The new party school ratings from the Princeton Review are in and the number one position has been taken over by the University of Florida, in Gainsville - which means a lot of college students will need alcohol and drug rehab. Florida State, in Tallahassee, has moved to number 10.

Prior to gaining this number one party school position, an estimated 10,000 of the University of Florida’s 51,000 students may have needed alcohol or drug rehab. There’s a good chance that being the number one party school in the U.S. will bump this up even more. 

With prescription drug addiction and abuse being a problem with about 15,000 students as well, it looks like roughly half the kids at U of F may be either taking drugs or drinking - both to excess.

Parents should be on the lookout for drugs and drinking and do something about it. With about $50,000 being spent on most State college educations, you want to make sure that, if needed, your kid gets alcohol and drug rehab. Florida has several alcohol and drug addiction treatment centers to choose from. If you need help, call Drug Rehab Referral - they can help you find one that’s good for your situation in or around Gainsville.

Of the 51,000 students in the University of Florida

With prescription drug addiction and abuse also being so prevalent in Florida, it’s

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Students starting and the University of Virginia this semester will have the opportunity to do a special orientation on alcohol abuse. The program actually starts in August online and continues once school starts. This is sure to prevent a lot of college kids from needing an alcohol rehab center but what I can’t figure out is why this program is optional.

Shouldn’t it be for every student?  ”Every year we hear about students across the country dying from alcohol poisoning,” said Susan Bruce, director of the university’s Center for Alcohol and Substance Education. “We don’t want that to happen here.” So, if the school is so concerned, what is the deal with making it optional?

Another kind of strange thing about the program is the focus on ensuring kids don’t think the alcohol problem is that bad at UV. While UV is not even in the top 20 party schools, to UV’s credit, I hope this doesn’t have the effect of minimizing the situation or the dangers.

According to statistics, it’s likely that about one in five college students could use some time in a drug or alcohol rehab center. It really is time colleges  and universities cracked down. So, even if this program is not the ideal, it’s a big effort. And if it’s done right, it should keep a lot of kids safer and ensure an alcohol rehab center isn’t the next step in their education. Want more info. Check out these articles on alcohol and drug addiction treatment?

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One of the attractions of beer for someone who’s an addict is that it’s relatively cheap. But this guy in Australia doesn’t seem to care how much it costs. He’s a father of four, a construction worker, takes home $1440 a week, spends $150 on rent, $150 on buses and taxis, $50 on his phone and spends about $1000 a week on beer. That’s one serious alcohol addiction. How he manages to work is beyond me.

He was also just convicted of drunk driving for the seventh time. In one of the accidents he killed someone. His most recent arrest came when he was driving his motorcycle at 123 mph.

He has now allegedly gone cold turkey and is involved in an alcohol rehab program. Let’s hope he gets into a long-term residential program that can get down to the bottom of his addiction problem.

This is an unusual case, no doubt about it. Not many people spend that much money on beer every week. However, alcohol addiction is the most common addiction in the U.S. and it kills thousands every year. Most of those people die from accidents or by taking risks they wouldn’t take if they were sober.

If you know someone who needs alcohol rehab, contact Drug Rehab Referral. They can help you find a drug and alcohol rehab that will really work. They can also help you with intervention services if you can’t convince someone they need alcohol addiction help.

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PalmBeachPost.com in Florida has an announcement about a town hall meeting to curb underage drinking. They want to do something about the fact that kids are drinking at younger and younger ages. Those starting their binge drinking at 12 or 13 will probably need a drug rehab as they get older.

From TheDay.com in Connecticut there is an article “Skeptics ask: Does Setting Drinking Age at 21 Save Lives”? I don’t know if it saves lives, but it probably saves some from needing drug detox or drug rehab for heavy drinking. My co-workers talk to enough people who need drug rehab because of alcohol abuse for me to be certain of that.

There is an online petition to sign if you think 21 is too old to start drinking legally. One man compared the age limit to the death penalty for juveniles. I guess he meant if you can die for killing someone at age 17 you should be able to drink. I don’t think the two are comparable. College and high school students think the law is absurd and they should be able to drink. The statistics speak for themselves: If you drink at an early age, and often, you are four times as likely to need drug rehab.

If you are a parent don’t let your kids drink, it is healthier. If you are a teenager learn more about drugs and alcohol, if you understand them you won’t be so eager to get stoned. You can avoid needing a drug rehab program by learning for your self.

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For someone who’s a heavy drinker or binge drinker, going to a drug detox before drug rehab doesn’t have to be unpleasant. Really, the fact that you have to go at all may be the worst part of it.

At Santa Barbara State College they have drug rehab or similar programs for college students who have become addicted to alcohol. The Alcohol and Substance Abuse Prevention office sees four or five cases a week.

]n Texas binge drinking is such a problem that the East Texas Review wrote an article entitled: “What Every Parent Should Know about College Binge Drinking.” Included in the article are some good things you should know if you’re a parent:

Students who live in a fraternity or sorority are the heaviest drinkers.  In fraternities, 86% of the residents report binge drinking, in a sorority it’s 80%. Nearly 50% of all college students report binge drinking nationally.

The article suggests noticing if alcohol is cheaper near the campuses or if nearby outlets run specials for students. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for example, February is bar month. I wouldn’t send my kids to college anywhere near there.

In colleges over the U.S., there are hundreds of thousands of accidents, physical assaults and sexual assaults every year. 25% of students report missing class, falling behind and getting poor grades because of alcohol abuse.

If you assume your kids are in the half that is not drinking too much, and you just let it go at that, there’s a good chance yours will be the ones in a drug detox or drug rehab program, in jail for drunk driving, or worse.

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Marc Katz, sports writer for the Dayton Daily News out of Ohio, has a good idea: He thinks the NCAA should ban beer commercials. Huge numbers of college students binge drink - over 40% of the student body in most schools - and more than 20% of the students need drug rehab or some sort of help. Over 90% of parents think that drinking is part of college life and many allow their high-school-aged kids to drink at home. What most parents don’t realize is that nearly half of underage drinkers become alcoholics and will need an alcohol or drug rehab program.

Most colleges, including Ohio State and Ohio University, have problems with students drinking too much. Mr. Katz had some interesting statistics in his article: 1700 college aged students die each year from alcohol related accidents including drunk driving, there are 600,000 injuries, 700,000 assaults and nearly 100,000 incidents of sexual abuse - all good reasons for not showing drug or alcohol commercials on TV..

Despite these outragrous statistics, most of Mr. Katz’s readers were horrified at the concept of not seeing beer commercials. But the numbers speak for themselves.

Parents should insist on their kids not drinking and the NCAA should ban beer ads. Prescription drug and alcohol abuse are sending millions of people to drug detox and drug rehab, why make matters worse with ads promoting drinking? One last point, Ohio University is a top ten party school. Does your child go there?

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At Stillwater High School in Minnesota, 99% of the seniors said they haven’t used meth in the past year. A very good number overall, and more than likely none of them will need drug rehab for meth abuse.

On the other hand, 27% of high school students and 41% of college students engage in high risk drinking. It is well known that the Midwest has an alcohol problem and Minnesota is no exception. Half of these students will need drug rehab for alcohol addiction. Far fewer than half will ever actually go to rehab, but they will need it.

In fact only 17 people between the ages of 18 and 25 entered treatment for alcohol abuse in 2007 in the entire Minneapolis area despite the fact that thousands of students are doing high risk drinking in Minnesota on a regular basis. It’s great that meth use is so low, but alcohol abuse figures need to be lowered in Minnesota or the drug rehab programs will be too full to meet the demand.

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According to a report by The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University 22.9 percent of college students might need drug rehab. At Arizona State that could be over 10,000 students – that’s a lot of drug rehab. Arizona State is ranked number 3 on the Playboy Party School list.

There is another interesting side to those numbers which is the drug dealers themselves - how many drug dealers would it take to supply 10,000 students for a month?
 
There is not only a danger to the user of drugs, but the drug dealer himself is often in danger from other drug dealers or people who know the dealer. At Arizona State a dealer named Jake was robbed at gunpoint of drugs and cash. “With a gun to his head and duct tape around his feet, mouth and eyes, Jake was told he’d be killed,” said a recent article. According to Jake, “They could have easily just popped it, walked out the door and gotten away with murder.”

Maybe that’s an unusual scene, or maybe not. But the dangers of drug dealing are probably not thought about by the customer.  Jake supplies drugs to some portion of the 10,000 students who take drugs regularly at Arizona State and made $10,000 in December alone.

There must be a lot of dealers hanging around the university marketing drugs to the students. For some it is just a party and for others it is far more serious – either way, there’s a good chance both will need an alcohol or drug rehab program.

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It looks like somebody, I don’t know who but I would guess we could follow the money right back to big pharma, is trying to get alcoholics and drug addicts going to their family doctors for help with their addiction problems rather than going through drug rehab.

On the surface, it looks good: someone who has an alcohol or drug addiction problem could go to their local family doctor and get drugs to control the craving and, somehow, they don’t quite have this part worked out yet, counseling. The problem is two-fold: first, the addicts are put on other drugs and, second, they’ll be getting drug rehab from docs who aren’t trained in it. I foresee this leading to prolonged drug taking - perhaps an addiction to a drug other than the one they came to the doctor to resolve. Which is what happened with methadone.

The thing I found most alarming about this article was comparing the addiction situation with the ‘depression’ situation of the ’80’s. “In many ways, we are with alcoholism where we were with depression 30 years ago,” said Mark Willenbring, director of treatment and recovery research at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

The article goes on to describe what happened with depression: “As a new generation of antidepressants came to market in the early 1980s, physicians on the front lines of patient care grew more attentive to the signs of depression and more willing to treat it. Patients with protracted bouts of blue mood turned to their family doctors for help in increasing numbers. In the process, depression was transformed from a highly stigmatized mental illness that rarely was treated before a suicide attempt or outside a psychiatric hospital to a condition for which 80 percent of patients turn first to a general medical practitioner.”

That’s right. And now we have a culture completely infused with prescribed antidepressants - including for kids who are killing themselves and others - and people who many experts say weren’t ill in the first place but are being made ill by the drugs themselves.
 
Prescription drug addiction has become epidemic in the U.S. and what happened with antidepressants is the exact mechanism that caused it. Marvelous PR guys these drug companies have. Feeling blue? Here’s the drug. Don’t bother finding out why you’re blue, don’t bother finding out what you have to change in your life to be happy - just take this drug and it will all go away. But nothing went away, except the person taking the drug. They went away.
 
The drug companies have invaded just about every sector of our lives but, judging by the $ billions being spent on prescription drugs and the alarming increase in the number of people who take them, we’re not getting any better. In fact, we’re getting worse. More and more people apparently need these drugs, and more and more people are taking them.

Are we really getting more unstable and less able to handle our lives without drugs with with every decade? I don’t think so. But if we keep taking drugs, that’s exactly what will happen.

If you want to get someone off drugs or alcohol, stick with a good drug rehab program. Don’t fall into the trap of choosing a solution that may well just become another problem. Addiction help is possible, whether for alcohol, street drugs or prescription drugs - through drug detox and drug rehab.

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Binge drinking and alcohol or drug rehab eventually meet up at some intersection: someone either goes to drug rehab or people and families get hurt. Alcohol addiction can go on for a long time and a big effort is necessary to stop it.
 
Princeton High School in Princeton, Minnesota has a problem with binge drinking and parents may soon be looking for a Minnesota drug rehab program to help them out.

An article in last week’s Minneapolis’ Star Tribune headline said it all: “Alcohol keeps a firm grip on state’s teens”. Lucky for the parents and students, Principal Pete Olsen recognizes the problem. He understands that if 70% of his students say they haven’t had any alcohol for two weeks, that means 30% of them have.

Olsen points to the 9% of senior boys who drank alcohol at least once in the previous two weeks, the 11% who drank three to five times, and the 2% who said drank six times or more. On the girls’ side the numbers are even higher - 15% at least once in the previous two weeks, 9% said twice, 6% said three to five times and 3% said six times or more.

They are “doing a lot of drinking on a regular basis” Olsen said.

To curb this abuse, Olsen is focused on reaching a younger audience regarding the risks of alcohol and drug abuse through more drug education classes. He also has his sites set on classes that teach life skills.

Mr. Rick Lahn, principal at Princeton Middle School is focusing on alcohol and drug abuse with his Life Skills program taught to middle schoolers in grades three through eight. Lahn also notes that parents have the biggest impact by being good role models. I agree - most parents are just too complacent about drug and alcohol abuse.

Drug Rehab Referral can help you, your family or friends if you have a drug or alcohol abuse problem that needs attention. Call us if you need help - we’ll ensure you find an alcohol or drug rehab program with a good success rate.

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