction is not enough.  Programs exist that solve addiction in people’s lives at a rate of nearly 90% success.  In light of that truth, it is immoral to provide any other type of treatment and it is unethical to tell addicts that they are suffering from an incurable disease when there are cures.

It is wrong to give this depressing message of no hope to those that have been suffering from addiction and are seeing their hopes evaporate and their families dissolve around their use.  To give this depressing message to even the most capable of drug free people, it would be hard to find people with the will power to confront such a diagnosis, but we are talking about people that have been down on the luck for some time and have, many times, tried everything within their power to end this problem and have failed and now they are being told that it will never end.

Call 1-800-893-7060 and speak to an experienced alcohol and drug counselor that can help you find a way out of addiction and a way out of continual, ineffective treatment.