We just heard Kriss Blevens’ plea for help for the addicted on “Fox & Friends.”
My son-in-law was a hopeless drunk. We tried everything. He was in about 10 different rehabs and then sent home where he languished on the couch for months. Behind the drunk was a wonderful loving husband and father, but the drink got to him. We thought there was no hope and he would eventually just die from what he was doing to his body. This story is repeated over and over in families all over the world. It doesn’t matter if it is drugs or alcohol.
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Then an amazing thing happened. A psychiatrist in a last-ditch attempt to stop the carnage gave him a shot “to make the alcohol not have an effect on him.” But that is not what happened. Within 3 hours after arriving home, he got up off the couch and went out to mow the lawn. He then cleaned the shed and came in to have a meaningful conversation with his family. He stayed sober for 18 months. Now this shot cost $1,300 and was to be given one per month. When you have a man not working, that number is unattainable. So slowly he reached for the next drink. We helped our daughter and found the money to get him another shot. The same thing happened, but again, now after six months, he succumbed to the alcohol. Then we tried it again. This time he did have the DTs but since has now been sober for 2 ½ years, holds down a job and that wonderful man is back.
During this amazing transition, my daughter looked up the drug and found it also worked on narcotic victims. Some of the reports say that it was effective in 80 percent of the cases. Wow!!! Even if it just worked on 25 percent of the victims that would be huge, but 80 percent?
We questioned some of the rehabs he had been to and they never heard of the drug. When users post online what it has done for them, why is no one paying attention? The shot is called Vivitrol and comes in pills that don’t appear to be as effective.
My only explanation is that there is too much money being made in addiction-related industries. Please, please do the research on this drug, not from doctors, but from users and the few people who have dared to do studies on it.
Can you imagine what something like this could do for our nation and the world? How many parents and families would be able to sleep at night, once again?
Blessings,
Carol Lydick
Allentown, NJ
Caroly Lydick is a retired teacher of the handicapped for the Department of Youth and Family Services and the Department of Corrections in NJ. She currently does volunteer work building and painting theater sets for churches and her son is a pastor with a street ministry working with the indigent, homeless and addicted in Trenton, NJ. She is the mother of four, grandmother of 6, and great-grandmother of 2, and says all sides of her family have been touched by alcohol addiction in some way.
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