Prayer as an Intervention in Drug Abuse

The Social Problem of Drug Abuse
Introduction
Drug abuse started in my family with my brother Camilo. As a poor, migrant family, we had to move around a lot as my father was constantly looking for work. Eventually he obtained a steady job and our family settled in the suburbs. Camilo found it difficult to adjust to all the changes that the family endured, however; making new friends only to have to pick up and move and start all over again took a toll on him. In order to find something stable in his own life he started hanging around a local gang, and then is when he took up his drug habit. The drugs really consumed him and he became totally dependent on them. They changed his character: he began lying and skipping school; before long he dropped out altogether—and then he even started stealing from our parents. It was as though he had been replaced by one of those alien body snatchers from the movies. On the outside he was the same, but inside there was some different character looking out from behind the eyes. All the same, my family has never condemned Camilo or ostracized him. He is still my brother and my parents still view him as their son. In fact, we all still get along great, like family. The only pain we experience is that we have to see him suffer: to this day, he is still a drug addict and still resorts to theft to pay for his supply. He has tried so many times to quit but never has been achieved his goal. He has been in an out of local and state prisons, and in and out of rehab programs. He is open about wanting to quit but also about how his chemical dependency is so strong now. What’s worse is that this problem is not confined to my own family but rather is a huge social problem—an epidemic, in fact, as DuPont (2018) has pointed out.
The Epidemic of Drug Abuse in Society
More than 25 million Americans struggled with drug addiction according to a 2014 survey by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (2015). The National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence (2015) has found that the causes of drug addiction can range from genetics to environmental factors. In my brother’s case, it was a combination of family issues and environmental factors; in the cases of millions of others, the story is the same.
However, the drug epidemic is really supported by the opioid crisis—the over-prescribing of drugs to people and the sale of those drugs into the black market (Murthy, 2016). With the streets being hit with so many pills, designed to have maximum effect on patients by the pharmaceutical industry, which also bears a great deal of responsibility in the rise of this epidemic, it is not surprising that millions of people are impacted by this social problem every year in the U.S.
The Need to Escape or Fit In
For my brother Camilo, he suffered both from a need to escape the constant instability in my own family as a result of us being uprooted constantly growing up and from a need to fit in somewhere and establish roots quickly. That is why he finally fell in with the local gang. They represented for him something that he felt he was missing in his home life—and they also represented for him a way out of the instability and problems that our family faced during our times of incessant moving about. However, he soon found a whole new world of problems as a result of using drugs, which were introduced to him by his friends in the local gang.
Camilo’s drug addiction caused our family a lot of pain. No one likes to see a family member suffer. It’s especially hard when you feel like there’s nothing you can do to help them. I know my family has often felt powerless to help Camilo because of the way the drugs take hold. One gives up one’s use of free will. It is like one becomes a slave of this thing, this chemical urge; we all knew that Camilo was still there among us, but it was like seeing him chained up and imprisoned by this addiction at the same time, this addiction that caused him to do such stupid and terrible things sometimes. None of us ever renounced Camilo—it was just hard to see him fall again and again. We all kept in contact with Camilo. He started abusing drugs when he was a teenager at aged 14. He is now 39 years old and it is still an ongoing problem. So for a quarter of a century he has been a drug addict. That is a long time—and in a way you get to used to it, used to the suffering, the sadness, the hopelessness. In another way, you never get used to it; you never really give up hope either, because then there would be no love and no compassion. That is one thing we have never lost as a family, though we sometimes feel like we have lost Camilo. We are always supportive and he is always grateful for our support, and even when he hurts as by falling again, we are never angry with him. It is just really an indescribably sadness that affects us most, seeing him like this even as he enters into middle age.
What We Can Do to Solve This Problem
In all honesty, if we knew how to solve this problem that Camilo and so many millions of others face, we would have done it by now. But in doing some research on the matter some unique ideas appear that some may not have considered before. One possible solution is offered by Gilbert (2014) who conducted a study on the use of prayer as an intervention for people suffering from sexual addiction. Gilbert (2014) showed that several cases in Mexico showed that when addicts prayed the Novena to St. Boniface of Tarsus as part of a pastoral program in the local diocese, they were able to overcome their addiction. Though Camilo’s addiction is to drugs, the implication is that prayer and spirituality may be an effective intervention, which is something that indeed other researchers have noted too with regard to helping drug addicts overcome their dependencies (Al-Omari, Hamed & Tariah, 2015; Ghahremani, 2017).
Another solution would be for society to really begin to focus on building social networks so that we can exercise a strong social influence on those we care about and help to keep them either out of drugs in the first place or help them to refrain from relapsing. As Best et al. (2016) show, “socially mediated processes of social learning and social control” can facilitate identity change which ultimately leads to greater self-determination on the part of the user (p. 111). In other words, if we as a society could just find ways to work together and really focus on being there for people—especially for those who suffer from drug abuse—we might be able to help them overcome their dependency.
A third possible solution is suggested by Hohmann et al. (2018): if more professional care providers and professionals in other fields get together to collaborate on ways that they can work together to give support, guidance, and helping hands to drug addicts, a nurturing environment might be cultivated that can better enable individuals suffering from addiction to stay sober and keep clean. This solution is similar to the previous one, except that instead of society at large—i.e., friends, family and community leaders working together, this solution focuses on professionals guiding the way.
Conclusion
In conclusion, drug addiction is a major social problem that has impacted millions of people all over the country, just like it has impacted my brother Camilo. My family has endured 25 years of his addiction—but we are still committed to being there for Camilo. While clear solutions to this problem are not readily forthcoming, there are a few ideas that might be tried. Prayer and spirituality is one option. Developing a stronger social network to give support is another. Interprofessional collaboration is a third. Short of stopping the drugs from hitting the streets at all, these solutions may offer the best hope.

References
Al-Omari, H., Hamed, R., & Tariah, H. A. (2015). The role of religion in the recovery
from alcohol and substance abuse among Jordanian adults. Journal of Religion and Health, 54(4), 1268-1277.
Best, D., Beckwith, M., Haslam, C., Alexander Haslam, S., Jetten, J., Mawson, E., &
Lubman, D. I. (2016). Overcoming alcohol and other drug addiction as a process of social identity transition: the social identity model of recovery (SIMOR). Addiction Research & Theory, 24(2), 111-123.
DuPont, R. L. (2018). The opioid epidemic is an historic opportunity to improve both
prevention and treatment. Brain Research Bulletin, 138, 112-114.
Ghahremani, D. G. (2017). Craving, prayer, and the brain. The American Journal of Drug
and Alcohol Abuse, 43(1), 1-3.
Gilbert, D. (2014). The Novena to St. Boniface of Tarsus: A Pastoral Program for
Addressing Sexual Addiction in Colonial Mexico. Catholic Social Science Review, 19, 87-109.
Hohmann, L. A., Fox, B. I., Phillippe, H. M., Marlowe, K. F., Hill, S., & Fowler, A.
(2018). A Community-Wide Education Program on Drug Addiction: Stakeholder Knowledge, Beliefs, and Opportunities for Interprofessional Collaboration. Value in Health, 21, S189-S190.
Murthy, V. H. (2016). Ending the opioid epidemic—a call to action. New England
Journal of Medicine, 375(25), 2413-2415.
The National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence. (2015). Family history and
genetics. Retrieved from https://www.ncadd.org/about-addiction/family-history-and-genetics
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (2015). Behavioral Health
Trends in the United States: Results from the 2014 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Retrieved from https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/NSDUH-FRR1-2014/NSDUH-FRR1-2014.pdf