Word: odyssey
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...That was the era," says Evelyn, 56, an Odyssey House graduate and an addiction counselor there. "If the drugs hadn't been so available, I wouldn't have been apt to go looking for them...
What makes the problem especially hard for seniors is that the wages of drug abuse are cumulative. A lifetime of recreational chemistry also means a lifetime of neglect of overall health--as a recent morning meeting at Odyssey House illustrated. There were too many canes in evidence for a group so comparatively young--the legacy of joints wrecked by years of undertreated diabetes--and too many bad hearts and bum livers and vascular systems fighting hypertension. "This is the first generation to have a high incidence of using recreational drugs," says SAMHSA epidemiologist Joseph Gfroerer. "All this puts them...
...become chronic and compulsive, crowding out room for much else. "If you came to our adolescent program and saw the 16-year-old kids whose lives have become unmanageable as a result of pot use, you'd understand it's addictive," says psychologist Peter Provet, president of Odyssey House. "But a lot of people who use pot don't become addicts...
...cancers of the mouth, throat and lungs. Although a recent study out of UCLA says no, practitioners in the field disagree. "There's certainly strong if not definitive evidence that long-term smokers take in a lot of particulates and carcinogens," says Dr. Robert Raicht, medical director of Odyssey House...
...come--there are a few factors that drive recovery. Seeing peers die of addiction certainly scares some straight. So too do late-life worries about the legacy one is going to leave. "You get to a point when you think about having a dignified end," says Jon Roberts, another Odyssey House veteran who is now a counselor. "You think about family reunification, about giving back through community service, about having spent your life as more than an addict...