October 16, 2012
Coping with a Rebellious Drug Addicted Teen
More people in America are turning to rogue online pharmacies to purchase prescription painkillers like Oxycontin.
‘Mom, if you won’t give me money to buy my pills, I’ll have to become a prostitute or a dealer myself!’
No matter how many reality TV shows get cooked up around the idea of “intervention,” addiction is still a health care process. If it turns into a “fed-up parent” power struggle, it can actually speed up the disease progression.
BILL: “I’m a single mom and an attorney with a good income,” writes Peggy. “My daughter Tina began sneaking my Oxycodone pills when I had a ski accident last winter.”
DR. DAVE: We hear about that all too often — kids experimenting with their parents’ pills. They never think how expensive they are before they become addicted. That quote above was Tina’s blackmailing threat to her mother?
BILL: When Peggy wrote us, I turned to Richard Taite, CEO of Cliffside Malibu Addiction Treatment Center. “I advise parents who have a child with a drug or alcohol problem,” he responded. “That if you tell your kid the only thing you are willing to pay for is his treatment or he’ll be put out on the street, then you will get your kid back. The parents who cave to the almost terrorist-like demands of their addicted children end up either losing them or creating years of unnecessary wreckage.”
DR. DAVE: I’d go a step beyond Richard’s overall advice. Parents tend to enable their kid either to keep using so they don’t end up on the streets, or they speed up the addiction by saying “It’s my way or the highway!” Often one parent takes one path and another takes the other, with the addict and enabler divorcing the intervening parent!
BILL: Are you saying the intervening parent who says, “Get clean or get out” is also off-target?
DR. DAVE: First of all, no matter how many reality TV shows get cooked up around the idea of “intervention,” it is still a health care process. If it turns into a “fed-up parent” power struggle, it can actually speed up the disease progression! I’ve seen too many righteously indignant parents in tears after their 16 year-old daughter has been on the streets for a month. “We did as advised,” they tell me. “We let her addiction create a bottom so she will want to get off her drugs. But now nobody has seen her for over a week!”
BILL: Basically, I’ve been taught that you want the pain of addiction to feel worse to the addict than the pain of turning her life around through therapy. Tina has it pretty good at home. Why isn’t “my way or the highway” the right kind of intervention?
DR. DAVE: Two of the three key ingredients of an effective adolescent intervention are missing: Love and Location. While the lifestyle Tina would lose meets part of the third ingredient, Leverage, the problem a parent runs into with an addicted teen prostitute is that the drugs can dull the sexual assaults she is being paid to endure. Tina could see the money as a momentary plus.
BILL: So, here we have it: Dr. Dave’s “3 L’s of Adolescent Intervention.” Please tell Peggy and our readers what you mean about Love and Location.
DR. DAVE: The expression of Love is hard for some parent , particularly when they’re used to the “old school” way of expressing it as a reward for kids showing respect and appreciation. Showing it when you are worried about losing your kid to addiction, with all the fear and sadness that means, goes counter to many parents’ style.
