HALT Recovery Central's Addiction Blog

New Year’s Eve Will Test Technology’s Capacity to Stop the Young From Drinking and Driving

DENVER — Heather Poli wasn’t quite sure how to react when her friend’s cellphone informed her she was drunk.

The 27-year-old ad-agency worker had been at a bar here with her buddies. It was late; she was about to catch a ride home. Then a friend pulled out an iPhone, and the gang took turns entering their weights and what they had imbibed into an app called R-U-Buzzed?

Bing! Up popped estimates of their blood-alcohol content. Ms. Poli’s designated driver turned out to be hammered. Ms. Poli wanted to take the wheel herself, but to her indignation, the phone told her no: “I got the big red ‘Don’t even think about driving’ result.” Her hangover the next day confirmed the phone’s assessment, she says ruefully. “But at the time, it was very surprising.” Still, she obeyed the phone and called a cab.

State officials hope tens of thousands of her peers will follow suit tonight.

A new iPhone app called R-U-Buzzed aims to help you decide if you’re too drunk to drive. Neil Hickey reports.

New Year’s Eve may mean champagne toasts and midnight kisses to many Americans, but to law enforcement, it means trouble and, too often, tragedy. The nation records an average of 54 alcohol-related traffic fatalities on New Year’s Day. The rest of the year, the average daily toll is 36, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The problem is especially acute among younger drivers. Federal statistics show that 65% of drunk drivers involved in fatal crashes last year were 21 to 34 years old. An additional 17% were under the legal drinking age of 21.

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Dangerous Times for the Newly Sober 

The holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s) can be a time of great joy and celebration, or a time of great pain, sorrow and depression. These can be particularly dangerous times for people who are in recovery, especially those in early recovery.

Drinking and using substances were ways that we celebrated the joy, or medicated the pain. What the holidays mean to us and how we participate in them might help us to remain clean and sober.

 An Essential Part of Recovery

Thanksgiving has its roots in the end of the growing season, where people would gather what they grew and take stock of their harvest. In the United States, we think about the Indians and early settlers, sharing their food with each other.

Thanksgiving is usually a time when we get together with family and friends, to share our food and company with each other. This is not any different than what we learn in recovery. We take stock of what we have and are grateful for it. Remember, “A grateful heart will never drink.” We then share what we have with others. This is an essential part of recovery.

 Celebrate Life!

Christmas seems to be the combination of a number of beliefs and rituals adopted from many people. However, most people, at least of Christian beliefs, celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. He was someone who wrestled with his spirituality and humanity. Sound familiar?

When we were drinking or drugging, we were moving quickly towards death and were engaged in destruction. Christmas can be a celebration of life and creation instead. We celebrate life, a birth, on Christmas. We can learn the rewards of embracing our spirituality and humanity.

 Letting Go of the Past

New Year’s is a letting go of the past year and embracing the new one. It is depicted, sometimes in a comical way, as Father Time handing the baton of a new year to a young baby. In a way, isn’t this what recovery is? Our old addicted life handing the reigns over to our new recovering self? A common practice around this time is New Year’s resolutions. Of course, most of these are broken in a short period of time. However, for alcoholics and addicts, to break our resolution to remain clean and sober is to die. And that is the good news. We usually live a life of destruction until that happens. Let’s make that resolution to remain clean and sober, and to do what is necessary to achieve that.

 Ask For Help

There are many specific strategies or “tools” to increase our ability to remain sober and clean through the holidays. Ask your sponsor or others in recovery how they do it. Get support from your family and friends. Tell them that recovery is important and you need their help. There are a number of books or articles that contain helpful hints.

The Internet is a great resource for finding suggestions or people that can support you during the holidays. Try helping someone else in need. As they say in the 12-step programs, “Don’t drink or drug, go to meetings, ask for help.” KISS (Keep It Simply Spiritual).

The United States is not the only place where abuse of prescription pain medications is a growing problem. A study from Toronto reveals that deaths from opioid use in Ontario have doubled since 1991 and deaths related to OcyContin have increased five-fold. Opioids, also known as narcotic pain relievers, are among the most commonly prescribed medications in Canada.
Deaths from opioid use increased from 13.7 deaths per million in 1991 to 27.2 death per million in 2004, the study reported.

Physicians at St. Michael’s Hospital reviewed nearly 7,100 files at the Office of the Chief Coroner for Ontario and compared them to data on physician visits and medication prescriptions and to the sales of prescription drugs.

Ocycodone Use Skyrockets

According to a St. Michael’s Hospital news release, these were key findings of the study:

• Prescriptions for oxycodone rose by more than 850 per cent during the study period. This increase was much larger than for any other opioid. Oxycodone accounted for about one-third of the almost 7.2 million prescriptions for opioids dispensed in Ontario in 2006.
• The increase in deaths was especially pronounced after OxyContin was added to the provincial drug benefit plan in 2000. Over the next five years, deaths related to any opioid increased by 41 per cent, and the number of deaths related to oxycodone (the active ingredient in OxyContin) rose fivefold.
• Deaths from prescription opioids in Ontario far outnumbered those from heroin.
• Most opioid-related fatalities (54 per cent) were accidental. The manner of death was undetermined in 22 per cent of cases and deemed to be suicide in 24 per cent.
• Most people whose deaths involved an opioid had visited a doctor and received a prescription for the drug in the month before they died.

“These findings highlight the tremendous societal burden of opioid-related morbidity and mortality and morbidity” says the study’s co-author Dr. David Juurlink. “Patients and doctors may not fully appreciate the potential danger of these drugs, particularly when they are taken in combination with other sedating drugs or alcohol.”