Substance Abuse Information & Resources
Substance Abuse Prevention Speakers Forum – 2014
If you feel you may have a problem with alcohol or drugs and would like confidential information and referral to a local agency, please contact:
Donavan Kirby, MA, LCMHC
Career Counselor
Western Piedmont Community College
828.448.3565
dkirby@wpcc.edu
Warning Signs
Any of the trouble listed below indicates serious involvement with alcohol and other drugs. If you identify with any of the behaviors listed, seek help right away.
- Preoccupation: Occasionally being preoccupied with thoughts about the next time you can use. Getting excited over a future event where you can use. Planning the weekend all week. Talking about getting high/being high with your friends. Currently having mostly friends who use like you.
- Protecting the Supply: Feeling more secure if you have some extra alcohol or other drug squirreled away for your own use. Keeping extra beer in the car “just in case they run out at the party.”
- Increasing Tolerance: Needing more of the substance to get the desired effect. Ability to consume considerably more than a special drinker, and, though impaired, still appear to be oky both mentally and physically.
- “Power Hitting”: Drinking or drugging in such a manner that the drug will act more quickly or powerfully. Includes gulping drinks, shotgunning, funneling, etc.
- Using alone: Includes using in a group of people where no one else is using
- Using alcohol or other drugs as medicine: Drinking or drugging to avoid life’s unpleasantness. Drinking or drugging to “medicate” feelings. Drinking or drugging to medicate problems that should receive medical attention (i.e. toothache.)
- Using when you hadn’t planned to: Drinking or drugging more than you had planned to or when you hadn’t planned to at all.
- Blackouts: Inability to remember parts of what happened during a drinking or drugging episode. This is a very serious symptoms of addiction.