Drug Rehab

I just looked at la.diydowntown.com. They have a nice blkog page. I was wondering, though, how my balloon picture and article got there. I was not complaining. Don Garza educated me as best he could about aggregators. Apparently that is what they are. Whatever they are, they have nice stuff with interesting pictures.

My blog is so dreary.

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Ok let me get into this drug rehab stuff.

Let me make it clear that I was clean from drugs before I went to jail and before I came here.
Then why am I here? Murphy's law--anything that could have gone wrong went wrong.

I have observed some things about drug programs down here. First I remember hearing a doctor talk about drug rehab when Britney Spears and dome other entertainers were in t rouble with the law because of drugs. First of all, I believe that if the Mainstream media (MSM)
cared anything about Britney Spears, et al they would leave her alone and treat her like a human being. She has problems like anyone else. IF people wanted her to get better, then give her some space and let her try to get to the root of her problems instead of trying to beef up their ratings by hurting her with comments and picking her life apart. Maybe it is easier to look at her and make themselves feel better at her expense instead of looking at themselves. Hell, that is what happened to me. People, make conclusions and interfere and know nothing about anything. Nobody asks questions.

A doctor, who was interviewed when Britney was going through her thing along with the other actress, said that a frighteningly large percentage of people relapse with 48 hours of leaving a facility.

I see it on Skid Row every day. Why is That?

Why is it that a court would send people to programs that have such a low success rate?"
Why is it that people must find their own programs with no tools to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of a program?

Drug Rehab is the wrong word for it. It should be called LIFE REHAB. I talked to LaJOy. She is the woman who is in the video about addicts learning computers. Go to youtube.com and punch in scribeskidrow and you can see her bubbling smile in that video.

Lajoy told me she relapsed after 5 years. I said to myself, "I bet she did not resolve issues when prior to quitting smoking." I was right. That is the first thing she said was that she had unresolved issues. That is one of the reason I wrote every day for years before I was arrested. I monitored my every thought. mY every feeling. I looked at every part of my life. I looked at what quitting the varsity basketball team, in high school, did to me. I looked at all of my failing efforts. I looked at why I failed--not the failures after I started doing drugs but the failures before drugs. I had to look at my motives for studying a subject. Was it because I liked it or because it would bring me prestige. That prestige climb caused me problems and failure because my heart was not in it. Subsequently, I did drugs to burry the pain from the failure.

Many black kids go into medicine because their parents were doctors. Some go into it because they are pressured. Some go into it because they are expected to. Some go into it because they think they want to go into it. I know a guy who went to Buckley School. He graduated from there and went to Yale. He graduated from there and went to medical school at Harvard or Yale, I am not sure. He could not pass the boards. His name was Keith Claiborne. I knew him all of my life. His father was a doctor. He went into that just because..... He was not forced or anything. Peer pressure largely. His brother went to school with me at Harvard School, Ron. Ron is on the weekend team for Good Morning America on ABC.

Keith figured out that he was not going to cause himself pain and continue to pursue something that he did not want to do. He ended up going to Harvard Law School and did very well in School and afterwards.

People continue to do that which brings pain. Some continue in relationships. Some continue to do drugs. Some study what they do not want to study. I studied things because of prestige.
Prestige was a burden. Of course I did not study some things that were a part of the "prestige curriculum" because of a lack of confidence. That stemmed from things when I was young like science and math. Yet when I tackled my issues alone, in a room, with pen and paper, so I could see things, I realized what the root of my problems were. I reviewed every aspect of my life while I trained for that triathlon. The more I trained the more I gained confidence. The more confidence I gained the more I wrote. The more I wrote the more I studied and the more I linked up disciplines and transfered concepts from one discipline to another to help me understand the essence of the newly challenging subject matter.

I studied physics because I understood tennis and martial arts. I understood rates of speed and momentum. I applied that to momentum in progress of life and development. Just like now, I have a blog. I started with nothing. Now I am on a couple of blogrolls and a readership is developing. (hopefully) (lol)

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a police officer from skid row just called me to see if I am doing ok. He like other people on the Row are determined that I make it and they believe that I was someone who just got a raw break.

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Any way, Skid Row practices group therapy. I do not know if they believe in it or if it is just as a result of a lack of funds. Every drug addict or drug abuser is placed into a category.

There is no "one"category of user. Down here, every person is suppose to be the same. If you smoke cocaine, you are one way. My sister probably saw alot of street smokers where she lived and stereotyped me as one of them. No two "street smokers" are alike. No one is alike.

No one looks the same. No one is th e same. That is the same way with drugs. A drug person's ability to walk away from drugs is a function of their ability to resolve the issues in their life.

I did that. I did that before this hell happened. Going to a few meetings, signing your name on a list, and sitting there day in and day out to hear these meetings is not going to do it.

No one talks about the pain of recovery. I would not have the same recovery or rebuilding had nothing happened to me. I would have kept swimming at USC. I probably would have been working there right now. I was preparing for that and was developing relationships to accomplish that objective. Now, I am a felon, so that is out of the question.

I was going to keep athletes out of trouble and focused on the right thing. That was a big thing in my self research. I wrote about that alot when I was training and decreasing my drug use.

Drug programs have to be administered by sensitive, yet firm, individuals who have an understanding of a wide variety of life issues in order to be effective. Then they must be able to communicate in a variety of ways to different types of people who will come from a multiplicity of backgrounds. Not every one is the same. Not one analogy will work with every person. you have to know the HISTORY of that person to know what will work. There I go again. the history.

They do not have the funding or the time to get to know the history of individuals. First of all they would have to discover who is sincere and who is not. Counselors have their own prejudices.

I know program directors and THEIR bosses who do not think a sponsor is necessary. They know that some sponsors, a lot of them use sponsorship as a power trip. Some sponsors treat their sponsees like some fraternity members treat pledgees to their fraternity. They make them run through hoops for no particular reason other than they can. They abuse the trust that some has placed with them. They put you down to make themselves feel better.

That is what I see alot on Skid Row. You see a person one day and he is a sponsor. You see his sponsee the next day and you find out the sponsor has relapsed. That is very much the norm on Skid Row. These so called sponsors tell you that unless you have a sponsor you are not serious about being clean. I sponsored myself. My mom sponsored me.

My drug life was not similar to the drug life that many on Skid Row led. My drug life is similar to the life that Marcus Johnson, of UCLA led. IN fact he and I grew up together in the YMCA. We talked about drugs at a party one night. I understood exactly what he was saying. He is someone that I could TRUST to understand my experience with drugs.

The same holds true with meetings. I would have a lot more in common with the people who would attend the Brentwood meeting of Cocaine Anonymous than I would a South Central meeting or a Skid Row meeting. The common thread of understanding is the educational or employment background or the life experiences that are similar.

I may not be able to be effective with someone who has only been yelled at and told he was not worth a dam. He is used to that. He responds to that. A softer approach may not work with him. I do not respond when someone yells at me. Alot of counselors yell at clients on Skid Row because they know no other way to communicate.

Rebuilding is a custome made things. It starts with understanding. It is the path of self discovery. That is why it is so important to leave a young woman like Britney Spears alone.
She has to discover herself. She has to understand her past. It is so difficult under the most private of circumstances to do that. IT is damn near impossible when you have the whole world making judgements about you. If you do not want her to be Judy Garland, back off. Give her a chance.

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A side note. I used to drive by the Hilton mansion everyday in Bel Air when I was visiting my best Harvard School friend. He lived on Chalon Rd above the Mansion. His father was a former president of Universal Studios. His uncle was Ray Milland. His sister went to Westlake and was best friends with Candace Bergen who also went to Westlake of the Harvard - Westlake family.

I just feel like commenting on this. Paris Hilton. Everybody said she got out early. That is not true. She had that 10% early release kick out. Everyone in jail knew it. Where she was housed and why, I can not comment but the early release hub bub that they press made a big deal of was not fair. If her lawyers would have not intervened, she would have stilled been released after she did ten percent of her time. That is another case of people not knowing what they were talking about. As a result she did more than others just so the authorities would not look like she was getting favorable treatment.
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Drug rehab is a combination of science and art. Indeed, there is a science to the art and an art to the science. Most people do not know what questions to ask themselves to rip down the barriers that prevent them from long term success

However, professional staff and guidance is necessary in many cases. not about drugs, too much is focused on drugs on Skid Row. NOt enough is focused on the life of a person.

Why? because drugs is homogenous and easy. Lives of people are heterogenous and difficult. That takes more time and patience. Time and patience is not apart of the norm on Skid Row.