Harm Reduction
Dealing with addiction
For many students, addiction poses a threat to academic success, and health.
Before I get started, let me inform everyone (if you haven’t heard already) that it’s hazardous to your health to smoke and/or drink or generally use any substance excessively.
Some people treat their bodies like temples. These individuals exercise regularly, fill their minds with wonderful facts and eat only the finest organically grown pomegranates.
I also treat my body like a temple, only mine is a temple of hedonistic delights. I have attempted to see how much smoke my temple could hold, only to find that this capacity is immeasurable, thus I changed the variable to a liquid. This liquid factor was much easier to keep track of, only it had an alcoholic content. Unfortunately, I lost track pretty fast and ended up back where I started: having accomplished nothing other than furthering the lung and liver destruction and gaining bruises with a little bit of wisdom.
No matter what I did to my temple, it was always functional the next day, so I found no reason to stop the madness. However, someone (or something) had been ransacking my temple’s attic, which had once been filled with all sorts of knowledge and interesting, yet useless facts.
So I was in a bit of a quagmire. As it stood, I was an unmotivated individual going into my graduating year with poor grades and it was largely due to the things I couldn’t stop using. So I quit, or at least attempted to quit everything that had wreaked so much havoc on my temple. This included drinking, and smoking. In short, the temple needed renovations.
But for any of you who have tried to quit smoking or drinking or some other addiction, you know it’s really quite hard to stop, but quitting cold turkey is usually the most obvious way to deal with it.
Then I interviewed Paul Logan, a youth and family therapist from Turning Point Youth Services, and discovered I may have been going about it the wrong way. Quitting is often the best option for some, because having just one smoke or drink after years of being clean can set the addiction in motion again. But for others there is another route: harm reduction. Mr. Logan often utilizes this method with his clients, many of whom have a high degree of drug use, but this strategy can be employed by anyone having a problem even with a minor addiction. The idea is to cut back the use of a substance to a point where it isn’t detrimental to someone’s well being.
At this point you might be thinking that it doesn’t make any sense to continue doing what’s causing the problems, but the truth is that most people who are addicted to substances (legal or illicit) lead relatively normal lives. The key is to not let substance use interfere with what you need to do. For example, take someone who’s addicted to weed. This pothead might be a frequent smoker who skips school to smoke, doesn’t do homework because they’re burnt out, and gets in trouble frequently because their parents don’t approve of it and want this person to get better grades, and quitting just isn’t a realistic option.
Now apply the harm reduction strategy.
If somehow we can get this student to stop smoking during school, they will go to class and get good marks, then they can go smoke after everything they need to do is done.
But there’s still the problem of the parents. Maybe this person will now be allowed to smoke because he or she has gained the opportunity through attaining good grades, but if the parents don’t approve of it, the smoker just doesn’t need to let them know. Sometimes it’s the most sensible way to perpetuate the harm reduction strategy; after all, what parents don’t know doesn’t hurt them, and as a result, it doesn’t hurt the student (get it, harm reduction). And what about the times when you’re dying for a smoke or a drink and are on the verge of breaking the harm reduction
strategy? In that case, keep busy or substitute it with something. If you’re craving a joint, have a cigarette, or if you feel you need a drink, go out and exercise.
Not to say you should apply harm reduction to everything, occasional heroin use is probably not the best idea, but for those already hooked on heroin, methadone clinics do give heroin addicts progressively less of what they need until they can function without it. Addictions can range from soft drugs like tobacco, alcohol and caffeine, to pharmaceuticals and things that aren’t even substances, like sex and truancy.
It is about doing what’s right for the individual person, not everyone can consume what others can, and I’ve seen this method work. I stopped skipping so much, which meant I wasn’t smoking as much, and because I don’t skip I do better in school, and because I do better I get a lot more freedom.
My temple might still be in rough shape, but the attic has been restocked with knowledge, and I didn’t even need to quit completely to get to this point.
Paul Logan is available in the Guidance Offices on Tuesdays; he’s a good person to talk to and everything you tell him is confidential.
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