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A "Model"
Meth Treatment Program
At The Women's Prison in Pierre, South Dakota, they have a program that a great many other institutions should be looking at.
The main part of their meth treatment program is 513 hours, five to ten times longer than many other meth treatment programs, particularly those conducted in correctional institutions.
They report an extremely high retention rate, and the program is conducted in phases. Phase one itself, is 90 days in length and the program is conducted six days a week.
In our opinion, these people seem to really know what they're doing and we feel it's a program that would be very effective for other institutions to model their program after.
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(Page 2 of 10 In This Section)
The "Real World" As It Stands Today
The Meth "Treatment" Misconception Despite the fact that we're learning more about meth treatment every day, there's still a lot of misconception and other problems. On the extreme end of the scale, we still have people (sometimes actually called "experts') who make blanket statements like, "only 1% of meth addicts ever recover." We assume that's supposed to scare people, but we wonder at how they arrive at that percentage? And for that matter, we wonder how they arrive at any reliable estimate of how many people successfully recover from any form of addiction. All reporting about addiction recovery rates is voluntary, totally non-verifiable, and subject to incredible subjective interpretation - so how do they come up with an exact percentage point? If anybody knows the "secret formula," please let us know, and we'd be happy to publish it on the site. A Little More Realistic View The first thing you have to understand is that "treatment" for any kind of substance abuse isn't just some consistent, identical process. It varies by approach and philosophy, it varies from state to state in the U.S. and from province to province in Canada. And it varies from country to country, county to county, township to township. Treatment also varies in the quality of the people that are administering the "program," the context of the treatment, and the duration of the program. Some treatment facilities and programs are terrific, and some are horrible. (Trust us, we know both types personally.) So when we refer to "treatment," we have remember that we're talking about something that's extremely "variable" on a number of levels. As a result, when you hear someone say, "Meth treatment doesn't work," the first thing you have to ask is questions like, "What program are you referring to?" "How qualified and up-to-date was the facility that administered the program?" "What constitutes the "program" that was utilized?" The Standard Model Doesn't Apply If we've learned anything about meth treatment thus far, expecting the meth addict to just conform and fit in to the traditional "modalities" of treatment for chemical dependence is the first mistake - it simply won't work and will waste valuable time and funds. However, there are also strong indications that the more tailored the program is specifically to the needs of the meth user in recovery, the higher the success rate. That may lead you to believe that a "tailored meth treatment program" is just about meth. Ironically, it's not. It's the fact that most meth users are polydrug users, and that changes the entire context of treatment. Meth Addicts Are Usually "Polydrug" Users The objective of the meth user and for that matter, anyone dependent on a substance, is to get from "point A" to "point B" psychologically. For a variety of reasons (depending on the person in question,) point A is a place containing bad feelings, low moods and negative emotions that they do not like. There are thousands of contributing factors that create these feelings, but if you sit in on enough recovery meetings, you'll often hear it generalized as "never feeling comfortable in my own skin," which says a lot. Conversely, point B is a place where those feelings, moods and emotions are either drastically attenuated or lessened, or under ideal conditions, temporarily eliminated. This is a place that they do like, and in fact during the early stages of their addiction, they love it. And the "vehicle" they use to make this journey is their primary drug of choice. And even if the drug no longer gets them to point B, their brain has become hardwired or imprinted to think that will, and they continue in vain to reach that original "euphoric" state. But meth addicts, like many other addicts, are "polydrug" users, meaning that at any given time, they are using and possibly dependent on more than one drug. As stated, it's like this with users of other drugs as well. Check out the autopsy reports from heroin overdoses - invariably other drugs are present in the system and often key contributors to the addict dying. So in the case of meth, even though the meth use might have been what landed the individual in treatment, court, or prison, other substances are usually involved in the total "constellation" of their substance abuse problem. On the next page, we discuss some of these "controls" and "governors" that might be involved.
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