Drinking games in college turn light or moderate drinkers into troublemakers and trouble magnets, according to a new study. If your child already drinks, you might consider getting them into alcohol rehab before they go off to college or university.

For the study, the researchers first surveyed 3,830 college students and found that 1,028 of them were heavy drinkers and 2,802 of them were light to moderate drinkers. Of the 2,802 light to moderate drinkers, two-thirds (66%) played drinking games.

They then surveyed the participants regarding problems like nausea or vomiting, hangovers, missing class, lower grades, fighting, damaged property, drinking and driving or being arrested for a DUI.

All of the heavy drinkers had a high percentage of those problems whether they played drinking games or not.

But of the 2,802 light to moderate drinkers, the ones who had the highest percentage of those problems were the ones who played drinking games – which, by the way, two-thirds of them did.

Why are drinking games trouble magnets? Drinking games are the ultimate in binge drinking.

Here’s an example of one drinking game called California Kings (taken from the website called www.collegebeergames.com – although the games don’t involve only beer, there’s hard liquor too – which tells you how to play about 100 drinking games.)

Spread cards face-down around a large cup. Draw in clockwise order. A “drink” is a normal sip.

- Ace – Social – He/she who draws proposes a toast and everyone drinks.

- 2-6 – Black (Clubs & Spades) – TAKE the card’s value in drinks.

- 2-6 – Red (Hearts & Diamonds) – GIVE the card’s value in drinks. The total may be split-up between multiple players.

- 7 – Waterfall – EVERYBODY begins to CHUG. You can’t stop until the person to your RIGHT has stopped. He/she who draws may stop first.

- 8 – Thumb Master – He/she who draws puts his/her thumb on the table. The last person to do so drinks.

- 9 – Rhyme – He/she who draws says a sentence. The person to his/her LEFT must rhyme with the last word in the original sentence. This continues in clockwise order. Rhyming words may not be repeated. If you repeat a word or can’t think of one, you drink.

- 10 – Category – He/she who draws thinks of a category, like “Simpsons Characters.” Then, he/she says one, like “Homer.” Then, the person to his/her LEFT must think of another one, like “Bart.” This continues in clockwise order. If you repeat an item or can’t think of one, you drink.

- Jack – Guys drink – A toast is often included.

- Queen – Ladies drink – A toast is often included.

- King – We don’t call it “kings” for nothing. He/she who draws the first, second and third king pours some of his/her drink into the “large cup” AND comes up with a rule that must be obeyed for the rest of the game, like “no showing your teeth” or “no saying ‘drink,’ ‘drank’ or ‘drunk’.” Anyone in violation of a rule drinks. He/she who draws the fourth king must POUND the contents of the “large cup.” Drawing the fourth king marks the end of the game.

Note:
Drawing the fourth king is a FATE WORSE THAN DEATH if there are a combination of beverages in the “large cup,” like beer, wine cooler and vodka. In fact, some players insist that only beer be poured into the cup; but they don’t have the love for the game.

This is just one of about a hundred games on that website, and I’m sure there are hundreds more.

Reading this should give you an understanding of how easily even a light to moderate drinker can drink themselves into a stupor.

Don’t want your child to get caught up in this kind of activity? If they are already drinkers, get them into a good alcohol rehab program before they take off for college or university.

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If someone you care about has a drinking problem and isn’t getting the help they need because they’re embarrassed to go to alcohol rehab, you should know that some of the best educated, most respected people in the world are also dealing with alcohol abuse – specifically, we’re talking about surgeons.

According to a recent survey, the problem among surgeons is nearly twice as bad as in the general population.

The guys who did the study sent out questionnaires to 25,000 surgeons. More than 7,000 responded to the survey and, of those, 15 percent said they have an alcohol abuse problem. Some experts think that it’s really way above 15 percent – they think many of the doctors surveyed would be unlikely to answer the question truthfully. They’re embarrassed, too.

Sometimes, knowing that people you respect and admire are having the same problems you are makes it easier to admit you have a problem. And that’s the first step to being willing to do something about it – like get into an alcohol addiction treatment program.

Use this information to help the people you care about.

Also, if that person is a doctor, it’s especially important to do something about it. Other questions on the survey were about medical errors. Of the doctors who said they had an alcohol problem, 77 percent said they also made a major medical error in the last three months.

So, if you get a surgeon into alcohol rehab, you’re not only helping save his life, you could also be helping to save the life of some of his patients.

How would you feel if your surgeon husband or wife, who you know has a drinking problem, made an error in surgeon that cost someone their life? It would feel especially bad if you hadn’t done enough to get them to go to rehab.

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According to a news story this week, heroin production in Afghanistan has increased 61% in the last decade. They’re pretty upset about this in England where more than 90% of the heroin on the street comes from Afghanistan. They’ve also pretty much given up on drug rehab in England – they’re now considering making heroin legally available to heroin addicts just to reduce the level of crime and the burden on the health care system.

The increase in Afghanistan’s heroin production is also causing a bit of a political mess:  the Prime Minister says that one of the major reasons England agreed to join in on the war in Afghanistan was to get the Afghanistan opium coming into England under control – i.e., put a stop to it.

Without getting political about this, I have to say that war certainly isn’t going to put Afghanistan in a position to develop a gross national product other than the deadly poppy seed used to make heroin.

In a country whose infrastructure is destroyed, where non-military deaths happen every minute of the day – losing parents, spouses and children, where there is virtually no opportunity left to do something productive, the people are going to fall back on whatever they know and can do.

It’s the same in Russia and many of the countries that used to be the USSR, and in other countries around the world: Lack of commerce leaves many people starving, so they take advantage of the fact that some things are hard to get and, instead, make those things available through the black market.

These types of situations are high among the reasons people turn to alcohol and drugs in the first place.

Would we still have alcoholics and drug addicts, would we still need alcohol and drug rehab programs treatment in a world of peace, health and safety, a world where everyone has the opportunity to produce something of value, something they can be proud of and for which they receive adequate exchange?

Probably. But I would bet it would be far less of a problem.

If you’re interesting in ensuring your kids don’t grow up with alcohol or drug addiction problems, try to help them create an environment of peace, health, safety and productivity. It will go a long way to making them happy with themselves and their lives.

And if there is one common denominator among people who drink too much and take drugs, it is that they are unhappy and do not feel good about themselves.

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The world now knows that Whitney Houston died yesterday. Although the cause of death will not be announced until the full toxicology screen results are in, the coroner reportedly told the family that it appeared to be a mixture of Xanax, other prescription drugs, and alcohol. So …Whitney’s been through drug rehab more than once. What went wrong?

A brief look over her history definitely gives us the broad strokes, if not the details.

It appears she started taking drugs after she married Bobby Brown, and, per her own reports, the relationship was volatile and abusive emotionally, mentally and physically. And they did drugs together.

She did her first drug rehab while with him, and went back to him afterwards. They didn’t divorce for several years after that. The chances of someone staying clean under those circumstances are almost nil.

After their divorce, she tried rehab again. Did the drug rehab facility get down to the bottom of why she was still taking drugs? Was she still under the influence of her ex? Did she have other negative influences in her life?

Was she upset about the fact that her voice was deteriorating from years of physical abuse? Did she have a solid plan to restore her health and get her voice back in shape?

Was she upset about the bad reviews on her last concert tour and some of the audience actually walking out?

Celebrities and really talented people tend to attract people who want to break them, control them, bring them down to their level, or lower. Unless those influences are recognized as such and the person gets them out of their life, it’s hard to recover from anything.

They also tend to be surrounded with ‘enablers’ – people who will get them the alcohol and drugs they ask for or otherwise support their bad habits. Those people might even say they love the addict, they might even be their own family, or doctors who are supposed to care for her, but their actions speak louder than their words.

If someone you care about is going to drug rehab, make sure the facility and method they use takes these things into consideration.

It is probably one of the biggest reasons why someone reverts to drugs, or alcohol, after drug or alcohol rehab – celebrity or not.

If the people in Whitney’s life who wanted to hold her down had been recognized and she had gotten them out of her life, there’s a very good chance she would not only still be alive, it is very likely that she would have continued her successful career.

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It seems that they’ve given up on handling the heroin addiction problem in England. They’re no longer talking drug rehab, they’re not even talking about ‘harm reduction’ like methadone programs and setting up sites where heroin addicts are supervised and can get clean needles so they can shoot up. Now they’re talking about just giving heroin addicts heroin. They hope to cut down the crime associated with the various things addicts do get the drug, and reducing sales of the drug on the street.

Okay – so they’re about to throw in the towel on the addicts. After a two-year trial, they’ve concluded that parking heroin addicts on heroin is a better idea than parking them on methadone – at great expense to the taxpayer, who will foot the bill, an infinitely larger bill than ‘methadone maintenance.’

Not that the government owes heroin addicts anything, but there are good drug rehab programs around that would get heroin addicts clean and sober – they just don’t seem to invest the time and money into really understanding addiction and figuring out what program(s) will work. And, really, if you want fewer heroin addicts, the last thing you want to do is support the habit and thereby condemn addicts to lifelong addiction.

Now they’re opening the door to more and more heroin addicts, and fewer and fewer productive and functional citizens.

I wonder if that’s what will eventually happen in the U.S. The so-called War on Drugs isn’t successful – there are more addicts of one sort or another now than ever, despite the fact that $ billions have been spent on fighting the war.

I’d like to know what people think of this as a solution.

Do you have an opinion? Do you have a better solution?

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That’s one in five. That means that if you’re in a room with four other people, there’s a good chance one of you is taking prescription drugs – painkillers, stimulants, or sedatives, all of which are addictive – for no medical reason. And that person needs to get prescription drug rehab.

According to Medline, ‘experts’ don’t understand why so many people take these drugs. They assume that the fact that they’re so available has something to do with it.

But it takes a lot more than ‘being available’ for someone to take drugs. Bridges and tall buildings are available too, but that doesn’t mean people are going to jump off them.

So, why do they take them?

The reasons are actually pretty obvious, despite the fact that people who take them might say they’re just doing it for ‘kicks’ or because they ‘like it.’

The real reasons center around the fact that the individual taking them is unhappy, frustrated, confused, overwhelmed – and all those other conditions that indicate the person has something going on in their lives that they don’t feel they can do anything about.

And when you consider the world we live in right now, feeling that way about life should come as no surprise.

Also, because tens of millions are taking these same drugs as prescribed by their doctor, they think that the drugs are safe and see no reason why they should take them, too.

But they are deadly addictive. It doesn’t take long to get addicted to them, but what it takes to get off them is, guaranteed, far worse than whatever the person was experiencing that made them take the drugs in the first place.

They are likely to become ill with a variety of side effects, and sometimes life-threatening conditions. They are also going to have problems in their family, their job, their finances, their friends and other relationships. And they’re going to have to do a drug rehab program, which can take several months, will cost them a lot of money and their lives will be disrupted even more.

After all that’s done, you would have a hard time finding someone who says it was worth taking the drug. The only way that might be true is that a good drug rehab program will help them figure out solutions to the problems they were having in life that drove them to drugs in the first place.

Isn’t it a lot easier to just do that – face our problems and find solutions – than to take drugs, go through hell, put our families through hell, only to end up having to do the same thing?

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I read an unbelievable news story today about the burn victims of methamphetamine. According to the news story, the associated press conducted a survey of key hospitals in the nation’s most active meth states. The survey showed that up to a third of the patients in some burn units were hurt while making meth. This added up to thousands of people. Thousands of people whose burns – serious enough to send them to hospital burn units – could have been prevented if they’d gone to drug rehab.

The story was actually about the fact that most of these people are insured, which is creating a huge burden on healthcare costs for the rest of us, and is actually causing some burn units to close.

What about people who are burned when being caught in house fires, or even fighting them. Can you imagine living in an area which no longer had a burn unit to help people who were burned while doing something legal?

The burns from methamphetamine are usually caused by explosions while making it. The method is called “shake-and-bake.” The raw ingredients are put into a 2 liter soda bottle and shaken. But the mixture is very unstable and if not done absolutely correctly can explode.

The explosions can cause permanent disfigurement, blindness, and death.

The damage is also reflected in the cost for each burn patient – an average of $130,000 each, 60 percent higher than other burn patients. Burn experts estimate the cost to the taxpayer at 10s to 100s of millions of dollars. They can’t get a closer estimate because someone burned by meth often lies about what happened.

Another problem with this method of making meth is that, unlike big labs, someone making it is hard to find. Big labs required quite a bit of equipment and the chemicals could be smelled all over the neighborhood.

But they are making their presence known in hospitals. From 1999 to 2009, there were 83 meth related injuries in Indiana. Thanks to shake-and-bake ‘labs’, there have been 70 injuries in the last two years. A big change.

One of the doctors in a burn center in Iowa said that many of the meth lab burn patients won’t be able to return to a normal life. They’ll need rehab and occupational therapy to cope with their disfigured body.

There are a lot of people who have a pretty casual attitude towards drugs – especially when it comes to something apparently not too dangerous, like smoking marijuana. But drugs lead to more drugs, and when they lead to something like meth, you’re really taking your life in your hands in a number of ways.

If someone you care about is into drugs of any kind, the only way to really keep them safe is to get them through a good drug rehab program so they will get off drugs, and not want to take them again.

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Years ago I had a friend who grew up in ‘the projects.’ Drugs, guns, crime, gangs – they were everywhere. And there wasn’t much else to do. Until some bright person started dance classes in a school yard. I don’t know how many kids were saved from a life of drugs, guns, crime, gangs, prison and drug rehab, or how many didn’t die when they would have otherwise, but my friend was one of them. In fact, he became a professional dancer and, after that, a very successful businessman with a great family.

All from one guy who cared enough to give the kids something to do that was fun and challenging enough to get and hold their interest.

Many parents get their kids involved in one thing after another – partly to teach them different skills, partly to enable them to achieve something, and partly to keep them out of trouble.

But these are ‘minivan’ parents – families with cars, money and the time and flexibility to ferry their kids around from one activity to another.

This is not the case in inner cities. A higher percentage of parents don’t have jobs or, because they work for a relatively low wage, need two incomes to make a go of it. But, as they will tell you, they can’t afford the daycare, transportation, eating out of the house, appropriate workclothes and so on that are needed for both parents to work. In fact, those expenses can cost more than their pay. So, mom is at home. And usually without a car, without a support group that can help her, and so on.

That doesn’t leave extra money they can pump into helping their kids achieve their goals.

If you’re in that position, or know someone who is, you could make a big difference by finding people who would volunteer their services for community programs that the kids will attend. You could do a little survey of the local kids, speak to them individually, and see what they would like. Then pick the things that the majority of kids say they would like and get something going.

Community activities like this can change an entire neighborhood. If you have the opportunity to do it, you could save lives, and help many kids achieve something that they’re proud of and can carry them forward to create a good future, free of crime, guns, gangs, prison, drugs and drug rehab programs.

And the personal satisfaction for you will be out the roof.

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Can you imagine living in a State where poverty is rampant and employers can’t find enough people to hire who pass a drug test? That’s the situation in West Virginia, and this year officials plan to figure out what they can do to get these people into drug rehab and work out an overall handling to reduce the number of people who are drugged.

West Virginia is a good example of what happens on a smaller scale – in families – when drugs and alcohol enter the picture. Sometimes it’s the parents with the drug or alcohol problem, and sometimes it’s the kids. In either case, the result is the same.

How did West Virginia become, basically, an entire State with the same problems drugs create in a family. West Virginia was one of the hardest hit States when the OxyContin addiction problem surfaced in the U.S. Purdue Pharma. Purdue promoted OxyContin as less addictive than previously used painkillers like Vicodin and Percocet – and was later fined $634 million for intentionally lying to the public and doctors.

Not only were people getting addicted to the drug left, right and center, OxyContin pills were also labeled as ‘killers’ because of the rapidly escalating toll of overdose deaths connected to the drug.

People in West Virginia tended to be older and suffer from many chronic illnesses and debilitating diseases caused by years of working in the mines, so they jumped all over OxyContin.

And, now, many years later, the State is still caught up in prescription drug addiction. And many of them can’t afford to get off the drugs – since they’re almost impossible to stop taking without a drug addiction treatment program offered by professionals. There just aren’t enough of them – not good ones, anyone – offered free of charge by the State.

Back to families – this is, of course, is tearing families apart. Not only are parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts and kids suffering from addiction, the kids who want to make something of their lives are likely to move to another State to do it. They want opportunity, and there’s not much of it in West Virginia. So, they leave, and the families are left behind.

Anyone who has a family member abusing alcohol or drugs needs to get help immediately. It really will tear the family apart, and someone may even die.

We have enough to regret in our lives without also having the fact that we could have helped someone, and saved their lives, but didn’t do it. A successful drug rehab program is the answer.

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It’s the new year, and it’s time to start taking drug rehab, for yourself or someone you care about, into consideration. Do you really want to go through another year of hell living with drugs?

If you are looking at drug rehab options, there’s one specific method of so-called drug treatment that you really don’t want – and that’s methadone treatment.

Methadone treatment is used for people addicted to heroin or other opiates – like prescription painkillers.

Sometimes methadone is recommended as a ‘stop gap’ – a drug to take that will prevent withdrawal symptoms but does not get you high. You should know that people who are put on methadone for this reason almost never get into drug rehab. They are given methadone for years. Sometimes for life.

Other people, usually those who have gone back to taking drugs after drug rehab, are told that their body is no longer capable of producing the natural endorphins that make us ‘happy’, and that their only choice is to take methadone.

What has usually happened there is that the person hasn’t done a good drug addiction treatment program – and there are plenty out there that usually don’t work.

People who are on methadone, and have been on it for some time, say that the drug has no negative affect. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that it does.

A recent study in Norway, for example, found that people who are on methadone are twice as likely to have car accidents as those who are not on it. For the study, they spent two years following 2,500 people who were on methadone.

Perhaps the worst thing about methadone is that it’s almost impossible to quit. It’s harder to get off it than heroin and the prescription painkillers the person was taking before. In fact, many drug rehab centers won’t even accept someone on methadone because getting off the drug is so very difficult – even when being treated by professionals who’ve gotten hundreds of people off heroin and prescription opiates.

The real solution to opiate addiction is a good drug rehab program. One that has a very high success rate. At Drug Rehab Referral, we’ve helped thousands of people get off those drugs.

If you’re looking into drug rehab, check with us first. We can help you find the addiction treatment program that’s most likely to guarantee success. Of course, there are no real guarantees, but you might as well start off with a program that has a better chance of success than with one that has a low success rate.

The alternative is having an addict go through treatment and fail – in which case they lose their faith that they can actually get off drugs and are more likely to fall for the idea that they need to be drugged forever – on methadone.

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