Drug and alcohol addiction and substance abuse, in general, has certainly become a pretty dangerous, upsetting, and concerning thing in the United States today. It envelops a big problem, to say the least. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issues this statement regarding the problem:
- “The United States is now faced with a legitimate addiction epidemic. That’s right. An epidemic. This is the first time in the history of the nation that this problem has gotten so far out of hand. Through the late part of the twentieth century, the drug and alcohol addiction problem was a crisis. Now, it is an epidemic until we all step up to the plate and do our part as citizens in our communities to correct and bring down this horrible problem.”
So we can see that drug and alcohol addiction is a truly grave problem. We can also see that, because the problem has pervaded out society so much, drug and alcohol addicts are amongst us daily. According to the Substance Abuse and mental Health Services Administration and the National Survey on Drug Use and Health:
- “Currently, there are about twenty-three million Americans who are addicted to drugs and alcohol. There are about ten million who are addicted to alcohol, eight million addicted to drugs, and the rest addicted to a combination of the two. Drug and alcohol addiction takes about eighty to a hundred and twenty thousand lives every single year in the form of drug overdoses, alcohol poisoning, accidents, injuries, driving fatalities, crimes, and violence. Finally, drug and alcohol addiction costs the United States government over four-hundred billion dollars every year in simply trying to clean up the damage caused by addiction and in trying to prevent it from occurring in the future.”
The Importance of Interventions
With so many people abusing drugs and alcohol, it becomes quite clear that interventions are needed perhaps now more than ever before. If the people who need interventions don’t get them, they may die from their addictions as a result.
Crisis interventions for drug and alcohol abuse and addiction are now becoming more needed and necessary than they ever were before in the history of the nation. Studies have shown to us in recent years that the overall current percentage of American drug and alcohol addicts who are actually NOT willing to seek out drug and alcohol addiction rehabilitation is quite high. In fact, the numbers are as high as ninety percent if not higher than that. The concept that one can just “deal with their addiction and handle it on their own” is more prevalent now than it ever was before, making the vast majority of the addicted populace currently feeling as though they do not need to go to rehab, and that they don’t really have a very big problem to begin with either.
Well, the brutal truth of it is that addicts do have a huge problem to begin with. They always have and they probably always will unless they seek out rehab. The key factor here is, addiction is one of the only diseases in this country that is 100% fatal in all cases if it is not addressed, yet it is 100% curable in all cases! Astonishing.
So, to answer the age-old question of, “Should I perform an intervention on my loved one if they already know it is about to go down?” can be answered with, “Yes, you absolutely should perform such an intervention, even if the addict does already know that it is about to happen.”
Given the above information, we know that an addiction is a pretty serious and concerning issue, to say the least. We know that from experience. It’s been a concerning and serious problem for some time and it probably will continue to be a pretty huge problem going into the future, at least until it is addressed on a more expansive and expanding scale. To do something about it, one actually has to intervene. Most addicts will not be willing to go to rehab on their own, hence the need for intervention.
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