today on larry king now thinking alcoholism marital bachelor claudia christian dr jeffrey and dr sophy help us live the veil on one of the greatest killers in america it's one thing to deal with the symptoms of the disease which is the drinking there's another thing to deal with the underlying causes the end yet in a medical school how many kids are taught about addiction and furthermore look at there's twenty thousand things for cigarette smoking with the two for alcohol we're doing something wrong if only one tenth of the people with a problem even looking for the treatment plus nothing is going to work until somebody is ready so you give them the menu and fast the one they picked that means they're open to it already it's all next on larry king now.

welcome to larry king now a very important show they nearly eighteen million americans struggle with alcohol abuse so dependency every day but. is there a cure for this addiction and that's what we're here to discuss with with us airways claudia christian star of the side by had babylon five clearly it succumbed to alcoholism and after various forms of treatment she found one that saved her it's called the sinclair method she recounts that story in her new memoir babylon confidential we'll talk about this treatment along with others during this next half hour drive to addie jaffe is addiction diction expert and former drug addict he's director of research at alternative a program offering alternative approaches to helping patients reduce their drinking marriage of baxter's the well known emmy nominee actor's actor was you know as the keaton family matriarch from the hit series rabbit from his series family ties

talking so much we're out of time mary of the battle of alcoholism before reclaiming her life with the help of the twelve step program and old friend dr charles sophy medical director for the l.a. county department of children and family services the nation's largest child welfare system i've done many programs over fifty four years fifty six years in brook kissing and never heard of the sinclair method what is that the sinclair method has a seventy eight to eighty percent long term success rate it involves taking an opiate blocker an hour before you drink alcohol so it's mostly for people they call it coping with alcohol in other words binge drinkers heavy drinkers that want to reduce but forty to forty five percent of people actually go one hundred percent sober on the sinclair method it's dead easy and it's counter intuitive is all going to the pill is now tricks on our now machine now tracks on is the one that you get the united states now machine is available on the e.u. approved now machine with drinking and recently scotland put it on the n.h.s.

the people who can get it in it's a prescription drug you can buy it online a lot of people are reduced to doing that because doctors simply don't know about it very often visit wean you off or once you take it you don't drink. it causes what's called pharmacological extinction in the brain so you take it and over a course of three to six months you end up not craving not desiring not wanting to be the last man standing some people drink normal levels after taking it for a number of months other people go sober like i said it basically stops the compulsive thinking about alcohol and it also just keeps you from wanting to drink juice completely i drink a couple times a year but not much at all and i don't have the desire to who is singler dr david sinclair is an american scientist who moved to finland back in the one nine hundred eighty s. to study their strains of alcoholic rats and he stayed for forty years he's devoted his life to discovering extinction and using the basis based on the side effects the side effects that i've heard of our knowledge of sleeplessness and sleepiness in very few people to do or no i didn't really the only the first few times i took

it i felt a little blurry around the edges that was four years ago that goes away because my system was so clean i was sober for quite some time and also i have i don't take drugs or anything going to do so reserved a human once well you can take it as you're drinking actually you can detox on it so you don't have to go to a medical detox a lot of people are doing that now because you can do it at home you take the opiate blocker an hour before you have your first drink of the day and eventually just drink less and less and less and less and less or is why pharma companies don't really want to support this because the more you take the drug less you need the drug so you can't make money off when you make in the jeffe well you know i think the idea of extinction is a great one and it's one that's been studied and taught a lot around drug addiction with the idea that once a drug stops being rewarding you'll stop taking it because we know that source rule reward mechanisms that actually drive addiction and yes we do know that when you block opiates specially the mule beatrice up to which is what naltrexone blocks we get reduced reward for almost anything which is by the way one of the side effects

of people who are four sometimes about ten to fifteen percent of people who take no trucks on or what's not part of the climbers a bit of a troll which is long extended release no trucks on do or poor kind of feelings of the. pression and don't you know what you'd expect when you block your pleasure nervous up there in the brain i think i'm a big fan of any method that helps some people even recover from addiction right if yoga and exercise helps some people and i recommend in our treatment center we recommend that they engage those activities because you never know what might work why isn't this widely known why is and did discuss their borders because the level examine the statistics of seventy eight to seventy eighty percent in in every clinical trial and for the people that i've actually experienced it's been it's been higher than not but so those stats are for people who adhere very very strictly to their regimen which is means that they drink only an hour or more after they take the pill noncompliant noncompliant which you have to account for this the rates drop significantly because one of the problems we deal with up ensues disorders is people are non-compliant and so once you come for that the race become

a lot lower and the other pieces you know nell taxon been around since the mid seventy's we've known that it can help with a sort of thing for a while the problem is people don't end up taking the pill every time there's loads they they do this out of this twenty two percent of small popular part of the population actually is genetically. they are not they don't react well to to naltrexone it doesn't affect them but the noncompliance was a huge part of that twenty two percent that didn't you know before we find out more of the story what is your reaction to this oh it's interesting i'm not unlike idiot dr jeff. you know i'm for anything that's going to move someone towards that we are in a i yes i mental step program there's no i was anonymous but once you go public that i thought to be a nothingness when you know i am a sober person that is true and i you know for a visit whatever helps helps i think whatever helps helps i have a special place in my heart for the twelve step program because it's one thing to

deal with the symptom of the disease which is the drinking there's another thing to deal with the underlying causes and that's what i support through the twelve step program dr sophy where you. i think it was unclear i think it's an ok approach i think it's a behavioral approach where we're treating somebody and taking a behavior and we're just incentivizing them so we're making it not interesting but at the end of the day underneath in a lot of people there are some driving factors mental health problems other problems that may be ignored just because they stopped drinking those people should definitely have dual treatments and a lot of the people that i deal with and that are on the sinclair method they say to me i didn't have a bad childhood i don't have those i'm not going through a divorce i'm drinking because i'm physically dependent on alcohol and i need to stop any you know drugs are having i drink socially in my twenty's and thirty's and then the idea of alcoholism in my family and it sort of crept into my late thirty's and i realized i had a problem in my late thirty's and then i just kept going into trying every single treatment everything from psychotherapy to

a to hypnotherapy to diet therapy vitamin therapy i tried everything and i would be nine months sober fall off the wagon ten months sober fall off the wagon six months off the wagon meritless to a little of your story when did you start drinking john i don't remember exactly i had a few drinking in blackout deals when i was in my late teens but i didn't really pursue act out alcohol actively as oh if i drink this eventually it will do something for me in the early seventy's i think. when did you know you had a problem oh well after i was sober. i don't think i had a problem even though i was drinking openly finally on the sets of films i was doing really was cool. it was an echo of where you really i thought i was cool mccollum i know it wasn't until afterwards that one of the producers who had been a good friend of mine for many years took me out to lunch and she said you know we're trying to cut this movie together and your eyes aren't focused and we can

understand you. i was devastated because i thought all i had my life was in shambles i was going through divorce and child custody stuff it was just wrenching and horrible and emotional and i thought the only thing i had left was my work so the fact that they were talking about me and having issues with me i thought i was in trouble so when she said we i really think you should call someone in a twelve step program and she gave me the names of people that i actually knew stunned that they were sober you see is the twelve step program a let me different is it is a yes it is i'd i'll tell you i do not like to say i am a member of alcoholics anonymous put that out there as a public deal because if for some reason even though i've been sober fairmount time if i take a drink and someone sees me out they're drunk they're going to program alcoholics anonymous doesn't work i think i think there's an or there's an element to what where this is talking about that i think is an important piece to talk about it not everybody has a problem has the wherewithal the motivation the the drive the awareness to kind of

go hey i need to go to a physician and get this pill and then i own it and looks up and i mean it can be even i could be just lack of awareness whether you're actively denying something we just don't know right you don't actually know but i think the reason is that it's important talk about these whether it's a technique is supposed to reduce your drinking or like we offer all control drinking sort of programs that help people either abstain or learn how to drink in a controlled fashion or to just out of stain for life whatever it is i think what we need to do is start expanding the menu in the new general thinking is that abstention is the only cure there's only been two drugs since the one nine hundred forty s. there's one one and to be used in fifty years later now trucks on i mean it's ridiculous we're really and yet in medical school how many kids are taught about addiction and furthermore look at there's twenty three. wasn't things for cigarette smoking too for alchemy the dr sophy an alcoholic can never drink they should never drink because of the effects it has on their brain but if they behaviorally can control it great for them but i haven't really seen a whole lot of that but here's the problem and the way i see it so the question you

asked was an alcoholic should never drinking and right. yeah but we pretend like we have some hardcore benefits of or ways to define what is specifically an alcoholic and we don't what we know is people experience alcohol based problems of subset of those have low grade problems and some of them have moderate palms of the others have severe and actually if you look at the s. and five now we moved away from the idea of you have an alcohol abuse problem and you're an addict or you're not calling all this sort of stuff it's it moves along the scale there's a continuum how do you define it well i define it as it's a substance that you put in your body changes your brain the way that you interact and it derails your life so depending on how much of your life then you get that level so if it doesn't derive your life's well you have a drug to drink every day and no effect well then that's the difference between use and abuse independence and if you look at all of that stuff across the so there are some people who could have three drinks a day and be fine and some people have one and they're beautiful and some of the genetics make that allowed these sort of you can't really define it it's hard to do

that it's an individual thing which is why you need not million prachi is why you need lots of different up we are his for a lot of the families because even those alcoholics who should never drink again their life the bottom line is out of the fourteen to fifteen million americans who have alcohol use disorder problems one tenth actually even seek treatment every year right so all we need to do is that's not their fault that's our fault we're doing something wrong if only one tenth of the people with a problem even looking for the treatment we need to expand the menu because even if what happens is people taking all tracks on try the sinclair method it doesn't work and then they go this didn't work for me i mean i need something stronger maybe they try a maybe try another method but we need to get in the door and introduce we have to get them in the door somehow a lot of people use it in conjunction they they they become sober using pharmacological extinction. and then they go to meetings to support themselves or men with some robbery or what exactly so you can actually combining streetman which is wonderful i've heard the individual though lots of i know a lot of rehabs do recovery houses do that yeah yeah get you or get rid of the

cravings and then put them in i was a meth addict so i'll call was an issue for me in high school and early college where there's an issue for everybody i mean i respect alcoholics anonymous for the anonymity because when they started you couldn't tell people that there were fifteen alcoholics in the room there would be mutiny around why we letting these alcoholics gather right because there was sort of seems to dredge as a society we need to move away in my opinion from this place where it's a shameful thing if you have these issues these are health conditions and if we can address them as health conditions when you have a health condition if you have a heart attack you don't go i don't want to tell anybody including my physicians when we do that are you want to get it taken care of you want to make sure it doesn't happen again you didn't know you were an abuser you know to be told i look i thought i was taking care of business. you know work for me i didn't like the way i felt so i drank and i seem to feel a little bit better about stuff and even if i didn't feel better i acted like idea . was that the movie incident that that was it that was when they got my attention and i was thinking about this today because i did make some calls and start going

to meetings but if someone had said take a pill go ya ha take a pill that was easy i knew that but it would not have i would not have gotten just from what i and the little i understand about the sinclair method i wouldn't have gotten what i've gotten out of them to get a broke my you know the nearly eighteen million americans struggling with alcohol today as many as half of them will slip and relapse which treatment is right for you that's next don't go away. well. it's technology innovation all the developments around russia we've got this huge you're covered. it was a very very hard to take. on. that that would hurt me here.

the people. welcome back alcohol is the most commonly used addictive substance in this country one in twelve adults suffers from alcohol abuse or dependence more than half of all adults have a family history of alcoholism or problem drinking over seven million children live

in a household where alcohol abuse or dependence is prevalent sources of the national council on alcoholism and drug dependence more than half of adults have a family history seven million children live in the household. so there are around it absolutely a third to almost a half of the calls that we get in the child abuse hotline are because of alcohol substance abuse related issues within the home i teach that i teach a class kelsey longreach and it's the psychology of addiction and i ask all my students to be in it how many people either have dealt with soaps use yourself or have a family member and every single one of them raise their hands not my parents no not my not in my immediate right or did you not my parents know i grandfather one would think give children are in the home of an alcoholic who can be abusive or you see someone really drunk you do not want to turn to it you would think that and sometimes that happens but on the other side they're also learning how to cope and that's their role model yeah i mean that's children learn the behavior from people around them and right parents are the best teachers especially early on if you see

that when a father has a hard time dealing with life they drink themselves so that they don't have to think about it that's what you learn to do even if you don't like it you know of any treatment is more effective than another or depends on what works for you i think that it is a menu and it's what works for you but i think the bottom line is the more severe it is in the longer and prevalent in the longer they've been doing it the more intense the treatment needs to be with a lot of support around this is not an easy disease it's not an easy issue to deal with and you need a support system and some people really need that twelve step a family of support around the a lot of people are lucky enough to have it in within their family unit which is wonderful i've run across a lot of people who have tried everything and then go on the sinclair method and they have a fiance or husband or wife or even children who say i want my mom back i will support you in doing this even if it means watching them do the one thing they hate watching him do which is brant is amazing i think larry has a really really great your question about other treatments that are better than others right i mean there's been a bunch of studies asking that and the mass study obviously is one of the biggest

ones that compared twelve step groups of c.v.t. to motivation has been therapy which were the big three at the time in the eighty's the answer is no they're all about equally effective but what we do know from research is that if you asked somebody here's a menu of options which one would you like to. you when they pick that one they are more likely to stick to it and the more likely to do better with it so even meredith when you were talking about if this was available the bottom line is we don't know what would happen if it was available and who knows what we universe right to you so you're here and you've got a lot of great stuff out of the tough stuff which is great but we don't know what would happen if another member was a villain so i read i do know they're ready to ready but even back then they were experimenting bill w. like vitamin three niacin therapy and drug therapy and was always scientifically hearing of yeah he was very scientifically interested in lots of things so who knows what would have happened we didn't already know you were describing that this was that the sinclair method worked very well for a certain type of people and i was thinking that because i was someone who drank not to be a social drinker i mean that was nice if other people were now maybe you know but i

drink a lot on me so i was going for the buzz and if if i didn't you know if i took the pill and that didn't you know and i drank and i didn't get the buzz i would have to go somewhere the you or me yeah right you miss drinking i can drink if i want to drink but i don't want to drink so a couple times a year is maybe in maybe i'll have a glass of wine but an honestly it's doesn't when you heard think the one day you feel you're going to go back to no god no in fact you usually can't even finish the glass of wine you miss it no no. you know what about when you're out a group and they're all drinking doesn't get it you know it bothers me if i'm sitting next to someone on a plane and they have red wine or hard alcohol you know when i said no no no i scan stand the smell of my you know what i have i have not longed for it at all. this is surprisingly now and i smell cigarettes when i stand next to the person going to stand it you know i can't stand it but i think that's we find that a lot of the people for whom treatment actually works right the idea is not to what

we call people on a will call this you know white knuckling it or something the idea is not to end up with a life where you hate it every single day and you just holding on to the table yeah wishing not to go get a drink the idea is that she get a life that you really like half of our clients learn how to drink moderately the point is not about the alcohol or drugs the point is do they like their life to do like the way they feel when they're not on alcohol because if they don't we've got an issue that's you know health is absolute and only getting rid of the thought of alcohol is so important so you guys think the celebrity rehab centers where we hear about a boreas ninety thousand dollars a month and stuff like that where they work if you're going to pay them i mean i personally wasted thirty grand on one and i was. getting you know nothing is going to work until somebody is ready so you give them and then you and that's the one they pick that means they're open to it and ready. and had it been around i probably would have i don't list dollars in my life i don't think massaging beautiful views help no addiction treatment pacifically but some people are used to

a specific kind of lifestyle and they're not going to go to the centers that are you know in hospitals or hardcore place there's not going to go there so if that's how we get people and that's great i don't think there's anything to the there's no services in the offering you better get it right i think that's the pits sometimes where you hear they have cured alcohol right they've cured addiction of somebody that that's crap i guess is the most affordable and turning up there you see here they are free of us and they're all over well they buy the land i think you can cure yourself so to speak for a couple hundred bucks so and by the way to just just we say this because there are absent is based non twelve step programs the smart recovery is an absent is based non twelve step arm's free self self-help group so that exists moderation management is a self-help free group of people trying to control their drinking there's women for sobriety there's s.o.'s which is secular organization for sobriety there are a lot of self-help groups to help you if you want for free help people are poured in questions for all of you let's get to as many as we can. kill love on instagram

is there are a number of relapses that are expected for someone starting recovery. i don't know of many relapses with the sinclair method there's no i mean it's hard to have a relapse when you're allowed to drink right now but i don't think there's a magic number relapse young go into a binge because that way seldom all on facebook wants to know what are some of the common factors that contribute to dependency mental health problems things they in your life that you have not worked out genetics those kinds of things really drive it and keep it going again j.-m. ten sixteen on twitter one of the biggest challenges alcoholics face when and during a. i say being willing to be honest and honest is a big one. that you have to stand up at every meeting and talk at no no you downed that honesty is not to other people is to yourself to stop to stop lying to yourself about why you're doing things about what's happened to you what your life is fan and the story you've told her said

a friend i work with who was an a and he when he would travel he would have to go to a meeting every day i mean he would go in the morning six o'clock every morning go ten o'clock at night all hop on one of those what anthony hopkins still goes on what do you have to go review every day i go six days a week and i don't have to why do you go if you i'm not your family after my you get i mean it's not it's not the goal isn't the goal define the kind of treatment the us she like it hearing to so that we don't end up with a life that you don't enjoy i mean it's not that's not a bad thing i go to the gym as much as often as i can during the week not because i have to because i like doing i'd be affected it gives me my life seven to steve on twitter wants to know would love to know what natural not prescription rebel these are out there for withdrawal effects withdrawal effects tapering a body being on the air so i don't have i don't have a lot of my sleep acupuncture works great you know i get longer acupuncture works really really well specially for opiate withdrawal mean it's it's amazing for opiate withdrawal for alcohol it's it has some effectiveness but it's not as most

of you have made it on instagram how does the panel feel about the use of so box own for opiate addiction you know all today that i'll say i feel the same way about as i feel whatever the treatment that i've met people who have been homeless heroin addicts and they get on suboxone in their life gets better and then the same edition of suboxone is an opiate agonist so deactivates opioid receptors suboxone activates and not as much as heroin or morphine but to enough of even the extent where people don't crave that opiates and for the same reason why people who are in a go to meetings for the rest of their lives some people end up on suboxone for years and use these people don't like that but to me if you were homeless as a heroin addict injecting on the street and now you have a job in a family and you just taken to a strip better it's your father your down up supply. think that's a success as it is used to get it's just fifty goes on you're young take this pill is to shoot heroin you get almost as you have a lot of children of college as i do we have a lot of kids that are using substances at what age twelve eight they have kids in

the u.k. being hospitalized five of them from alcohol poisoning the amount of drug dealers on school you know campuses brad think on twitter wants to know how many of addicts use alcohol for their pain issues because their doctors won't help them manage their pain that's really good question you know i don't alcohol is not the best paid really run the face of the earth so there are other i mean marijuana i know is used for pain pretty regularly and there are longer should be legal shouldn't we already had we already had that discussion i said you have it exactly because i think it should definitely be criminalized for sure it should not be a schedule one of people should never go to jail for smoking weed it just it doesn't really make sense as for police chiefs once in a convention in miami beach given the choice you could legalize one of the of no one or alcohol all observe it legalize marijuana they would make us dialogue all illegal and they say they never saw a murder committed with someone. make romano on facebook is it possible disagree

question is it possible to be cured from addiction i think this gets us back to the question of how you find addiction i think we start defining addiction way too broadly and then it looks like people get cured from the classic sort of alcoholic state right they want to really lifetime alcoholics i think if we get to those really really hard core people to chronic lifelong drinkers. it's an uphill battle i think it's also the semantics of saying it i always say to people on the sinclair method you're in remission as long as you comply using the word cure scares a lot of people because they say it's too cold it's not if you yeah it's a control just like a diabetic takes their insulin you take you're not tracks on the floor you drink every drug for example hope you will have problems like this thank you i thank you and thank you for a big thanks to our guest claudia christian dr jaffe meredith baxter and dr charles sophy remember you can find me on twitter at king's things see it next on.

big bucks but. we're going to do the job did you know the price is the only industry specifically mentioned in the constitution and the concept that's because a free and open press is critical to our democracy shred albus. rule. in fact the single biggest threat facing our nation today is the corporate takeover of

our government and across a seven year old we've been hijacked why a handful of powerful transnational corporations will profit by destroying what our founding fathers once built just by job market and on this show we reveal the big picture of what's actually going on in the world if we go beyond identifying the problem trucks and rational debate in a real discussion of critical issues facing america for ready to join the movement then walk a little bit but. i would bet that. a society that i'm big corporation kind of can. do i'm the banker i think it's all been all about money and i'm a vastly fit for a politician write the laws and regulations that. are coming up.

there is just too much pressure at today's society. that. the. what's up y'all i'm abby martin and this is breaking the set so in case you weren't aware one of the torture mechanisms used on prisoners at gitmo was having ear piercing music playing ourselves continuously the melodies chosen for these weapons of war ranged from heavy metal songs to sesame street songs that would play for hours or even days on and now when this came out the pentagon downplayed the news by saying that the music was not torture despite a.p. report detailing how the music drove prisoners literally mad and even suicidal the bands in question kindly asked the administration to stop weaponized in their art but one canadian band is taking it one step further industrial music group skinny puppy just found out that their music has been in use on at least four occasions

and the thought of the u.s. government using the band's dark melodies to inflict mental and physical anguish was deeply troubling to the group the lead singer seven keys said quote we never supported those types of scenarios because we make unsettling music we can see it being used in a weird way but it doesn't sit right with us so what are the band do all they dedicated and presented their new album as an inner voice for the u.s. government it's called weapons and the album itself is a literal bill for using the band's service as torture methods so crude owes to an awesome ban for using its platform to call attention to the human rights abuses that are still going on today now let's break this up. it's a. very hard to take a. look i never had sex with rick perry.