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Tag: drug withdrawals

  • Lil Xan Describes Withdrawals After Quitting Drugs Cold Turkey

    Lil Xan Describes Withdrawals After Quitting Drugs Cold Turkey

    “I wanted to stop drugs completely, but I did it the wrong way.”

    Rapper Lil Xan has never been secretive about his relationship with drugs and his quest to become sober. The “Whipped Cream” rapper recently relapsed after spending time in rehab late last year and he spoke to TMZ about how quitting cold turkey affected his body.

    Lil Xan, born Nicholas Diego Leanos, told TMZ that he stepped out of the public eye after relapsing on hydrocodone and Xanax. Following the relapse, Xan entered the hospital to detox and would go on to suffer several seizures during the strenuous process.

    Withdrawals

    “The withdrawals actually gave me seizures,” the 23-year-old Soundcloud rapper told TMZ. “It was a wake-up call … they said it was from just going cold turkey off of Xanax. I wanted to stop drugs completely, but I did it the wrong way.”

    Lil Xan’s battle with addiction has been a public one, like many of his peers. After seeing his hero Mac Miller and his friend Lil Peep succumb to their addictions at the start of their very promising careers, Xan decided it was time to get help for his addiction.

    Miller’s 2018 overdose death left Xan shaken and unsure if he wanted to continue making music. During an appearance on Adam22’s No Jumper podcast last September, Xan said,  “When your hero dies, f—k that s—t,” he said. “I don’t want to make music no more.”

    During the podcast, Xan also spoke about his desire to get sober.  

    “I want to get sober now, completely sober, but it’s so hard,” he told Adam22. “I just want to be off everything. I want to be like a normal person. If I didn’t have a tour coming up, I would be in rehab right now.”

    Losing Lil Peep

    A year prior to Mac Miller’s overdose, Xan lost a close peer to addiction. Gustav Elijah Åhr, better known as YouTube star and rapper Lil Peep, died in November 2017 from a fatal overdose. Fentanyl, Xanax, marijuana, cocaine and Tramadol were found in the 21-year-old’s system, according to a toxicology report.

    Xan said that Peep was on his mind a lot during his most recent relapse. The rapper entered rehab last December and checked out two weeks later. He has relapsed a couple times but the latest relapse made him withdraw from the public eye while he dealt with his health. 

    “It has to come from within,” Xan said about sobriety last year. “I’ve gone through periods of like, six months. And now it’s because of me. It’s because I want to be clean.”

    Xan says that he’s now “completely sober.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Jails Struggle With Being The Nation’s Primary Detox, Treatment Centers

    Jails Struggle With Being The Nation’s Primary Detox, Treatment Centers

    One Massachusetts sheriff estimates that 80 to 90% of the prisoners in his jail have a substance use disorder.

    By some estimates up to two-thirds of prisoners in county jails around the country have some sort of substance use disorder, which has made jails the nation’s primary detox and treatment centers, a role they are often ill-equipped for.

    “It was never traditionally the function of jail to be a treatment provider, nor to be the primary provider of detoxification in the country — which is what they have become, so with the opioid epidemic, jails are scrambling to catch up,” Andrew Klein, a research scientist with Advocates for Human Potential, a company that works with jails to facilitate treatment, told NPR.

    Peter Koutoujian, sheriff of Middlesex County, Massachusetts, says that jails have become a catch-all system for people who fall through the cracks. 

    “We have not been able to get our hands around it because, quite honestly, society has not gotten its hand around either preventing [drug-addicted] people from coming into our institutions or supporting them once they get back outside,” he said. “The fact is you shouldn’t have to come to jail to get good [treatment] programming. You should be able to get that in your own community so you don’t have to have your life disrupted by becoming incarcerated.”

    And yet Koutoujian estimates that 80-90 percent of prisoners in his jail have a substance use disorder. 

    Increasingly, jails are stepping up to try to figure out how to help people get treatment while they are locked up. The National Sheriff’s Association recently put out guidelines for delivering medication-assisted treatment in jails. Still, many law enforcement officials are wary of using medication-assisted treatment, the established best practice for treating opioid addiction, because the medications can be diverted or abused in the jail. Only about 12 percent of jails offer MAT, but that is good progress, Klein said. 

    “Although this number is not the majority of jails, five years ago it was zero. And the number is increasing every week,” he said. 

    In order to save lives, jails need to consider not only keeping people sober when they’re inside, but also how to help them stay sober once they’re released, said Carlos Morales the director of correctional health services for California’s San Mateo County. 

    “We know if you are an opiate user you come in here, you detox, and you go out — it’s a 40 percent chance of OD-ing,” he said. “And we have the potential to do something about it.”

    However, Koutoujian said that MAT alone is not the answer. 

    “Medication-assisted treatment is very important but people have to remember if you do the medication without the treatment portion — the counseling and the supports — it will fail. And we will just fall prey to another easy solution that just simply does not work.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Pennsylvania Supreme Court To Decide If Prenatal Drug Use Is Child Abuse

    Pennsylvania Supreme Court To Decide If Prenatal Drug Use Is Child Abuse

    A lengthy legal battle has been waged by the state against a mother whose newborn was hospitalized for 19 days to treat drug withdrawal.

    The highest court in the Keystone State this week heard arguments on the divisive matter of whether prenatal drug use counts as child abuse. 

    Attorneys for child protective services framed it as a matter of “human rights,” while defense lawyers for an unnamed mother warned that criminalizing such behavior could be a “slippery slope,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. 

    The Pennsylvania Supreme Court case revolves around a woman who tested positive for a medley of drugs—including pot, opioids, and benzodiazepines—just after giving birth in a central Pennsylvania hospital. Afterward, her newborn was hospitalized for 19 days to treat drug withdrawal.

    Children and Youth Services took custody of the baby and accused the mother of abuse, setting off a lengthy legal battle still winding through state courts. 

    Early on, a Clinton County court decided that the mother’s drug use didn’t constitute child abuse as a fetus is not a child. But during the appeals process, a Superior Court bounced the case back to the lower court, though two judges raised concerns about the implications of labeling drug use during pregnancy as a form of abuse.

    “Should she travel to countries where the Zika virus is present? Should she obtain cancer treatment even though it could put her child at risk?” wrote Judge Eugene Strassburger, according to the Philadelphia newspaper. 

    Earlier this year, attorneys for the mother—who is identified in court filings only by her initials—asked the state’s high court to take up the case, and this week the justices heard oral arguments from both sides. 

    “Failing to heed a doctor’s advice to take folic acid, if the child is born with a neural tube defect, then the mother could be a child abuser under the county’s reading of the statute,” said attorney David Cohen, arguing that labeling prenatal drug use as child abuse could open the door to a variety of similar arguments against unhealthy behavior. 

    But Justice Christine Donohue called that “slippery slope” argument “too much,” and said she wasn’t sure that she’d “buy” it. Meanwhile, county CYS attorney Amanda Browning told the court that the case was about “human rights, equal protection and child welfare,” pointing to the painful withdrawal process after birth.

    It’s not clear when the high court will issue its decision.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Family Of Woman Who Died While Detoxing In Jail Files Lawsuit

    Family Of Woman Who Died While Detoxing In Jail Files Lawsuit

    Prosecutors declined to charge the deputies involved with the case so the family decided to take another route to justice. 

    Following a year-long probe, Nevada investigators have decided that the deputies involved in a jail inmate’s July 2017 death should be criminally charged for the way they handled a woman who was in medical distress.

    The Mineral County deputies were aware of the inmate’s condition, according to the 300-page report. Kelly Coltrain, 27, who was jailed for outstanding traffic tickets, had informed jail staff that she was dependent on drugs and suffered seizures when she went through withdrawals, according to the Reno Gazette Journal.

    Coltrain was visiting Nevada from Austin, Texas to celebrate her grandmother’s 75th birthday. But instead of spending time with her family, she spent four days in Mineral County Jail until she died in her cell on July 23, 2017.

    According to investigators, who produced a 300-page report on Coltrain’s death, jail staff violated multiple policies when they denied Coltrain medical care. Based on Coltrain’s history of seizures, jail staff should have cleared her with a doctor before keeping her in jail; and as she suffered withdrawals, they should have been monitoring her vitals.

    Instead, when Coltrain asked that she be taken to the hospital, which is about a two-minute walk across the street from the jail, according to the report, Deputy Ray Gulcynski told her, “Unfortunately, since you’re DT’ing (referring to the detoxification process), I’m not going to take you over to the hospital right now just to get your fix. That’s not the way detention works, unfortunately. You are incarcerated with us, so… you don’t get to go to the hospital when you want. When we feel that your life is at risk… then you will go.”

    Surveillance video of Coltrain’s jail cell shows her being ordered to clean up her own vomit with a mop. Less than an hour later, she was dead, and remained in her cell for more than six hours before a deputy noticed her lifeless body. He did not try to revive her or call for help, and Coltrain was left in her cell until the morning, when state officials arrived at the jail to investigate.

    Investigators with the Nevada Division of Investigation recommended that the deputies involved face criminal charges, but Lyon County, where the case was forwarded, refused to prosecute.

    “The review of the case, in our opinion, did not establish any willful or malicious acts by jail staff that would justify the filing of charges under the requirements of the statute,” said Lyon County District Attorney Stephen Rye.

    Coltrain’s family, however, believes her death was preventable. “(Jail staff) knew Kelly Coltrain had lain for days at the jail, in bed, buried beneath blankets, vomiting multiple times, refusing meals, trembling, shaking, and rarely moving. Defendants knew Kelly Coltrain was in medical distress,” according to a federal lawsuit filed by the family last week.

    View the original article at thefix.com