It seems to me that people in recovery might get sick of reading self-help books. Sometimes, a memoir can be refreshing, especially for teens struggling with drinking issues. Koren Zailckas’ fantastic memoir, Smashed, comes to mind. Now award-winning Canadian young adult author, Susan Juby, has written Nice Recovery, about her years as a teenage alcoholic.

Juby, who is 41 and has been sober for more than 20 years, says, in an interview in the Vancouver Sun, that she wrote Nice Recovery to “honour where I came from…I didn’t get here by accident. I’m really lucky to be having a functional life. I thought maybe it would be instructive, or I would scare people straight through my extreme lameness.”

Juby doesn’t have children, but she does offer advice for parents on how to approach drug and alcohol abuse with their children: 1) Keep the lines of communication open; and 2) “Kids should have an awareness [of the difference] between social drinking and experimenting with drugs and what addiction looks like, because there’s a big difference. Most kids are going to experiment, but some of them are going to cross that line [into addiction], so it’s great if they can understand what that line looks like.”

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Photo Source

Australia has a drinking problem, reports an article in the The Sydney Morning Herald. And the Australian government is quite worried about alcohol consumption among its young people, and cites shocking statistics revealing that in an average week, four people under 25 die due to alcohol-related injuries.

In an effort to raise awareness and curb the drinking tide, a number of no-booze campaigns and fund-raisers–FebFast, Dry July and Ocsober–have surfaced in recent years.

Tomorrow begins the third annual FebFast, a charity challenge inviting participants to “give up the grog” for the next 28 days. Through their national education, awareness and fundraising campaign, FebFast organizers are aiming to lessen the impact of alcohol and drugs by inviting people to kick their drinking habit during February, simultaneously raising money to support youth alcohol and other drug services.

Over the last two years, FebFast has inspired more than 3,500 people to take up the month-long challenge. And collectively, they have raised more than $700,000 to support their cause.

 The money raised from the last two campaigns has been shared by 13 organizations around Australia. 

Proceeds from the 2010 registration and fundraising efforts will be shared amongst the Australian Drug Foundation (that operates nationally), YSAS (the Youth Substance Abuse Service) in Victoria, The Ted Noffs Foundation in NSW and the ACT, Mater Hospital’s Adolescent Drug and Alcohol Withdrawal Service in Queensland and FebFast’s grants program for smaller grass-roots organizations.

by Priscilla Warner

I suffered my first panic attack when I was a fifteen-year-old waitress at the Brown University cafeteria. As I stood behind a counter dishing out peas, I felt an electrical current tear through my body. My heart raced, skipped beats, and flopped around in my chest. My lungs tightened up so fast that I was breathless. Or so I thought.

I was actually breathing too quickly. I began to hyperventilate. My throat closed up, my body trembled, my arms grew rigid and my fingertips tingled. I thought I was dying.

But I managed to get home, curl up in my parents’ bed, and watched dazed as a family physician paid a house call, examined me and announced that I was “just a little bit nervous.”

Was I ever.

He wrote me a prescription for a tranquilizer, and I carried the pills with me everywhere, on high alert for the next attack. Now that I’d been prescribed a drug, my condition was official: I was a freak.

I knew that for sure.

None of my teenaged friends had a defective central nervous system that reared up and exploded, catching them completely off-guard, turning them into a quivering mess.

Back in 1968, no one ever used the term panic attack. Nobody was in rehab, or at least admitting it. A few kids were messed up enough to disappear, leaving town for places unknown. But I was normal enough to stick it out. Or try to, as I played the role of a mentally healthy adolescent.

I didn’t have panic attacks every day. And I didn’t take Valium all the time. I never talked to my family or any of my friends about the fact that I faced death on dozens of occasions when the all-too familiar symptoms of an attack – tightening lungs, a pounding heart – snuck up and clobbered me.

Sometimes the attacks were so powerful that the Valium didn’t work fast enough. Desperate to counteract the terrifying symptoms, I enlisted the help of a secret friend. I opened my parents’ liquor cabinet and vodka bottle. The fiery liquid was a faster fix.

I’d wince while it burned my throat. But soon my terrified lungs would be bathed in a warm glow, spreading down my arms to my shaky fingertips, soothing my whole body. And slaying the dragon, which I knew I could not do on my own.

As my hormones shifted through adolescence, and I went off to college, it was comforting to know that I had two weapons in my arsenal against anxiety – Valium and alcohol.

They were a lethal combination, and I knew that, thanks to the tragic tale of Karen Anne Quinlan, a 21-year-old girl in New Jersey, who had collapsed at a party after drinking alcohol and taking Valium. She lay in a coma for years, a constant reminder to me of the dangerous path I was on.  As a result of her cautionary tale, I never mixed alcohol and Valium. But I wanted them both with me at all times.

A bottle of Valium was easy to conceal in a pocketbook, but I couldn’t carry around a pint of vodka. Nowadays you can buy flasks in many shapes and sizes, made of all sorts of material, including sterling silver. But I bought my flask in 1968, and it wasn’t even really a flask. I think it was actually a hot water bottle. I found it at a drugstore. It was plastic, white and bulky and eventually it turned dingy, rusty and scratched.

It was way too big, but I made it work. The cheap vodka I poured into it made a sloshing sound as I lugged it around in my purse – glug, glug, glug. But I didn’t care how it sounded as long as nobody saw it was there.

I took my secret flask with me everywhere – walking around town, in cars, on planes, trains, automobiles and boats, on dates, to college classes, on job interviews and into ladies’ rooms. A swig here, a swig there – whenever I felt a panic attack coming on, I took a gulp of medicine. For years, the fiery liquid distracted me from what was raging in my central nervous system.

Until finally I burned out.

The alcohol began to betray me. My body rejected the medicine that had soothed me. I’d wake me up in the middle of the night with a start. I’d lie in my bed wide-eyed, shivering and shaking. The warm, mellow glow turned into jolts of all too powerful, unwanted electrical energy.

So I dropped my old friend. I stopped drinking altogether.  I took the advice of a good psychiatrist and began taking a tiny dose of Klonopin instead. It’s tasteless, legal, unexciting and clinical. But it works.

The bulky, plastic drugstore “flask” of my youth seems comically out of place in the emotionally healthy life I’ve managed to build for myself now. It’s a relic, like the electric-colored bell-bottom jeans I collected for years. But the bell-bottoms were a badge of honor, hanging from my slim hips with a sexy, nonchalant air. And the flask was a dirty little secret, a shameful crutch that no one in the world ever knew about.

Priscilla Warner co-authored The Faith Club and is currently writing a memoir about her journey from panic to peace. You can follow her progress at: priscillawarner.wordpress.com

Most of us can remember going to parties in high school. I didn’t drink then, but even I ended up at my fair share of parties, and believe me, drinking was happening, and it was in someone’s parents’ house. I never, ever saw the parents, so were they all away, a la Risky Business? Supposedly, things were more lax back in the 80s, when I was growing up. But is that really true? There were parties in people’s houses then, and there are parties now.

It’s a fairly commonly held belief among parents that if you let your teens drink in your house, you are keeping them safer by knowing where they are and what they’re doing. But what about this scenario:  This month, a doctor and his wife were charged with giving alcohol to minors and corruption of minors after a party at their house. The police officers who ended up at the house rounded up nine teenagers in the basement, where they found beer bottles and cans, a plastic beer bong, a “beer pong table,” and joints. The parents said they allowed their 17-year-old son to host parties at the house and emphasized that they did not let any of the underage drinkers drive home.

In an article in The Pittsburgh Tribune, Carnegie Mellon University police Chief Tom Ogden said this about parents: ”They say, ‘Oh, just drink in the basement, but it’s stupid, it’s irresponsible, and it’s criminal. It’s a problem with the attitudes of these parents. Rather than tell their kids no and hold them accountable for their actions, they try to be their cool friends.”

Another policeman, Officer McDonough said, “They think because the kids are drinking in the basement that everything is fine, but how are they going to keep track of all those kids? And if one leaves and gets into a DUI crash, now innocent lives are being affected.”

Whether you do or do not let them drink in your house, teens will gather, and alcohol might or might not be involved. What is your stance regarding your (or other people’s) underage teens? Would you let your teens drink with their friends in your house? Would you host a party and if you did, would you stand there, monitoring everyone? This is one of those hot-button, no-win topics, it would seem…What do you think?  (As a postscript, I wonder how this issue plays out–or doesn’t–in other countries. Think of France, where teens have been sipping wine since they were kids. Would their parents get arrested for underage drinking? It almost makes one wonder if the drinking age doesn’t create certain problems of forbidden fruit…)

by Marika Brussel

The room spun as if I were doing a million pirouettes. My fingers and lips were rubbery and only vaguely recognizable as my own. From the other room came echoes of voices, laughter, the skunky aroma of pot. The floor was cold and dirty. I closed my eyes again to feel the spin.

I started dancing when I was three, and by the time I was thirteen I was dancing at least five hours a day, six days a week. I loved it. I loved the sweat and the blisters and the discipline. I loved the mirror and starvation. What I didn’t love was that the competition made it hard to have real friends. I liked the older kids, the 20-year-olds. They had it all together, I thought. They lived on their own and didn’t have homework. They seemed to be able to be friendly with each other. With me, they acted like I belonged.

In the ballet world, you’re judged on how good you are, not on how pretty or how smart; it’s all about talent and your potential for a successful career. I was good. And because of that, I could be included. I see that now with my own students. If a kid is talented, the older people hang out with her, talk with her, treat her as an equal. The lesser-skilled kids have to hang out with their own. It is a hierarchy based largely on ego.

It was autumn, and the new schedule had just been posted. I was in Advanced, with the older kids, including Frankie, who was about 19 and whose sweat smelled like sandalwood. ”Josh is having a party,” he told me after class, as I uncapped my Diet Pepsi and gulped. “You should come.”

Soda spilled down my chin, leaving sticky tracks on my neck. He wiped it off with one finger. It confused me.

“Okay,” I said, as if it didn’t matter at all, as if I always went to adult parties by myself.

“See you there,” he said, licking his finger and smiling.

Josh lived in the Bronx, a borough of the city I had never been to. I took the subway, creaky and hot, up past Yankee Stadium, a ride that seemed to take forever. I dressed in tight Jordache jeans, and a shirt that reminded me of sugar. The streets in the Bronx were long, wide and empty.

You may be wondering about my parents. Me too. They were pretty hands off.

The apartment was easy to find. Dancers leaned against the railing of the fire escape, smoking cigarettes and drinking from plastic cups. A few people nodded to me as I walked down the hallway looking for Frankie. He wasn’t there, but a tall boy I knew from class put a plastic cup in my hand and smiled.

I sniffed the drink. It smelled kind of like Passover wine, but stronger, less fruity. I dipped my tongue in. Wow! It was just like Manischevitz, but with a kick. Later, I learned that it was Sloe gin, but at the time it was liquid confidence.

With each sip I become enboldened. ”Where’s Frankie?” I asked a girl in the Company.

She laughed. “He and Bethie went into the bathroom about an hour ago.”

I took another sip. And another. And pretty soon it didn’t matter where Frankie was. The room took on a calm echo, and I felt fine, just fine.

“Hey,” the tall boy said. “You okay?”

“Great.” I steadied myself on his arm. Boy, he was tall.

“Wanna go look around?”

Before I knew it we were kissing, hard and deep, in the other room. I didn’t feel anything other than his tongue winding itself around mine. It wasn’t bad. It was fine. Everything was fine. My body felt nothing. Alcohol had made me numb in every way. I kept touching the waist of my jeans to make sure they were still on.

After about a hundred years we pulled away from each other. I squinted. He was older than I thought, maybe 25. I was 13, and my body looked younger.

“Want more?” he asked.

I stared.

He held up a cup.

“Sure,” I said, lowering myself to the floor. The room spun when I closed my eyes, but I was so tired. The tall guy didn’t come back.  The next day I found out that he’d passed out in the living room. I also found out he was gay, but that’s another story. And not mine.

Eventually someone put me in a cab. I remember sitting in the back seat as the city whirled by me. I didn’t want to think about anything. I just wished I could stay in the taxi forever, as the city passed me by in a tornado of color and sound, and I was safe, enclosed, and  all alone.

Marika Brussel is a dancer who trained at the Joffrey Ballet School. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and currently dances with Napales Ballet Theater in San Francisco.