FoxNews is running a story on the website FacesofMeth, a project of Multnomah County Sheriff’s Deputy Bret King in Portland Oregon. The pics show the two mug shots of a crystal methamphetamine user, one taken after their first arrest for the substance and another taken a couple of years later.
The images show a change from relatively healthy-looking faces to grey, scabbed complexions caused by the noxious chemical cocktail that makes up meth. Authorities are hopeful that the images will help keep people off the drug:
Sheriff’s Chief of Staff Christine Kirk said Faces of Meth is not a scared-straight approach, but rather “real life honesty to keep kids from ever trying it.”
I have a couple of comments on this. First the images aren’t random; someone selected them, most likely to show the most dramatic change – like the one shown in the pic above. Second what do the mug shots of drunks look like? How about potheads and crack addicts? Is the meth behind the change or is it addiction itself? Finally if these people are as sick as they look, do they even belong behind bars? If not what should we do with them, and if they do, is locking them up without treatment the best option?
The truth is that there are no easy solutions when it comes to addiction. Medical treatments have terrible success rates. AA and NA are still the best options even if their long-term success rates are low. The Law limits the options by loved ones and family members to intervene in an addict’s death spiral. Addiction is perhaps the only method of suicide the State allows.
I’m not sure what the website will do. When a particularly powerful version of heroin hit Philly streets and killed dozens of addicts, it boosted demand for the drug – so I doubt that addicts are going to see the site and say “I’m going to quit.” Kids think they are immortal and will experiment no matter what adults say. And non-addicts who see these images will shudder and avoid a drug they wouldn’t have used in the first place. Perhaps it’s best for those of us who are recovering, to remind ourselves that “there but for the grace of God go I.”
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Looks like an AIDS patient.
HankB
AA and NA are not the only way. In fact, while I’m deeply committed to the AA system these days, I have some deep frustration with it. Studies have shown that many different peer support groups that are non-12 step, not even designed to look like 12 step programs, work very well indeed. For some AA is the right approach but for others, different approaches work better. There is still a serious problem, in my view, with people getting 12 step programs rammed down their throats as “the only thing that works.” They aren’t. Studies have shown other approaches work. The most important things are individual commitment to a life change and peer support to that process. But AA is everywhere you look, is tacitly endorsed by the government and large corporate institutions, and other workable approaches are not.
Dean
Nothing works for everyone. In fact the problem is that hardly anything works for anyone. The figures I’ve seen on AA/NA show a 20% rate of sobriety/”being clean” after 5 years. In fact now that I think about it that seems high, but Google has failed to show otherwise.
AA has 70+ years of history behind it; the other methods such as CBT have a worse track record than AA. Meds are worthless; I had hopes for Chantix when it came to smoking, but now the Wife won’t even prescribe it due to side effects.
I believe it’s good to be critical of AA but the truth of the matter is that it does work for a minority of people. Who is that minority? Dunno – and neither do psychologists.
I appreciate the goal of these types of campaigns, but they embark on a type of stereotyping that I don’t really appreciate. Like the news reports on a crime in which they mention pot but the crime really had nothing to do with pot.
Many people dabble in illicit drugs and do not get addicted. Many more dabble and don’t look like the poor souls in these pictures.
I’ve had quite a few friends who liked to methout on the weekends. None of them ever did enough of anything to alter their appearance.
Same with the coke or the pot. And same can be said for alcohol. Certainly, I run across pickled people all the time where I work. But they are a far cry from the folks I know who enjoy some weekend wine or beer.
As for myself, I spent quite a bit of time in my youth, when I earned far too much money and had way too few responsibilities, with an 8-ball or some funny cigars on the weekend. Every weekend. For years. It didn’t keep me from getting my bachelors or masters degrees. And I assure you, I never snorted my boat or my car or my house, etc… And I never looked like the woman above.
In any case, I developed the theory that it is not the drug that is at fault but the personality or situation or willpower of the user. If your recreational poisons start influencing all your choices, or jeopardizing your finances or you family life, or your judgment about your job, than you have become a slave to the substance, and you’ve moved from a user to an abuser.
Of all the poisons I’ve done, and it started when I was pre-teen with that ever-popular gateway drug, the only one that truly got a hold of me was tobacco. I still struggle with that. Pot, Coke, Meth, Beer, etc… I could do so any of those tonight and forget about it tomorrow. As always, I’d rationalize that this is a fling not a marriage.
Perhaps it’s genetic. I don’t like seafood either. But I’m not the only one. My pal Sara doesn’t like seafood either. Just kidding, she dumped meth pretty easily when it started affecting her business and even when she was deep into it she looked great, fabulous, in fact.
In any case, these examples are extreme examples and surely indicate much more going wrong in these people’s lives than methamphetamine.
I wish them well, and you two of course, also. I think, that in these cases, the drug is a substitute for some void. If that is the case, you can take away the substance but they’ll find something else to fill the void. A food addict can look pretty crappy too.
I think Dean’s right about the individual commitment. But one should examine the personal impetus to abuse and not place complete blame on the substance.
OT and BTW…this live preview in the comments is pretty danged cool.
L
This will be my only comment.
If you look at picture one you will see a photo of a once very pretty lady that is slightly worse for wear and tear.
If you look at picture two you will see, profound mental and brain deterioration due to the negative effects and affects of meth ingestion.
A later life of mental psychosis is hardly worth a few dollars of crystal meth.
Let the buyer beware.
To be fair, even Dawn Wells looked pretty rough in her mug shot, and she cleans up pretty nice when she tries.
However, I agree with McKiernan on this one. It is hard to believe those photos are of the same woman, just three years apart. And the “after” does appear to me to be of a woman hounded by physical and mental tortures. It says “Meth will kill you, and it will hurt” and I believe it.
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Addiction is at least as much a physical ailment as it is psychological, if not more so. Yes, people who become addicted to alcohol, pills, or other drugs do have a somewhat higher incidence of certain psychological problems involving a bad childhood and things like that, but plenty of addicts have really quite normal and healthy upbringings and attitudes before they get hooked, and quite a few other people who have problems with dysfunctional families, depression, etc. never become addicts.
If you do enough research on addiction–and it really doesn’t matter whether it’s to legal drugs like alcohol or illegal ones like cocaine–you discover that there is a very strong change that comes over the addict’s brain. Amongst other things, an addict’s brain at some point becomes physically and chemically different from a normal brain; the brain’s cells start to interpret the chemical of choice as they would things like food and water and sex. The craving becomes all-powerful and consuming, because the cells in the body are demanding the drug in the same way as demanding food if starving or water if severely dehydrated. Imagine being desperately hungry and desperately thirsty and, if on top of that you can imagine being extremely horny, and having all of that at once screaming at you, and you have an idea what the addict in withdrawal is going through.
Also, another insideous component of the disease is that because it becomes used to receiving pleasure from drugs, the brain starts to lose its ability to experience pleasure *without* the booze or drugs. The addict *physically cannot feel pleasure* or other normal emotions without chemical assistance. I realized I was truly lost and needed serious help when I finally realized it had become *impossible* for me to feel normal, or to feel pleasure in *anything*, without chemical help. The only things I could feel were things like anger, boredom, or despair if I didn’t have at least a little booze to help me.
So, imagine being extremely hungry, terribly thirsty, desperately horny, and completely unable to take pleasure in anything a normal person feels pleasure in, even friends family and loved ones. That’s what an addict is going through.
It’s been shown over and over through copious research that this is how it works, with a wide variety of drugs. And no, most addicts don’t start out that way, they can take or leave the drug, in large or small quantities. Most addicts, once you point all this out to them, can tell you when they went from casual or even somewhat excessive users into full blown addicts; for me it was pretty much right after I had some abdominal surgery back around 2002 or 2003.
Dean
I agree with everything you said, but particularly this:
Towards the end of my days drinking my personality was extremely flat whenever I wasn’t drunk. It was as if I was some kind of robot without a personality “chip”. But hand me a drink and a personality appeared – just one that was an a$$hole and not my own one.
Once I stopped it took about 2 years before I lost what the Wife called my “flat affect”. Even today 7+ years later my personality is still more subdued than I believe it would have been had I not pickled myself for most of the 1990s.
Yep. Medical professionals and researchers who’ve dealt with this will tell you that basically, the brain loses its ability to release endorphins (those chemicals that let you feel pleasure) without drugs. So you literally *can’t* feel normal anymore without chemical assistance. Once your brain trips over into that, it’s really not possible to go back, which is why the true addict remains an addict for life, whether he’s using or not.
This is all quite physical and has little to do with psychological issues. Psychological issues may well have contributed to your getting there, but once you’ve gone past the line (which you can usually see only in retrospect) it’s exceedingly unlikely if not impossible that you can ever go back. The toothpaste is out of the tube, as it were.
I wish I’d fully understood and believed all this sooner; I quit drinking a few years ago, managed a period of sobriety of a few months, and then tried experimenting with controlled drinking, with some success at first but very much a “one step forward, two steps backward” way. And, if you look at the medical literature, That’s all pretty standard. The disease is progressive and can only be arrested, never stopped. Which is also why, if you do go back to using, you’ll almost certainly find that you pick up right about where you left off, as if you’d really had little or no “time off.”
The fact that this has all been documented scientifically and with copious hard research, and isn’t just AA “dogma,” was what finally convinced me. I wish I’d seen some of that literature a lot sooner, it would have helped.
Ah well.
As for my personality: the funny part is that I always had a subdued personality, and was socially shy. Alcohol helped me overcome that and made me more sociable, even before it was a problem for me. Indeed, I had people, including a number of my in-laws, tell me repeatedly that they enjoyed my company more when I was drinking than I was sober–which, as you can imagine, made it easier for me to rationalize drinking over time. The fact is that I didn’t become truly addicted, completely out of control and unable to feel things normally, until maybe 5 years ago. Prior to that, I was just a semi-serious regular drinker who drank maybe a little too much on occasion, but functioned just fine. Heck, when Rosemary and I first got together, we got drunk together constantly, and it wasn’t a serious problem for either of us.
Addiction is insidious, all the moreso because most addicts can honestly say they weren’t addicts at first. It creeps up on you, and suddenly you’re truly hooked, and you can only recognize it in retrospect.
Oh, but I should have mentioned, the medical scientific literature *als0* shows that, given time, the brain *does* get back its ability to “feel things” normally over time. It just takes time. It frankly requires some faith on the addict’s part, because at first, they can feel almost nothing but sadness, loneliness, and alienation, especially during the first few weeks and months. But it slowly starts to come back in almost all cases.
Also, they have a growing list of prescriptions which can help, and have been shown clinically to be effective if administered and monitored properly, especially Camprol and Naltrexone, and antidepressants can also help.
All of this, by the way, was what helped me get over my reactionary beliefs, which were that addicts could all quit if they *really wanted to* and that it was just touchy-feely moral-relativism feel-good crap to describe it all as a “disease.” No. It really is a disease. Self-inflicted, arguably, but in many cases not really, because the alcoholic and some other forms of addict really can’t tell they’re slipping into addiction until it’s way too late, and we live in a society that doesn’t just tolerate alcohol consumption but actively encourages it, and guess what? Most people *will* never have a serious problem with it. So it’s simply *not* fair to most alcoholics to say they “did it to themselves.” Yes, somewhat that’s true, *if* they had been urged their whole life to stay away from the stuff. But otherwise, it’s really not fair at all, for the booze addict really has all sorts of ways to tell themselves they’re “fine” until it’s way too late for them to back out.
Never having been any kind of liberal, my answer is to let all the acidheads die off as fast as their bodies deteriorate. I certainly want no tax funds diverted from the needs of the more deserving, for purposes of extending the live spans of the suicidal.
They all must want to be in the garbage bin of human society. Which is where they wind up in any case.
Life will go on without such idiots. So do not divert your time and attention to any of them. Unless you are related to one of them. In which case, you probably need somebody to help you pray for them, or whatever.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
That’s interesting, Arnold, because in the past I’ve seen you say that you thought people struggling with addiction ought to be helped if possible.
I don’t consider addiction a liberal/conservative issue, and calling it a “disease” does not mean that we should treat it the same way we treat AIDS, or cancer, or malaria. I wonder, though, if those who are so dead-set against considering addiction a disease (because the addict chooses to use) are consistent in belief towards AIDS patients (who got the disease by choosing to have sex/use IV drugs) and some cancer patients (who smoke and develop various cancers due to smoking). How about diabetes and high blood pressure: many people could avoid these diseases by not overeating and exercising more. Should we let these diseases kill those who suffer from them just because they “chose” to become ill?
Addiction is a disease, but that doesn’t mean we should treat it exactly the same as any other disease. In fact having seen both sides of the disease – as an addict and a family member of an addict – I’d like to see laws that stripped freedoms from addicts. Forcing an addict into treatment is impossible; heck family members can’t even keep them from walking out of a hospital AMA.
Like I mention earlier, I don’t know what the answer for addiction is. Those who have never experienced it can’t really understand what the addict and her family goes through. It is truly Hell on earth for everyone.
I find that at least some who angrily say “it’s bad behavior, not a disease” are sometimes consistent in that they say the same things about people who get cancer from smoking or diabetes from poor habits, but usually not so severely.
I would agree that you can’t force treatment on addicts, but they do need to see the consequences of not seeking treatment. Society does try to do this, although a little clumsily; loss of driver’s license, jail time, etc. Courts often make addicts go to 12 step meetings, which is something of a start (although I strongly believe they should recognize other, non 12 step programs, and should tread lightly in that area).
It really is a disease. Yes, it affects behavior, and causes very negative behavior, but angrily fulminating at the badly behaving person does nothing to make them better. Confronting them can help, but ultimately it’s on them to seek treatment or not.
From high school till my mid twenties I drank like a drunk sailor at an all you can drink buffet. While in the service I drank so much 3.2 beer (several pitchers) that I had so little oxygen left in my blood that my eyes shut themselves down. Luckily I knew the way back to the barracks with my eyes closed.
When I met my wife, I had a pitcher of beer in my hand. My roommate owned one of those movie theaters that served food and beer, so I was there often.
About a month later my liver shut down. Not from drinking but from cyto-megallo virus. The future mrs’s took good care of me that month I looked like a reject from the Simpsons.
Needless to say I haven’t had more than two beers at a single sitting since that. I’ve had a six pack of the good stuff in my fridge for almost a year now. I’ve had one drink in the past three months.
Now, I ask myself was I addicted back then? I’d honestly have to say no. When I ran outta cash and couldn’t drink, there were no cravings. I’d just do without and wouldn’t think twice. Hell, I’ve been drinking coffee since I was 6 months old, and I’ll go for weeks without it and I’ve never even felt the caffeine withdraw. Maybe I’m lucky. But several other members of my family aren’t so lucky. One uncle spent time in prison for prescription drug abuse. An aunt died from an overdose, my uncle still hasn’t gotten over that. A best friend of mine for many many years growing up has been clean for a while now, but still struggles. He was a computer genius and taught me so much when I was in high school about programming. Then the drugs and booze took hold of him, and he works as a roofer when he could have done so much more.
What’s my point? Oh, I’m not really sure. I think what I want to say is I know I’m personally very lucky, and I’m grateful for that. But the important part is to always have compassion for those around you. Everyone has their own personal demons. Is pawning off another social responsibility to the government the right thing to do? I don’t think so but there does need to be support for everyone from somewhere.
‘Many and sharp the num’rous ills
Inwoven with our frame!
More pointed still we make ourselves
Regret, remorse, and shame!
And Man, whose heav’n-erected face
The smiles of love adorn, -
Man’s inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn!
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Well said and spot on, Chad.
Chad
Compassion. Good word. I like it.
Been thinking a lot lately with the things going on in my life, and compassion keeps coming up as something that needs to be seen more in every day life.
I know that’s always been the case since the first human threw poop at another filthy monkey but still it needs to be said.
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Alcoholism and drug addiction are diseases. Initially, I embraced that idea, but I had no idea what it meant. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about that part, either. Bottom line: I can’t drink because I’ll lose control of my drinking.
That said, for some reason, I really want a drink tonight. I just want to crawl in a hole and drink myself to oblivion, to forget everything … but when I first got sober, they told me to "think the drink through." That is, keep going with that line of thought about the drink. Which means that I’d drink, I’d get drunk, I’d lose control, do something stupid, and wake up with acute shame and terrible self-loathing and a pounding headache, and start the addiction spiral again.
God grants me the serenity …
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