Fighting the Opioid Epidemic Using New Technology

Facing a rapidly worsening opioid epidemic, federal health organizations are turning to new technology to fight the growing problem. Leading the way, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has created a mobile application called the CDC Opioid Guideline Mobile App. 

CDC Opioid Prescribing Guideline Mobile App
An app created by the CDC in order for health professionals to monitor their patients’ pain and opioid medications. Photo credit: CDC.

The app features a Morphine Milligram Equivalent (MME) calculator that helps give prescription recommendations, and lets health providers practice effective communication skills. It is free and available to download on any smartphone. The CDC is optimistic that the app will help manage the legal distribution of opioid drugs more efficiently.

Cities across the U.S. have also found ways to tackle the opioid epidemic using new technology in their local communities. The Overdose Detection Mapping Application Program (ODMAP) helps first responders and public health officials locate areas where overdoses are happening. It also helps predict potential opioid drug trafficking areas.

Continue reading “Fighting the Opioid Epidemic Using New Technology” →

The Lifelong Quest For Sobriety…The Ultimate Hero’s Journey—Part 16

Guest Blogger and long-time Council friend, Bob W. presents Part 16 of a series dealing with Alcoholism and Addiction from a Mystical, Mythological Perspective, reflecting Bob’s scholarly work as a Ph.D. in mythological studies.

Dante and Virgil, having finally escaped Hell, the Inferno, find themselves traveling through the Earth into the light of day, on the other side of the world. Now they must traverse upward, through the circles of Purgatorio. In the Church of the time, Purgatory was a place where souls, otherwise in God’s grace, needed further purification, further temporal punishment to become holy enough to enter Heaven. In Dante’s poem, Purgatory is effectively the reverse of Hell, structured as a mountain with rising terraces, each dedicated to one of the Seven Deadly Sins, in reverse order from The Inferno. Each terrace is where souls with one of the sins encounter a process of purification dictated by the representative sin.

The punishments are much less severe, temporal in length, and designed to “correct” and “purify” the soul.  We could see this as a representative parallel to our efforts in our early stages of Sobriety.  This seems a reasonably good parallel to the practice of working the Steps of Four through Nine.  We must record our history in the disease and then reveal it to another.  From this we identify our “defects of character,” ask God for their removal, and then work to correct the effects they had on our life by seeking forgiveness from all those we had harmed.

Having achieved such a purification in Purgatorio, the souls reach a pinnacle, a sort of paradise on earth.  The top of the Purgatorio mountain is just such a paradise, it is the Garden of Eden before the Fall of Man. For us, this could be seen as a place of Steps 11 and 12, where we develop the conscious contact with God and begin to practice the principles and pass on the revelations.

From here, Dante proceeds on to Heaven, Paradiso. Virgil has had to leave him in Purgatory, since, in the beliefs of the Church of the time, his not being a Christian has obviated his worthiness to enter Heaven. In his place, Dante has connected with Beatrice, the love of his early life and the symbol of purity and perfection, and she becomes his companion in Heaven. They ascend above the Earth, traveling to the Moon and the Planets, each housing a realm more beautiful and bright than the one before, until finally reaching the company of all the angelic beings and the Trinity.  The brightness and serenity of this final place is a perfect representation for those of us in the glow of fully committed Sobriety, perhaps the most perfect rendition of the “Sunlight of the Spirit.”

The Council Teams Up with KPRC Channel 2 to Fight Opioid Addiction

Counselors at the phone bank at KPRC on October 6th.
Counselors from The Council on Recovery participating in the KPRC phone bank. From Left to Right: Desmond White, Lisa Simmons-Arnold, Christine Yeldell, Leonard Jeffcoat, and Kara Grant. Photo Credit: The Council on Recovery.

With the opioid epidemic becoming a community-wide problem, The Council on Recovery teamed up with KPRC Channel 2 during its October 6th broadcast of “Opioid Nation: An American Epidemic“. The Council sent five of its licensed counselors to staff a live phone bank throughout the one-hour program, as well as during KPRC’s afternoon/evening newscasts. Continue reading “The Council Teams Up with KPRC Channel 2 to Fight Opioid Addiction” →

The Lifelong Quest For Sobriety…The Ultimate Hero’s Journey—Part 15

Guest Blogger and long-time Council friend, Bob W. presents Part 15 of a series dealing with Alcoholism and Addiction from a Mystical, Mythological Perspective, reflecting Bob’s scholarly work as a Ph.D. in mythological studies.

Dante and Virgil, in the opening to the medieval epic poem, The Inferno, have begun their journey into the bowels of Hell. There are nine concentric, descending circles they must traverse, each dedicated to a certain group of sinners, each one more frightening and severe than the pervious. Dante, beginning a desperate search to find God, is extremely afraid. Virgil, the Latin scholar, is his guide.  The characterizations and descriptions of the groups of sinners in all the Levels, and their forever, eternal torment in Hell, provide stark and terrifying reminiscences of the events of our own lives in the acting out of our addictions. Dante’s and Virgil’s descent into and through Hell is necessary to get them to the recovery stages of Purgatory and eventually Heaven.

The sins and sinners of the Circles of the Inferno are organized generally in line with the Seven Deadly Sins, as promulgated by the medieval Church leading up to Dante’s time. Dante is using them both in a spiritual, political, as well as mythological sense.  They are dealt with by Dante according to the Church’s view of increasing severity:  lust, gluttony, greed, wrath, heresy, violence and fraud.

Forgetting about the nature of these offences for purposes of our analogy, it is interesting to see the horrific nature of the eternal punishments Dante describes for these sins.  From the point of view of pain and suffering, it is a vivid analogous journey of us in our addictions, before recovery, conveying the horror of what we all experienced in our disease.

In the descent, for example, they see souls wallowing in putrid muck and slime, others encased in frigid ice, or boiling in oil and pitch (“enormous bubbling boiling pitch”).  Many are on fire.  Those whose lives were engaged in endless violence “are steeped in a river of boiling blood.”  The greedy, those whose lives were lived as hoarders or wasters of money, are chained together “straining their chests against enormous (opposing) weights with mad howls,” railing at each other’s lack of restraint in life.

Finally Dante and Virgil reach the bottom of Hell, and come face to face with the Devil.  They then courageously claw their way over him to a hole in the earth and eventually emerge into day, on the other side of the world.  Here begins their journey to Purgatory. This confrontation and emergence, the subject of the next note, could be seen as a very vivid, if symbolic, inflection point for our own initiation into recovery.

Addicted to Comedy 2017

Celebrate National Recovery Month with The Council on Recovery at Addicted to Comedy 2017. Performers from previous years have included Shayla Rivera, Jose Sarduy, Kristin Linder, and Jamie Lissow. This year, comedians Jay LaFarr, Mike Vance, and the headliner, Rich Vos, will be serving up laughter all night long.  This event will be the ninth fundraiser hosted by The Council on Recovery for the Sober Recreation Committee (SRC).

Addicted to Comedy Flyer 2017

The annual Addicted to Comedy show will take place on Saturday, October 7th from 8 pm – 10 pm.  The event will be held in The Hamill Foundation Conference Center at 303 Jackson Hill St., Houston, TX 77007. Premium seating (first four rows) will be $30 and general admission is $20. To register, please visit www.councilonrecovery.org.

The Lifelong Quest For Sobriety…The Ultimate Hero’s Journey—Part 14

Guest Blogger and long-time Council friend, Bob W. presents Part 14 of a series dealing with Alcoholism and Addiction from a Mystical, Mythological Perspective, reflecting Bob’s scholarly work as a Ph.D. in mythological studies.

The year 476 A.D. is seen as the year that ended the Roman Empire, an institutional bastion of power, wealth, and peace that had dominated the known world of almost 1,000 years.  It had been weakening for many decades, but the breakdown of its fundamental institutions and the advance of the Germanic tribes into the corners of the Empire finally resulted in the dissolution of the majesty that was Rome in the 5th Century.  What followed in Western and Central Europe was 500 years of declining culture, scholarship, civil order and peace, a period called the Early Middle Ages, also the Dark Ages.  The Christian Church, which was ruled, if loosely, by a Holy See in Rome, was the dominant institution and much of the more repressive elements of Early Christianity found their initiation and resurgence in this period.

Beginning in the 10th and 11th Centuries, the roots of scholarship and development began to resurface, enabled by a number of trends; and one piece of artistic majesty that emerged at the end of this was a literary survey of the spiritual, social and religious belief systems of the Middle Ages.  It could also be seen as a spectacularly large analogy for our journeys from the depths of addiction to the sunlight of sobriety.  It is called The Divine Comedy by Dante Aligheri.

It is fiction, written in the first person, with Dante as the protagonist; and it has Dante as a 35 year old man, mired in an aimless life, desperately trying to find his way to God.  To do so he must travel though three realms, each a separate part of the book, Hell (The Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Heaven (Paradiso). Written in complex verse, it is also quite explicit, especially with regard to The Inferno and it has been said that the grossly horrific images of Hell portrayed by Dante in The Inferno are the source of much of the Judeo-Christian West’s terrifying view of Hell over the past 800 years.

Dante is in a dark place when he begins, but he is aided by Virgil, the famous Latin poet, who becomes his guide into and through Hell. The task is to get through a series of nine descending concentric Circles, each of which deals with a certain set of evils and sins, with each descending Circle a more severe one than the previous.  Dante and Virgil are but travelers through these descending circles so they are witnesses to the sufferers, but the poignancy of what they see and the experience of it all are worthy of the analogy we are building here to show the comparisons to our Journeys.

I will leave it to my next writings to explore some of the more poignant comparisons of their horrendous experiences in Hell and then of the eventual move on to Purgatory and Heaven.  But to close here, before we begin our exploration into Dante’s psychic renditions, it is worthy to recite the carving above the Entry Gates to the Inferno in the story. It is an inscription that clearly recalls our deep despair when we were mired in our disease: “Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here.”