Word: odyssey
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Today Gwen spends most of her time far from Virginia, living in New York City and attending regular sobriety meetings in the Odyssey House ElderCare treatment program in East Harlem. It's not how she envisioned her retirement. "I never thought the drug-abuse classes I taught applied to me," she says. "But here...
...Services Administration (SAMHSA), a division of the Department of Health and Human Services. By 2020 SAMHSA expects the number to reach 4.4 million. Already an ongoing federal study has found that the number of older Americans seeking help for heroin or cocaine abuse roughly quadrupled from 1992 to 2002. Odyssey House, which was founded to treat younger addicts, now has a separate division, with both inpatient and outpatient facilities, to deal specifically with older users...
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...