Lately, Lance and i have found ourselves hooked on, of all things, Intervention.
If you haven’t seen it, it’s a show that is shot documentary-style as a glance into the life of an addict. The addictions range from drugs, gambling and shopping to food-related disorders. The person being focused on doesn’t know that their family has contacted the show with the purpose of doing an intervention; the person just think they’re helping with a documentary. You follow the person through a few days of their life, talk with the family members, and at the end there is an intervention. The person can say yes or no. So far everyone has said yes.
I first heard of this show about 2 years ago through my book club. I tried watching it on regular TV, but didn’t really get into it. I think now that it was because i tried watching it live and there were too many commercials to be able to get “into” it. Now, we are streaming it from Netflix, and there are NO commercials. It’s great, no suspense.
It’s a little bit fascinating and a little bit scary. If i ever thought i had problems? Nope, my life is easy. I can’t imagine being a family member of someone who was addicted to heroin – the families go through so much pain.
One thing about the drug addicts – if the show says they are addicted to “heroin”, inevitably they are actually using everything else too, including meth and crack. There are a lot of meth addicts shown. I suppose there is a hierarchy of hard drugs, and the show advertises the worst one being used, but it seems that if you are addicted to meth you probably also do crack and pills.
A couple of things i have learned (i mean, i never had a reason to know any of this before).
- One time doing heroin is enough to get you addicted. That’s so scary.
- There are lots of ways to ingest the same drug.
- People who have bulimia are often extremely good at hiding it.
I’m always very proud of the families for coming together to support the person. And i’m always happy for the person when they complete their treatment and continue to do well. Only 44% of people who went to rehab in 2005 actually completed treatment. Certainly some number of those relapse, which makes the success rate seem small, but some lives saved must be better than no lives saved.
Something happening around the house: We installed a sprinkler system in the back yard to water the new grass that Derrick seeded for us. I use “sprinkler system” liberally here – what i mean is i bought one of those back-and-forth sprinklers that kids like to run through in the summertime.
