Category Archives: California Drug Treatment

CVS Standing For Life and Safety

methadone-recovery-1It was announced late last month that CVS Drugstores intends to expand their provision of non-prescription naloxone into 12 additional U.S. States. Currently, they provide naloxone over-the-counter in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, but will begin offering the life-saving medication in California, Minnesota, Mississippi, Arkansas, Montana, New Jersey, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah, South Carolina, and Wisconsin.

Naloxone has gained attention in recent years due to its ability to reverse opioid overdoses. Over 44,000 people have died annually in the United States from drug overdose with a majority of those stemming from heroin or prescription pain medication. Naloxone has been successfully utilized in emergency rooms and on site in communities around the country reversing opioid overdose and saving thousands of lives.

It is critically important to recognize that people who have suffered with addiction are sometimes close to a lasting recovery. There is a popular expression used lately that is somewhat stark though true and thought-provoking. The expression goes “You can’t recover if you’re dead.” While this may sound off-putting to some, it reminds us that people stuck in years of painful addiction can, and do, change. We would much rather have naloxone readily available to save a life and to provide a son, daughter, or friend the opportunity to change direction.

An addicted individual could be much closer to choosing a life of recovery than we might imagine. This happens on a daily basis. How, and when, someone recovers from addiction is hard to predict. All we can do is to offer them an open door to a new and better life.

More Articles on Naloxone

Acadia Healthcare Opioid Treatment Programs

Acadia HealthcareAcadia is a large U.S. based company who provide a broad range of behavioral healthcare services that target mental health and substance abuse problems in children, teenagers, and adults.

Their inpatient facilities provide approximately 9200 beds in 37 states including the United States, United Kingdom, and Puerto Rico. The company’s outpatient addiction services specialize in opioid addiction and medication-assisted treatment for those suffering with heroin and other opioid dependencies. Each Acadia clinic utilizes methadone and suboxone in their overall treatment.

Acadia recently acquired CRC Health Group and in so doing raised their total number of opioid treatment programs to about 90 – currently making them the single largest provider in the United States.

Cassava Recovery App For Mobile Phones

cassava-appA new mobile phone app for recovering people was released last month by Elements Behavioral Health based out of Long Beach, California. The app is called Cassava and it provides a number of nifty features such as a daily reflection, a support group meetings finder based on your location, and a personal sobriety tracker that measures one’s number of days drug free.

In addition to days sober, the app allows users to record in a personal journal format their moods, daily nutrition, and even sleep patterns. An important part of growth in recovery is following new disciplines and remaining aware of self-care needs. The Cassava app can function as a useful toot for recovering people aiming to feed their recovery on a daily basis.

Another potentially helpful feature of the app is the inclusion of “recovery tips”. These function as reminders and suggestions for ways to cope with relapse risks. Addicted people, particularly in the early phase of recovery, are more vulnerable to sudden urges to use and often need a means of redirecting their thinking in order to sidestep a build-up of thoughts that feed the urge to use. Reading recovery literature has always been a potentially useful action step that helps to short circuit urges and cravings.

The app is free and can be downloaded from the Apple website. While it is designed for Apple iPhone 5.0 and above, I was able to install the app on version 4.0 and it worked well.