A lot of people have commented here on The Suboxone Blog about their need for opiate addiction treatment and a problem with being able to pay for it. It makes sense. Drug addiction may destroy relationships, careers, and your health but it attacks the bank account first. I mean, prescription painkillers aren’t cheap, whether you buy them on the street, off your cousin or get them legitimately from the drugstore. And while insurance may cover part of your prescription, many don’t have insurance and covering the cost of the dose that seems to grow exponentially along with your addiction is enough to send you to the brink.

So when you’re already broke and more desperately in need of treatment than ever, how do you pay for drug rehab when you need it the most?

It’s more difficult, certainly, but not impossible.

Funded Facilities

Whether it’s a nonprofit with a special grant, a hospital with a research grant, or a country/city/state facility with drug rehabilitation paid for by the taxpayers, there’s most likely somewhere that at least offers a sliding scale payment where you pay what you can. Others arrange payment plans or take Medicare and Medicaid. If you need inpatient service, check out the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s Substance Abuse Treatment Facility Locator or call 800.662.HELP (-4357). You’ll get a list of options, which you can call for more information about payment options. If you need an outpatient treatment, you can contact Meditox and talk to them about their payment plans.

Praying for Help

Okay, I’m not a fan of this one, but I feel obligated to help you find treatment wherever it is offered. President Bush has a drug addiction initiative called Access to Recovery. Here’s the blurb on the White House Drug Policy site:

Access to Recovery will ensure access and accountability for alcohol and drug abuse services by allowing individuals greater choices among appropriate programs. It would enable eligible individuals to use federal alcohol and drug abuse vouchers to obtain help at all effective treatment organizations, including faith-based and community-based organizations. This would expand treatment utilization and accountability, thereby broadening and strengthening the current system.

Roughly translated, faith-based organizations are prioritized and not all states have access to this particular form of recovery.

Be a Guinea Pig

Another way to get the funding for treatment is to opt into some cutting edge research trials. This may be a way to subsidize your medical treatment at Meditox with some new therapeutic research trials or just trials that want to monitor your success as you go through whatever program you choose. Either way, it’s a little extra money to pay for your treatment and a little extra incentive to stay on track. When people say, “Don’t be a statistic,” you’d actually have the option to live in such a way that you change the statistics. Nice.

Don’t Give Up

Finding money to pay for treatment whether you break open the piggy bank or borrow it from a relative is ultimately one of the best investments you can make. If you have access to the funds, even on a credit card, the freedom to stay clean and the ability to work when you’re done makes it as good as investing in college—if not better. It’s simple: if you’re an addict, you need treatment. Do what you have to do to get the help you need as quickly as possible.

So who stayed clean and who didn’t? That was the big question for everyone as they tuned in last night for the reunion show of VH1’s Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew Pinsky. The show wrapped production in August, 2007, and since the show has aired, the public has been sitting with their eyes peeled, barely blinking, staring down the participants and waiting for them to relapse. So…did they or didn’t they?

AWOL

Two people were noticeably absent from the reunion: Daniel Baldwin and Jessica Sierra. Well, it’s no secret that Jessica Sierra, former American Idol contestant, relapsed, got knocked up and went to jail. The rumor is that she’s signed up for a year with Dr. Drew at the Pasadena Recovery Center in Los Angeles where the show was shot. As for Daniel, no one seems to really care where he is.

Straddling the Fence

Other than that, though, the outcome for the rest of the participants was positive overall. They introduced each person with highlights from the show and then an edited clip of their experience now. Chyna still isn’t sure that she’s an addict and Jeff Conaway, who left the program early, is going through surgeries and so is still on pain medication and has not really committed to moving forward. Some reported casual use like Mary Carey drinking wine, and Jaimee didn’t follow through with the outpatient treatment and still smokes marijuana. This is worrisome because, as most addicts will attest, even a little is too much; there’s really no such thing as moderation once you’ve crossed over into addiction.

Sticking With It

Brigitte Nielson and Ricco Rodriguez both managed to maintain sobriety for the six months between the end of the show and the reunion. Spurred on by the idea of being the one in 10 who makes it and his family, Ricco made all his court appointments and continues to be clean. Brigitte moved back home with her family and has made a real and consistent change in her life. Seth Binzer relapsed a couple of times, but they were short, he was honest about them and he came back from it immediately.

And The Moral of The Story Is….

What I got from this is the importance of making fundamental changes in your life, not just stopping the action of drinking or doing drugs. You started using for a reason whether it was to fit in, self-treat depression and/or to mask feelings of anger, pain, or hurt. If you continue doing the things or being around the people that made you feel that way initially, it won’t be long before your using again, no matter how effective a treatment you used to get yourself off the drugs in the first place.

It’s a scary thing, not only to take away the buffer that drugs create between you and the world, but then to make deep and fundamental changes in that world without a “crutch” of any sort. It can be terrifying and it can be a long process, but addiction is a chronic disease and the goal is this: to decrease the number of relapses and the length of relapses when they do occur. It’s the best you can do and though we all wish that we could pop a magic pill and ensure a completely abstinent future, it just isn’t reality.

So thanks, Dr. Drew. I think this just might be the first reality show that not only attempted to treat a highly personal disease in front of millions of viewers but that also actually had at least a dose of reality in it.

Okay, so I heard about this first from The Junky’s Wife but I had to talk about it here because, well, I heart Amy Winehouse and let’s just say that there’s a lot about her life—as far as the media describes her—that I can identify with. And this latest little bit, just makes me shake my head.

As if it isn’t hard enough to be an addict, even harder to also be in love with an addict, how sad is it when the addict you’re in love with is an idiot as well. It seems that Blake Fielder-Civil, Amy Winehouse’s husband is locked up at Pentonville prison in London. If you don’t know, it’s kind of hard to maintain a habit while you’re inside—hard but not impossible. Making money, on the other hand, is a bit more difficult. Fielder-Civil has overcome this issue of lack of income by selling his wife—or signed pictures of her, anyway. Yup, the word on the grapevine is that he’s trading signed copies of her picture for heroin, pictures that the recipients are hoping to hock on eBay, I guess. Hey, if you can’t be with the one you love, exploit the one you’re with.

Addicts are nothing if not resourceful, I guess. However, the Melbourne Herald-Sun reports that the couple isn’t handling the split so well: he’s mad that she isn’t making it to visits, on time or at all, in some cases. Conflicting accounts say that he may ban her from visits due to her cocaine use. Somehow, I don’t see a junky passing judgment on using behavior, but you never know. Supposedly, he’s told her “not to bother” visiting again.

And Winehouse, well, she’s strung out. According to Melbourne’s Herald Sun a source at Britain’s The Sun says that “Amy’s in an awful state again - she’s clearly on drugs. Many of us think full-time residential rehab is the only option but she won’t go back.

“She was smoking cannabis and drinking heavily as soon as she left rehab. That has now increased. Everyone who has seen her in the last week or so has been really disturbed by the state she’s in. She’s getting back to her worst.”

Ironically, or maybe not so ironically, one of Winehouse’s biggest singles off her Back to Black album is a song called “Rehab,” in which she states emphatically that “They’re trying to make me go to rehab/ I said, ‘No, no, no.’” Winehouse has reportedly been to rehab a few times but stayed only briefly before returning to her old lifestyle.

Who knows what’s true and what isn’t. Many watch the progression of Amy Winehouse’s disease as avidly as they follow the Grammy winner’s career. She’s 24 years old with an amazing voice and an incredible musical sensibility, with a number of YouTube.com videos attesting to her addiction issues. If anything, it’s yet another example of how all the success, beauty, fame and money can’t solve a thing if you suffer from addiction.