The Easiest Way to Quit: Don't Start

[Originally posted on hellowellness.in 29 Sept. 2010]

The placid canal that winds through Paris' Tenth Arrondissement is a social gathering place for the young.  On the warm nights of early September, we saw hundreds of twenty-somethings, or perhaps a bit younger and older, sitting in small groups on the banks, chatting, flirting, and in some cases smoking and drinking. There also we saw uniformed Paris police officers, unarmed and with a relaxed gait, ambling among the groups, chatting, and passing out some literature.  I got a copy. The main item is a 16-page pamphlet titled "Alcohol" (in French, of course), almost small enough to fit into a pocket, and liberally illustrated with cartoons in a popular style showing characters speaking in Parisian argot.  The pamphlet is an easy-to-digest, humorously presented short course in the physiology and psychology of alcohol.  It doesn't try scare tactics, but it asks hard questions, and concludes with information on where to get help.   The pamphlet appears to be the product of a wide collaboration between a number of nonprofit groups together with the French Ministry of Health. There are several French associations concerned with alcoholism:  Alcohol Assistance (http://www.alcoolassistance.net), Croix Bleue (http://www.croixbleue.fr/), and Vie Libre  (http://www.vielibre.org/) are among the best known.  Each of these combines recovery support with prevention work; that is, they provide mutual aid groups for the already addicted and also engage in advocacy and education efforts to prevent addiction in the first place.   We happened to be present in Berlin on the "Day for Alcohol-Damaged Children."  Unprepared, we missed all of the day's events, but the plastic grocery bag from the local supermarket carried, on one side, a big ad for the cause,  "Alcohol for kids -- not in our bag!"    Berlin is a "sobering" city in many ways.  Museums and many other public buildings still show pockmarks and craters of bullet hits on their facades.  Plaques and statues honoring resistance heroes murdered by the Nazis dot the city.  A main attraction is the Holocaust Memorial.  It consists of rectangular blocks of dark gray concrete, a bit larger in surface area than a coffin, hundreds of them, of varying heights, with narrow passageways between.  This stark minimalist simplicity goes on for a full city block. Walking among these endlessly repetitive monoliths conveys the monstrosity of the genocide more powerfully than any baroque monument of the 19th century ever could have done.  Berlin knows how to build monuments! In the United States alone, we lose nearly six million lives to addictive substances every decade.  The holocaust from tobacco alone exceeds the grim toll of the death factories at Auschwitz and Birkenau.  At 50 bodies to a car, it would take a freight train more than 2000 cars long to carry each year's victims of alcohol in the U.S. alone.  The worldwide totals are untallied.  It's important, of course, to provide support to those whose brains have already been hijacked by the addictive substances.  If caught early enough, treated effectively, and given unfailing support, all can recover.  But providing recovery support alone is like rescuing the survivors of the concentration camps.  The larger social task, one that takes the cooperation of a broad range of nonprofits, for-profits, and government, is prevention.   As Jane Brody, health editor of the New York Times, pointed out earlier this summer, the most effective way for an individual to escape addiction is not to commence using the substances in the first place.  A life free of addictive substances brings numerous benefits in terms of wellness, prosperity, and longevity -- and it means never having to quit.

Man busted in nicotine withdrawal rage

Braunschweig, Germany: A smoker in nicotine withdrawal called police to complain he was going mad. He then took a hammer to a cigarette vending machine. He was arrested shortly afterward. Details.

Abstinence regenerates alcoholic brain

The brains of alcoholics can show measurable improvement in volume, chemical activity, and functionality after as little as seven weeks of abstinence, a new study published in the journal Brain today reveals.

Researchers from Germany, the UK, Switzerland and Italy collaborated on a study of ten men and five women alcoholics who had achieved an average of 38 days abstinence at the time of the study. Alcoholics who used psychoactive medications or who smoked more than 10 cigarettes a day after they stopped drinking were excluded from the data. Researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and proton MR spectroscopy, laboratory tests for levels of brain chemicals that measure nerve integrity and repair, and performance tests for attention and concentration.

Brain volume increased an average of two percent, researchers found, and there were major increases in the substances that measured nerve health and regrowth. There were also improvements in performance. However, in one subject, who had the longest history of alcoholism in the study (more than 25 years), the evidence of brain recovery was not visible within the relatively short time span of the study.

The leader of the research, Dr Andreas Bartsch from the University of Wuerzburg, Germany, said:

"The core message from this study is that, for alcoholics, abstinence pays off and enables the brain to regain some substance and to perform better. However, our research also provides evidence that the longer you drink excessively, the more you risk losing this capacity for regeneration. Therefore, alcoholics must not put off the time when they decide to seek help and stop drinking; the sooner they do it, the better."

Source.

Smoking depletes important brain chemical

Chronic smoking significantly depletes levels of an important amino acid in the brain's anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), the part of the brain that processes pleasure and pain, German researchers have found. Depletion of this amino acid is linked with a number of psychiatric and mood disorders, including schizophrenia, dementia and bipolar disorder, as well as in cases of substance abuse, particularly alcohol dependence. Source.