1. Weed

There’s a lot of controversy surrounding the fact that marijuana is the number one street drug right now. Treatment admissions for marijuana abuse, especially to outpatient programs, are through the roof. You can’t walk two blocks in any large city without seeing a kid on a corner smoking a lit blunt in broad daylight like it’s already legal, but pot is also easy to score in America’s most remote rural areas, where it competes mainly with alcohol as the high of choice. High-potency herb is more ubiquitous than ever before, and those seeking treatment for habitual use are some of the youngest admissions in the entire system.

As the older crowd of heavy drinkers gets sober or dies off, bank on weed becoming America’s most popular drug of both casual use and chronic abuse.

Look at the trend in my home state of Pennsylvania. In 2009 treatment admissions in Philly for marijuana abuse edged out those for alcohol, 25.7% compared to 23%. By contrast, in 1992 marijuana comprised only 7% of treatment admissions statewide, whereas alcohol was 38%; in 2000, pot was up to 14.6%, booze down to 24.4%. Do these statistics suggest a more general trend in drug consumption? Perhaps.

As the older crowd of heavy drinkers gets sober or dies off, bank on weed becoming America’s most popular drug of both casual use and chronic abuse—a prospect that large numbers of Americans have no problem with. According to a recent survey, as much as 71% of those polled in Massachusetts support marijuana decriminalization. More than ever, the public dismisses the “gateway” myth about Mary Jane. In fact, marijuana legalization advocates point to the drop in the numbers of cocaine abusers—as kids increasingly pick up the bong instead of an 8-ball—as a major positive in addiction-related harm reduction.

Yet, as the Drug Enforcement Agency frequently reminds us, the marijuana trade isn’t driven by a bunch of fuzzy old Deadheads; there’s a lot of money in weed—an estimated annual $120 billion worth—and ruthless Mexican drug traffickers feed much of America’s voracious appetite for buds.

Critics of prevailing “Drug War” policies argue that legalization could effectively shut down this black market. In addition, as the criminal justice system has become more involved, via drug courts and probation stipulations, in determining who gets drug treatment in lieu of incarceration, more and more potheads who don’t really need treatment are filling the slots—an underreported aspect of the much-hyped jump in pot admissions. On the flip side, many addiction professionals who work with “forensic” clients steered into addiction treatment by the courts cite the epic consumption of pot some users self-report (15 to 20 blunts daily). Frequently contributing to, if not caused by, such high levels of chronic weed intake are co-occurring mental health disorders, certainly a legitimate, if often unmet, treatment need.

In terms of knowing what’s out there to sample, the justice department does us the favor of serving up a kind of menu-by-location with their annual drug market analyses. Northern California looks to be a smoker’s heaven with a slew of “indoor grow sites” producing “high potency” weed. Philly gets “good quality Mexican,” while Chicago is singing the blues, trying to get by and stay high on “commercial grade” dirt buds.

As for the Obama administration’s rampant raids on medical-marijuana suppliers: a boondoggle resulting in monumental waste of money? Or a long-overdue intervention for abusers of a drug with an underestimated capacity for harm? Marijuana use (and treatment for its abuse) are touchy subjects, dear readers. Argue it out in the comments section.

2. Meth

Crystal methamphetamine addicts constituted 45,457 cases of addiction treatment in the state of California in 2010—more than the state’s combined number of alcoholics and heroin admissions. In Oregon law enforcement crackdowns in 2007 on pseudoephedrine, meth’s widely available chemical precursor, resulted in a brief lull in meth-related arrests, but those numbers began climbing again all too soon.

Meth is an ugly business, toxic to make and use at home resulting in massive social costs like increased foster-care placements for children of addicts and dealers. In addition, murderous Mexican drug cartels finally figured out that meth could be as profitable as smuggling cocaine, conveniently manufacturing the drug in their own laboratories instead of being the middle man for South American coke traffickers.

For all the gaunt, gap-toothed mug shots favored by the national media, meth remains mainly a problem of America’s new Wild West. There were fewer than 250 cases each of meth-addiction treatment admissions in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts in 2010. On the East Coast, meth is a blip; outside the gay club scene you rarely encounter Tina, as the boys on the dance floor have affectionately dubbed her. But ice’s popularity rises as you travel west, ticking up to 10% of treatment admissions in Missouri and crossing the Rockies at a high altitude to become 20% of admissions in Nevada, where the drug fuels the eternal bacchanal of other addictions on the Vegas strip.

3. Alcohol

Just as the dudes with the rainbow cascade of keychains hanging out of their ass pockets at the Narcotics Anonymous clubhouse are wont to remark, booze is a drug. In fact, plain, old-fashioned alcohol has been fucking so many people up in so many ways for so many years that its destructiveness would seem to exceed a mention as newsworthy on a list of the year’s top street drugs. Plus, being legal and all, booze is not, technically speaking, a “street” drug, although its sleek and sexy advertisements on billboards from coast to coast suggest otherwise.

But King Alcohol will not be denied, ranking a strong second in large urban centers both in terms of treatment admissions and, more important, in percentage of drug-related deaths. In Philly, liquor has in recent years become very much of a street drug in another sense as well, as the City of Brother Love struggles with a “nuisance bar” problem that has pushed up its murder rate. The inner-city bar culture resembles the old frontier-saloon scene, except that now gun-strapped hustlers are partying after their crack-corner work shifts and getting into drunken arguments that escalate to shootouts.

Last year, after nine people—nine!—were shot outside a club with a bad street rep, Mayor Nutter declared, “We’re not putting up with this crap anymore,” and set to waging war against booze-fueled street violence.

Of course, the substance is deadly enough without a bullet hastening the end. It often seems like the most underappreciated drug fact is the role alcohol plays in the entire gamut of drug-related deaths; in 2010 in Philly alcohol was present in 23% of such deaths—nearly as many as cocaine. Arrests for public inebriation and drunk driving were also up. Even in Philly’s poorest neighborhoods alcohol remains the most common drug of abuse, especially with older substance abusers in whom it exacts hellish tolls such as chronic health problems and homelessness.

4. Pills

That’s right, just “pills”—no fine distinctions here between oxycodone and hydrocodone. The fact is that on the streets, where formal knowledge of psychopharmacology is often at a low ebb, black-market pharmaceuticals that came in pallet loads off a truck or bottled from the pharmacy shelves are largely seen as a monolithic category separate from “street” drugs that were cooked and bagged at someone’s kitchen table.

Over the past two decades specific sections of some cities have grown up to accommodate the traffic in pharmaceuticals; my own old stomp in North Philadelphia—”Pill Hill”—was set away from the more violent heroin and crack corners so Oxy addicts could cop in relative safety. Oxys weren’t the only product trading at Pill Hill; Percs and Endos (percocet), Xanies (Xanax), Pins (Klonopin) and even Suzie Q (the antipsychotic drug Seroquel) were abundant and readily available at a 24/7 open-air drug market at the corners of 17th and Jefferson streets until recently when gentrification moved into the neighborhood.

Of course, pill abuse has swept the entire nation, as the incidence of treatment for prescription drug addiction has skyrocketed, doubling, tripling and more over the past 20 years. The ongoing meteoric rise in social costs associated with pharma narcs puts pills ahead of the remaining street drugs of abuse in this survey; dope and coke are, in many ways, so last century.

The DoJ considers CPDs (controlled prescription drugs) “the primary drug threat” in its most recent drug-market analysis of Appalachia, handily outpacing the abuse of locally cooked meth. That Rx drug abuse has yet to subside from the hysteria-inducing levels of, say, 2002 has recently spawned a new round of “Oxy epidemic” news stories, pitting enforcement-oriented pols and the families of overdosed drug addicts against civil libertarians (and the medical and pharma lobbies) arguing that legitimate pain patients suffer unnecessarily when given a bad name by crazed gun-toting drug-store cowboys knocking over the local CVS for a sack full of Vicodin.

5. Heroin and Cocaine

How to choose between these two old stand-bys of the street drug world for the final spot on our list? Neither high has the same allure as in the ’70s, ’80s or ’90s. Cocaine, especially, has lost its disco-era luster; fiscal austerity imposed by the financial collapse seems to have driven many casual coke snorters to cheaper alternatives like weed. There’s also an “older-sibling effect”—kids who observed the devastating impact of the crack epidemic on the inner city grew up to prefer comparatively harmless blunts to the dime rocks that put them in foster care. This trend is reflected in nationwide data; the count of current cocaine users has dropped off hugely from 2.6 million in 2003 to 1.6 million in 2010.

Yet coke and junk remain a presence in the nation’s inner cities, especially on the East Coast—for example, ranking third and fourth respectively in total treatment admissions in Philadelphia only behind marijuana and alcohol. And both are still very risky ways to get high, ranking first and third in drug-related deaths.

Heroin use was especially Russian Roulette-like during the fentanyl outbreak of 2006, when a batch of bags containing the superpotent, respiratory depressing anesthetic instead of heroin left a trail of dead addicts in Philly, New York and New Jersey. The DoJ calls heroin the “most significant drug threat” in Boston, overburdening law enforcement and public health resources. In addition, officials are predicting that in big-city markets where heroin is available in unlimited quantities and more expensive painkillers less so, today’s Oxyheads will be tomorrow’s dopefiends, setting off an addiction bomb that spikes new heroin users through the roof.

Teen alcohol and drug use is rife, but not in our little angels, parents believe.

Denial is not restricted to addicts, it seems. In a clear case of familial favoritism, the parents of 13-17 year-olds tend to overestimate teen substance use in general—while underestimating their own kids’ substance use. The latest C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health from the University of Michigan shows that moms and dads operate on a widely-held belief that, “Other teens drink and use marijuana, but my kids don’t!” Researchers including Bernard Biermann, Medical Director of the Child/Adolescent Inpatient Unit at the University of Michigan, found that a mere 10% of parents believe their own teens have drunk alcohol in the last year—but they put the rate of alcohol use by “other teens” at 60%. Similarly, 5% of parents believe their own teens have used marijuana in the last year—but on average parents believe 40% of teens in general smoke pot. As Biermann identifies, “There’s a clear mismatch between what parents are reporting in terms of their children’s possible use of substances and what teenagers report themselves.“ Parents who face up to their misconceptions may wonder exactly how many teens are really using alcohol and drugs. Well, in the most recent Monitoring the Future study, 52% of 10th graders reported drinking alcohol in the last year while 28% reported using marijuana. So what should parents do? “These mismatched perceptions indicate a need for awareness and communication about teen substance abuse”, said Biermann. “Awareness is a means of opening the door to communication.” He urges parents to acknowledge the possibility—even the likelihood—of their teen using alcohol or marijuana. Talking about it, monitoring for signs of substance use, and trying not to overreact to single incidents are also recommended.

At Sober College, we understand the need for young adult treatment programs. With the growing amount of young adults, high school and college students abusing drugs and alcohol our goal is to help them get back on track and make the transition away from substance abuse as easy as possible. If you think your child or someone you know may be using drugs, take a look around our website for more information on addiction, substance abuse, and treatment options.

In an orchestrated attack on cigarette regulation in the UK, tobacco giant Philip Morris, the world’s largest tobacco company, filed a flurry of Freedom of Information Act requests in September designed to give them access to proprietary academic research on teenage smoking habits. It’s no coincidence that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced in November that the percentage of adult smokers in America had finally fallen below 20%. American teens smoke at slightly higher rates than adults, as do citizens of the UK. (Figures in the EU vary widely, but hover in the high 20s.) For the past month, tobacco firms Philip Morris and Gallaher have been busily engaged in a campaign to force academic researchers in Britain to turn over sensitive cigarette research—a campaign Philip Morris quietly dropped this week, after two months of adverse publicity.

The cigarette companies have also targeted the UK Department of Health, demanding access to the minutes of confidential meetings involving health department officials and cancer experts, “to the surprise of those who attended the private discussions,” according to Steve Connor, the science editor who spearheaded the investigation for the British newspaper, the Independent. The FOI requests, the Independent concludes, are part of “a global campaign by tobacco companies to fight any further legal restrictions of cigarette sales and promotion, particularly the introduction of plain cigarette packets.”
Hooking the developed world’s teen smokers is the one bright spot in Big Tobacco’s future, and industry executives know it. What Phillip Morris wanted was university research on a wide range of attitudes and behaviors teens hold towards smoking—especially their feelings about new plans for British cigarette packaging. Like the U.S. and Australia, officials in Britain are planning plain packages in a neutral color, with no brand logos, only the brand name in simple typeface plus warning labels.

Big tobacco appears intent on drawing a line in the sand any way it can over the issue of plain packaging. The U.S. and Australia have already mandated these changes—restrictions that aim to turn cigarette packs into either fright cards or the proverbial plain brown wrapper. But the British attack by Big Tobacco rocked the public health community, where confidentiality is often the keystone of successful research, especially into stigmatized issues such as underage smoking. Researchers were horrified, but legal opinion on the request was mixed. From the tobacco industry’s point of view, the problems began when Cancer Research UK, the nation’s leading cancer charity, bankrolled a study by the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies at Stirling University in Scotland. The investigators surveyed thousands of British teenagers to investigate their attitudes and behavior toward smoking, with special emphasis on why they do or do not pick up the pack—and the habit. Needless to say, a study intended to read the minds of Big Tobacco’s target market would be met with parental fury.

With a database of some 5,500 teens between the ages of 11 and 16—who participated only on condition of anonymity—Stirling was unprepared for the Phillip Morris request. A separate FOI request by Gallaher, a subsidiary of Japan Tobacco International, demanded “all correspondence between the [health] department and outside organizations, such as the campaign group Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), the UK Centre for Tobacco Control studies, and the scientific research charities Cancer Research UK and the British Heart Foundation.” Deborah Arnott, chief executive of ASH, said it was clear that the industry “wants access to government documents and academic research for one purpose only to help it fight regulation.” The Independent said that in the case of the Health Department requests, “the company wanted to understand what materials were being relied upon as evidence for planned plain-packaging legislation.

“All the experts say that the tobacco industry will fight tooth and nail to retain their branded packets.” says the Independent’s Steve Connor. “The tobacco industry claims it does not target children, but branded packets are undoubtedly attractive to this under-age group as well.”

But why are the tobacco firms so concerned with packaging? Let’s face it: The red Marlboro chevron, the cartoon camel, and the iconic bull’s-eye of Lucky Strike (designed by the man who brought us the Coca-Cola logo) are all hugely lucrative branding devices. The industry is increasingly faced with the problem of finding legal space—any space—where they can exploit these powerful icons. Thus, the fierce fight over the package itself—virtually the last advertising space over which the industry exerts some advertising control. An internal cigarette industry analysis released in 2007 put the matter forthrightly: “If you smoke, a cigarette pack is one of the few things you use regularly that makes a statement about you. A cigarette pack is the only thing you take out of your pocket 20 times a day and lay out for everyone to see.”

The trade magazine World Tobacco counseled companies that “if your brand can no longer shout from billboards, let alone from the cinema screen or the pages of a glossy magazine… it can at least court smokers from the retailer’s shelf, or from wherever it is placed by those already wed to it.”

In a report issued by Cancer Council Victoria recently, Australian researchers analyzed 24 published studies and concluded that “the cigarette pack has become the key  marketing tool employed by the tobacco industry to attract and retain customers.”

Some of the Stirling data is already accessible in published studies. The July issue of Journal of Tobacco Control featured an article about the influence of packaging on the behavior of young smokers, showing that those with plain packets took out their cigarettes less frequently, handled the cigarettes less often, and sometimes hid the packs. Lead author Dr. Crawford Moodie said the study, which was based on only 50 young adult smokers, “confirms the lack of appeal of plain packs.” Moodie said his group was “now looking to build on this research to understand more about the impact of packaging on smokers.” Big Tobacco wants to understand more about it, too, so it can find ways of making plain packaging more appealing. And it wants to use Cancer Research’s own data for the purpose.

Phillip Morris wants the teen smokers’ database so that they can get an advance peek at the research they will shortly be refuting with poorly-designed, hastily conducted, and misleadingly-compiled studies of their own. “Doubt,” as the infamous cigarette industry motto would have it, “is our product.”

Nonetheless, what the tobacco firms are doing is perfectly legal and common under the auspices of the UK FOI regulations. But as the Independent notes, this is not a two-way street: “Although tobacco companies can use FOI legislation to access government documents, the tobacco industry itself is not subject to the legislation.” As a tobacco industry spokesperson put it, “information held by private companies such as ours is often of a commercial nature and therefore cannot be released for competitive reasons.”

When asked what material Phillip Morris which makes seven of the world’s top 15 international brands  had specifically requested, Professor Gerard Hastings told the Independent: “They wanted everything we had ever done on this.” Professor Hastings said he feared a loss of trust from study participants and funding sources: “I don’t think for one moment a cancer charity is going to take kindly to paying us hundred of thousands of pounds to give aid and succor to a multinational tobacco corporation.”

Stirling researchers involved in the study said they have received anonymous hate emails and phone calls, which they assume is the work of pro-smoking lobbyists. Professor Linda Bauld, one of the targets, said such attacks were nothing new. “I’ve had a series of anonymous calls starting about a year ago,” she told British sources. “These are phone calls in the evening when I’m at home with my children. It’s an unpleasant experience.”

The worldwide tobacco industry pushback against the forces of annihilation, from their point of view, is now in full swing: R.J. Reynolds, Lorillard, and other tobacco companies prevailed earlier in November over the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, where Judge Richard Leon ruled that forcing cigarette manufacturers to offer their products only packaging containing “graphic images” was a violation of free speech, and therefore unconstitutional. The companies were granted a preliminary injunction, while the FDA regroups and lawyers rehuddle. The new regulations were supposed to take effect in September of 2012, and are considered one of the keystones of the Obama Administration’s public health approach at the FDA.  

Meanwhile, the head of the World Health Organization last week urged countries to stand together against ongoing tobacco company efforts to “harass” them into backpedaling on their anti-smoking programs. “How can we as an international community allow big tobacco to harass countries?” asked Director-General Margaret Chan. She made her sharply accusative exhortation in response to legal action launched by Philip Morris in Australia, aimed at combating new legislation which bans brand logos and bright colors, substituting graphic health warnings and plain type. On November 22, Phillip Morris announced it would sue for billions in compensation if the government outlaws “logis, imagery, colours, and promotional text.”

What goes unstated is the fact that cigarette packages do more than make a personal statement—in their new form, they broadcast a statement about ill health. Back in 1995, a Canadian report examined existing studies and concluded that teenagers “are much less likely to associate specific brands with specific types of people when packs are plain. Students have enhanced ability to recall health warnings on plain packs, suggesting that imagery can distract from health warnings. Health warnings on plain packs were seen as being more serious than the same warnings on branded packs, suggesting that brand imagery diffuses the impact of health warnings.”

Marketing mavens have long known that young consumers are fickle. Phillip Morris declared in corporate communications that “once exposed to innovative [packaging] especially young adults see their current packaging as dated and boring.” Plain packaging does not fulfill the tobacco industry’s need for ever-newer packaging that is “slick, sleek, flashy, glittery, shiny, silky, bold.”

The tobacco industry has predictably already developed a strategy to subvert the negative influence of plain packaging. A paper by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco notes that the advertising battle over pack imagery includes “the inner frame card, outer film and tear tape, and the incorporation of holograms, collectable art, metallic finishes, multi-fold stickers, photographs and images.” And that’s just the package. The industry has discussed the role retailers can play in advertising, such as placing logo signage nearby, or even stocking specially designed cartons that display a brand logo when stacked correctly.

In Australia and the UK, the fallback for the tobacco industry’s legal challenge has been intellectual property rights. Cigarette makers argue that forcing them to use plain packaging represents a blatant violation of a company’s right to deploy its legally registered intellectual property. However, plain package advocates point to a wealth of published work by experts in trademark law suggesting that governments are allowed to “restrict use of trademarks to protect public health.”

In America, the legal argument has centered on the reliably red-meat issue of  free speech—far more engaging for the public than the dry British complaints about trademarks. In the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., the firms argued that the FDA exceeded its brief when it unilaterally decided that the public interest in information about the dangers of smoking gave license to trample on the free speech rights of the cigarette makers. In response, the FDA said that “the public interest strongly militates against delaying health warnings that more effectively convey the extraordinary, undisputed health risks created by the use of plaintiffs’ products.” Industry insiders say that the tobacco companies don’t necessarily expect to win such lawsuits, but can use these cases to keep the matter tied up in court for years.

Science editor Connor at the Independent draws parallels between tobacco industry actions and the flurry of FOI requests now burdening the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, which is studying climate change: “The scientific denialism shown by Big Tobacco can be linked with the climate denialism of the fossil-fuel industry through organizations that foster both types of skepticism.” Both lobby groups know that “the best chance of avoiding regulation is to challenge the scientific consensus by sowing disinformation and personally undermining those who carry out the research.”

Article Published by Dirk Hanson

Sober College Young Adult Treatment

In relation to addiction,  the DSM-V will no longer be using term or labels such as “substance dependence” and “substance abuse” but will instead classify addiction problems under the heading “Substance Use and Addictive Disorders.”Substance abuse—which was used to characterize drug problems that fall short of outright addiction, like college binge drinking—is a highly stigmatizing and misleading term. If “child abuse” means harming a child, does “drug abuse” mean harming a drug? It never made any sense linguistically and only served to associate drug users with abusive people in the public mind. Indeed, one randomized controlled trial showed that healthcare professionals who read vignettes about patients described as “substance abusers” supported more punishment and less therapy than those who read about the same patients identified as having “substance use disorders.”

Even worse is “substance dependence.” The term was placed into a revision of the third edition of the DSM, DSM III-R, in the ’80s as a euphemism for addiction with the intention of using a “medical sounding,” or nonstigmatizing, phrase.Dr. Charles O’Brien, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania whose addiction expertise is so renowned that Penn even named it treatment center after him, described the events in a 2006 article co-written with NIDA director Nora Volkow:

There was good agreement among committee members as to the definition of addiction, but there was disagreement as to the label that should be used. The proponents of the term “addiction” believed that this word would convey the appropriate meaning of the compulsive drug-taking condition and would distinguish it from “physical” dependence, which is normal and can occur in anyone who takes medications that affect the [brain]. Those who favored the term “dependence” felt that this was a more neutral term that could easily apply to all drugs, including alcohol and nicotine. The committee members argued that the word “addiction” was a pejorative term that would add to the stigmatization of people with substance use disorders.A vote was taken at one of the last meetings of the committee, and the word “dependence” won over “addiction” by a single vote. Experience over the past two decades has demonstrated that this decision was a serious mistake.

Moreover, with the term “dependence” in the medical definition of addiction itself, it became very difficult to teach people that needing a drug to function isn’t the essence of addiction. The misdefinition encapsulated the idea that suffering withdrawal—rather than compulsive use despite negative consequences—was fundamental to the problem. That meant that the drive to take drugs—now demoted to being called merely “psychological dependence”—was less important than getting sick if you couldn’t get the drug.

In reality, this desire—and related repetitive drug-taking—matters far more than how sick you get when you try to stop. In fact, with heroin withdrawal, the severity of symptoms like vomiting and diarrhea isn’t particularly linked to relapse risk, which is far more associated with how much the person wants the drug. With cocaine, which doesn’t make you sick at all if you quit abruptly, the entire addiction is “in your head” or “psychological”—but that obviously doesn’t make crack not addictive!

Other changes to made include a possible removal of Asperger’s Syndrome from the manual that could result in denial of needed services and widespread underdiagnosis of autism, addition of certain mood disorders, and addition of substance induced disorders.

Click to read more about this, or to check out how sober college is making headway on innovated treatment for young adults.

Not only do we help our students build a new relationship with themselves, but we help them by providing a community of love and support. Alumni, staff, and residents make up the Sober College community. The community of Sober College is growing and our goal is to keep our students and alumni close that way help is just that much easier. Young Adults in early recovery need a strong support group and our goal is to provide everything we can for our students to lead sober and independent lives.

So this Valentines Day, Check out how we spread the love to our students or our community, and spread some love to those around you and to yourself.

Students, Alumni and Staff creates a community for students to feel comfortable while moving forward not only in recovery but in life. We pride ourselves on the “Sober College Atmosphere“, a place where young adults can see how truly great it is to get and stay sober.

Watch our Talent Show Live Stream this Saturday and 7 p.m. or visit us to learn about our drug and alcohol program.

Student Graduating High School

This past week one of our student’s, Max C., completed and passed his GED test. We are so proud and excited to watch no only max but our students grow and make achievements while in drug treatment. The Sober College program is designed for young adults to get help for drug and alcohol addiction while continuing to move forward in their lives. For young adults, we have found that not stopping their lives to get sober and helping them to learn how to keep moving forward in sobriety creates a level of attraction for our students.

We have lots of students who come in and havent finished high school or had to leave school early. Our goal is to help students move forward with getting there diploma or GED and move into College Courses or our Vocational Program. Sober College offers numerous options for students who are still in the process of completing high school. Our academic team will communicate and cooperate with the teachers, administrators, and counselors at a student’s current high school in order to keep them on track with their current graduation plans. If the student’s home school is not amenable to such an arrangement, Sober College utilizes Burbank Unified and Los Angeles Unified School District’s independent study programs. In many cases, students are able to participate in the Woodbury University college classes offered on site and receive high school and college credit simultaneously. Sober College also offers comprehensive GED preparation and testing. With the wide variety of options Sober College offers, all students have the option to finish high school during their stay.

So whether a student is like max and needs help finishing his GED or like our other students who are pursuing vocational goals, our goal is to help them move forward in the best way indiviualized for each student.

Learn more about the Sober College Program

Student in our Creative Arts Studio

Sober College is based on 5 Core Competencies to create a well rounded and balanced Young treatment program. Implementing life skills, productivity, sobriety, emotional intelligence and fitness in our students day to day routine teaches our students how to live life again, or for the first time for some of our students. These competencies make up the structure of our program, but our program is designed to let student build their own treatment plan within that structure. Dr. Ken our fitness director states, “It’s important that I do not run a cookie cutter program, but rather tailor it to the individual. Not everyone likes lifting, just as not everyone likes team sports, so I accommodate our student’s backgrounds, preferences, and talents”.

Sober College understands that every client is different, which is why each client has their own individualized treatment plan developed by the members of their treatment team. A clients treatment team consists of an academic coach, neuropsychologist and/or psychiatrist, counselor, therapist, and house manager. This team works closely with each client, their family, and each other to determine exactly how best to serve our client, and to ensure they are receiving the best care possible throughout their stay at Sober College.

Drug Rehab Comparison, states the below on how important both a community and individualized treatment are important.

students before service work!

For most treatment programs, in-patient and out-patient, there is usually a very strong component that stresses peer support. Studies have been suggesting for a long time that one of the best ways to treat addicts and alcoholics is to have them work with each other. People in different stages of recovery can help to shed light on the journey for others, they can share advice, and addicts tend to trust others who have been through the same thing rather than trained professionals who may not know what it’s like from the inside out.

At the same time, individual therapy is also extremely important. This gives the recovering addict the chance to really focus on their own issues, and their own process, and it gives importance to their own individual concerns. One of the most common distinguishing features of an addict is a rather pronounced self-centeredness. This is a personality trait that is formed after years of use and abuse, that leads to the spiral of addiction. By giving this self-centeredness a place in therapy, it has a place to find expression, ultimately leading to a breakthrough where they can discover that they are not unique, and not at all alone. In therapy, they can develop the necessary skills to talk about their own feelings, and this is one of the most important steps toward becoming a whole human being, free of addiction.

- Allen R., Former Sober College Student

Sober College is an attraction based program. At Sober College the staff and students, who have attended for a period of time, provide wonderful examples of where sobriety can take you. Sober College does not believe that they can force someone that does not want to be sober to stay sober, but they do think that after staying with us for a period of time students will be naturally attracted to sobriety. Alcoholics and drug addicts that do not think that they need to stay clean and sober may relapse. Many of the staff at Sober College are in recovery, and are a shining examples of the happiness that sobriety can provide someone. A want to be sober is not a requirement for long term sobriety. Many people that have come to Sober College and stayed sober did not plan on staying sober, but were giving a loving push by their parents or the courts to come to Sober College. This fact is mirrored by the amount of people that have gotten sober due to the court system through 12 step programs. Sober College helps many young adults become motivated to stay sober because they build lives that are so big and full.

Part of this “attraction based model” at sober college is teaching our students how to have fun in recovery. Who would get clean if it didn’t mean your life gets better. Our goal is to show our students that being in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction means having the ability to take life a step further. We teach our students how not only to live life but how to enjoy it. Most newly sober young adults struggle with the idea that they can have fun without drugs and alcohol. For many students at Sober College it is the only way that they know to have fun and relate to their peers. Sober College shows its residents that it is possible to have fun without using by introducing them to exciting new activities, and showing them that everything that they enjoyed doing while drinking and using is just as fun, if not more fun now that they are sober.

Check out Sober College’s Young Adults Treatment Center to learn why our students are having a blast, in rehab.

Women's Program during Experiential Therapy!

The percentage of women who have mental health problems such as depression in addition to addiction or who show signs of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is significantly higher than it is for men; in addition, the mortality rate for women with addiction(s) is 50 percent to 100 percent higher for women than men. Because of their size and hormone fluctuations during the menstrual cycle, women generally become intoxicated more quickly than men—and become clinically “addicted” much more quickly (according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism).

Although 40 percent of all alcoholics are women, women account for only 25 percent of all who receive treatment for addictions (according to the Alcohol and Drug Problems Association of North America). Aside from society’s general expectations of women, as well as its association of women and alcohol with loose morals, women face specific barriers to treatment that men do not. Barriers for women are usually very practical: lack of childcare, fear of losing their children, lower wages, and less money.

Throughout American history, society and traditional family structures have contributed to women’s roles being central to the stability and “nurturing” of the immediate family, and often of the extended family of parents and in-laws and close friends. And whereas drinking a couple of beers with his buddies makes a guy “manly,” an alcohol or chemical abuse problem makes a woman shameful and suspect, and her family, the object of pity and scorn. Women are more likely than men to lack social and family support for going into treatment. Because alcoholism is also a family disease, and however dysfunctional the family may be, the roles of mother and wife are seen as essential in meeting the needs of the others, and everyone’s denial remains a powerful barricade to treatment.

Student performing at the SC Talent Show!

At Sober College we have transformed the way women’s treatment works, hoping to reach more young women who need help. our initial emphasis is to introduce a functioning basis of physical sobriety. Over the course of stay we begin utilizing the principles and traditions of the distinctively successful 12 step model, while providing a forum for each girl’s individual goals and aspirations to manifest. The residents have the benefit of gained confidence through active execution of structures within Life Skills, Emotional Intelligence, and Community Welfare. Encouraging anything from enrolling in voice lessons to interning at a veterinarian’s office; we enthusiastically support each of our residents to realize their potential. Our Women’s Program provides a safe environment to recognize the possibilities, identify and work toward real goals, and learn healthy boundaries to support a healthy lifestyle.

Check Out the Women’s Program and all the we have to offer, at Sober College