She opened a laundry to support her hotline: Recovery from addiction

Wu Xuemin, a 40-year-old woman in Baotou City, in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, was sent to a local agency to have treatment for her drug addiction.

Three years later, she has been successfully running a special hotline to help other addicts.

"When I was first in the anti-addiction clinic, my whole body ached, and I seemed to have a thousands ants crawling over me," she recalled.

Wu conquered her addiction with the help of the police officers and her roommates at the center. Afterward, she pledged to start a new life by helping other drug addicts to cure their habit.

The former addict opened a hotline called "Xuemin Chat Room" to talk with addicts and their relatives. The hotline received hundreds of calls in the first year.

When the local authorities heard that Wu had run into financial difficulties in running the hotline, they helped her by providing a new office and a computer. Wu has also opened a laundry to support her hotline and to give former addicts a job.

"I hope more and more brothers and sisters who want to give up their addiction will get in touch with me," she said, "I will spare no effort to help them."

Advice: Spare no effort to help your friends struggling with addiction, like Wu Xuemin has.

Read one of our addiction recovery stories, or read more from the source article from the Xinhua News Agency.

Now he looks for another kind of high: Crystal meth recovery

Joe Duavit says he turned to crystal meth, or speed, in college to help study for exams. But the powerful upper also gave him a high, and an addiction that consumed him. He began to steal from his family to support his habit, going on binges that would last for days. "I ended up in a straitjacket in a psychiatric ward," says Joe, who in 1992 finally conquered his addiction. He then went to work for Habilitat, a drug treatment center in Kaneoho, Hawaii. The urge to take the drug again was the most difficult part of the recovery process, Joe says.

New research may help explain why drug abusers struggle so much with the compulsion to take such a risky drug again and again. A scientific study now suggests that compulsion can be traced back to damage to a part of the brain involved in making good decisions. Yet people such as Joe do recover -- often with the help of therapy. Studies also now suggest that the brain may heal itself after a person stops abusing a drug, a finding that indicates that recovery may get easier as time goes on.

Joe didn't notice any memory problems after he quit meth. But he did have to learn how to take pleasure in things that many people take for granted. He says he had to learn how to get satisfaction from working hard toward a goal, such as getting a college degree. And, over time, Joe did experience a healing, in his case one that freed him from a seven-year addiction to meth. Now as a drug treatment counselor, he looks for another kind of high, one that he gets from helping others break free of drug addiction.

Advice to people struggling with addiction: Look for a better high in helping people, like Joe did.

Read another of our addiction recovery stories, or read Dr. Don Miller’s source story, from the USA Today of April 18, 2002.

I went wherever help was available: Recovery from addiction

Shivakumar’s story

I am a 37 year old recovering drug user. When I was 19, my friend and I had a road accident in which I broke my left hand. I was hospitalized at the same hospital where I was working. The pain was unbearable so the doctor gave me an intramuscular injection. For three hours there was no pain and the drug was giving me some high – which I was enjoying! When the drug wore off, I started feeling pain again, the high was gone, and my addictive personality was calling for me to take one more shot without the doctor’s knowledge. So I raided the hospital storeroom and took another injection.

For three years, I kept taking injections. My physical condition deteriorated to the point where I couldn’t perform my duties. Being around drugs at the hospital on a daily basis didn’t help, I came to realize, so I decided to move on.

Once out of work, I started to mingle with brown sugar users and very soon, I got hooked to it and cannabis. My drug use landed me in a local jail three times. It was there that I became ashamed of myself. I wanted it all to end. So I loaded a barrel full of drugs hoping for a last dying trip.

When I came to, I was in a hospital. After a few days, I was released and I started using again. I injected for six months but, this time, my family came to help me. They took me to TTK Hospital, where I enrolled in a three-month treatment program.

It didn’t take long for me to relapse. Again, the downward spiral which led to my second suicide attempt. After that, I went back to TTK and cleaned up my act, went to self-help group meetings where I got strength and hope and I went wherever help was available. With God’s grace and the precious help I found at TTK, I am recovering from drug dependence, staying away from all drugs for more than ten and a half years now, and still attending the self-help meetings on a daily basis.

Since I beat my addiction, I have been working at TTK’s Outreach Center for six and a half years as the buprenorphine project coordinator. My work and the pharmacotherapy allow people to get jobs, enjoy their family lives and maintain decent social relationships.


Advice: Look for ways to apply what you have learned the hard way to help others, as Shivakumar is doing.

Read a sad story about problem drinking, or read Shivakumar’s source story.

I get bottles at a time: Abuse of Adderall for ADHD

"Todd" is a senior at Needham High School, outside of Boston. He has been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD, or ADHD) by a psychiatrist and regularly takes Adderall to help him focus. His friends have often asked him for a tablet or two before SATs, tests, or just for focusing on homework.

"I get bottles at a time so I can afford to give it out, but I don’t like to. People ask me because they feel really overloaded with work and feel like they need the extra push to keep up. They’ll pay me or even do me favors to get it. I could name at least ten people who took Adderall to get better scores and they got it easily from friends."

Another senior commented, "I have a friend who gets prescribed Adderall and doesn’t even take it; he only sells it. He sells each pill for five or ten bucks."

About 5% of the American population has ADD, according to the ADD Association, and Adderall is widely used. It may well be abused in many other neighborhoods with highly competitive high schools.

Advice: We need to come back down to Earth and be more understanding of human flaws, say Becca Pryor and Sarah Kristeller, and create a healthier competition among our kids.

Read another of our ADHD stories, or read the source story by Becca Pryor and Sarah Kristeller in the May/June issue of The Hilltopper.