Maureen Murdock's Blog, page 4

Surgeon General: Addiction is a Disease of the Brain, Not a Moral Weakness

Remember the 1964 Surgeon General’s report on smoking and health that first linked cigarettes to cancer? Well, even if you don’t, it led to a successful national campaign against tobacco use. Yesterday, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a call for a cultural shift in how we think about addiction in his 426 page report “Facing Addiction in America.” In it, he highlights the fact that more than 20 million Americans have substance abuse disorders (more than are diagnosed with cancer) but only...

Four Traits that Put Kids at Risk for Addiction

On Tuesday, voters approved the legalization of marijuana in California, Massachusetts, Nevada, and most likely in Maine, although that may face a recount. I did not support the initiative to legalize pot in California because I have seen too many students lose their edge and ambition as a result of heavy pot use and become passive zombies.

Maia Szalavits, author of “Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction,” wrote an important article in the New York Times that list...

Smaller than a Snowflake

A synthetic drug called carfentanil, in an amount smaller than a snowflake, is killing people.

More than 200 people in the Cincinnati area have overdosed on the drug in the last three weeks leaving 3 people dead. Similar overdoses have occurred in Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia and the Gulf coast of Florida overwhelming ambulance crews and emergency rooms.

Carfentanil is an animal tranquilizer used on elephants and livestock with no practical use for humans. It is being manufactured in Chin...

Phase Out Private For-Profit Prisons

“Towers” by Brendan Murdock

On August 18th, the Obama administration said it would begin to phase out the use of private for-profit prisons to house federal inmates. The deputy attorney general, Sally Q. Yates said that private prisons do not save substantially on costs and provide fewer rehabilitative services like education and job training that reduce recidivism when inmates are released.

From 1980 to its peak in 2013 the federal prison population grew from 25,000 to 219,000. By then about...

Stop Stigma

Dear Readers,

For those of you who have been loyal followers of my blog on mental illness, addiction and criminal justice reform, we are moving venues. We’re moving to my new improved website, www.maureenmurdock.com. I have a new book coming out in November, Blinded by Hope, and I will continue blogging from the website. I hope you will continue to follow the blog and raise awareness about mental illness, addiction and criminal justice so that we can remove the stigma from these conditions.

I...

Stop Stigma

Welcome to those of you who have been loyal followers of my blog on mental illness, addiction and criminal justice reform. I have a new book coming out in November, Blinded by Hope, and I will continue blogging on these topics from my new blog on this website. I hope you will continue to follow the blog and raise awareness about mental illness, addiction and criminal justice so that we can remove the stigma from these conditions.

I recently read about a group of 24 middle school students at W...

The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr

I have been reading Mary Karr’s excellent book, The Art of Memoir, and sharing it with my memoir group. I think is the best book on writing memoir out there. Karr knows what she’s talking about because she has written three memoirs, including Liar’s Club, Cherry and Lit, and she is often credited with popularizing the genre. I was teaching memoir writing in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program in 1995 when Karr’s first book was published and all of a sudden everyone wanted to write memoir! Bec...

Memoirists are Our Contemporary Mythmakers

I believe that memoirists are our contemporary mythmakers. When I was teaching a course entitled Myth and Memoir at Pacifica Graduate Institute it became clear to me that some of the same archetypal themes found in myth, such as a search for origins, for one’s identity, the mother-child relationship, initiation, journey, descent and return were also found in contemporary memoirs. Although not every memoir reflects a mythic theme, most memoir writers unconsciously reveal mythic themes in their...

What Really Works in Drug Detox

I have been writing about the heroin epidemic in our country for the last couple of blog posts. As you know, the increase in deaths from drug overdoses is driven by an increase in addiction to both prescription painkillers like OxyCondin,Vicodin and Percocet as well as fentanyl and heroin. Police departments and homeless advocates across the nation are instituting programs to address these overdose deaths. However, one of the little known approaches to heroin detox and relapse prevention whic...

CDC Takes Action to Stem Deaths from Drug Overdoses

There is an epidemic of deaths from drug overdoses in nearly every county across the U.S. driven by an increase in addiction to both prescription painkillers like OxyCondin, Vicodin and Percocet as well as heroin. The number of these deaths reached 47,055 people in 2014, equivalent to 125 Americans everyday.

West Virginia, which has many blue-collar workers who tend to experience work-related chronic pain, has the highest overdose death rate in the nation. Drug deaths have also skyrocketed in...