JUST SAY NO TO ED HUGHES

Model of Brain Circuity

The Leedoms, Austin and Wally,  have been doing their usual eagle-eye detective work and have come up with some incriminating evidence about  local businessman Ed Hughes, whom many people in Portsmouth have never heard of, even though he has been in business for some thirty years.  Hughes’ business is treating drug addicts in a counseling centers that he operates in Portsmouth.  It has become a multi-million dollar business.  The funding for  these operations comes  from the state and federal governments, that is from taxpayers. On Tuesday, August 20, 2013, Austin posted an update on this developing story, which you can access by clicking http://portsmouthohio.tv/  

To know more about Ed Hughes, I recently watched a DVD at the  Shawnee State library (Baffled by Addiction: A Seven Part Series for Loved Ones), and I have read a Portsmouth Public Library book that Hughes and Ronald Turner, M.D., published in 2009: Baffled by Addiction?: Strategies to Help Your Addicted Loved Ones. Hughes calls those he lectures to Loved One Groups. Coming from a large alcoholic family myself, I am all too familiar with that particular addiction, which led me to become interested in addictions in general. The strategies Hughes offers in Baffled by Addiction? represent what the state of the art in the treatment of addiction was about twenty-five years ago, which he presumably learned at Western Kentucky U. The letters after Hughes' name, MPS and LICDC indicate he has some kind of accreditation. LICDC may stand for Licensed Drug Counselor but what MPS stands for I have been unable to figure out. Could it be Master of Professional Studies? In any event the times and the thinking about addiction have changed. Addiction studies has  become more scientifically sophisticated,  as I learned from watching  the series of Charlie Rose PBS programs on the brain, which were  fascinating, especially number 7, on how the brain is involved in addiction.  

The single most important fact I learned  was that heavy drug use permanently alters the neurological circuitry of the brain.  As far as the circuitry or the neurological wiring of the brain goes,  once an addict always an addict. It is possible to become a recovering addict but not a recovered addict, as Alcoholic Anonymous has long preached. The recovery process must continue for the rest of the life of the addict.  Recovery is a lifelong and therefore a very expensive process, and there is no guarantee, in fact there is a high degree of probability, that the addict  will  relapse because the altered circuitry of the brain leaves the addict with a craving that is easily triggered by the faintest suggestion or reminder of the drug.

The key element in addiction  is a simple organic chemical, dopamine, which functions like a neurotransmitter in the brain. Dopamine plays a crucial role in addiction because it is the key chemical in the reward-motivated behavior the brain is based on. When we do something that is pleasurable, dopamine is transmitted neurologically throughout the brain, producing a feel-good state of mind. What addictive drugs do is hijack and intensify the natural high produced by dopamine. But it is not only drugs that can produce addiction: repetitive compulsive behavior can as well. Another name for this kind of addiction is process addiction.

Process Addiction

According to  the clinical psychologist Dr. Tian Dayton in her article “Money Addiction,” “There is a change in brain chemistry with a process addiction that’s similar to the mood altering effects of alcohol or drugs. With process addictions engaging in a certain activity, say viewing pornography, compulsive eating or an obsessive relationship with money, can kick start the release of brain/body chemicals, like dopamine, that actually produce a ‘high’ that's similar to the chemical high of a drug.” Money may be the most pervasive drug in America and the most trafficking in it takes place on Wall Street, but the trafficking goes on everywhere, including in our chronically economically depressed city of Portsmouth, with its high per capita of drug addicts. In addition to many drug addicts, Portsmouth also has at least a couple wealthy money addicts, Hughes apparently being one of them, who were able to replace their alcohol addiction with a money process addiction.  The alcohol craving is still there, and capable of taking over their brain again, but it is the money addiction that is now in control of their brains and their miserable lives; it is the dopamine high they get from money that makes them so dopey.  Drugs are not essential to developing a process addiction: however, dopamine is necessary to the process of developing an increasing dependency on money. 

It may be just an urban legend, but the putative wealthiest  man in Portsmouth was supposedly asked, “Don’t you have enough money by now?” and he is alleged to have answered, “There is never enough money.” As Dr. Dayton wrote in “Money Addiction,” “[J]ust as with a drug or alcohol, tolerance increases and they [money addicts] may find themselves needing to devote increasingly larger amounts of time to these activities, to achieve the same mood altering high that only a little once provided. Because of this they become increasingly preoccupied with all things related to getting and maintaining their substance to the exclusion of other things,” the substance in this case being money.

The Profit Motive Panacea

The profit motive is America's dopamine. Hughes refutes the Republicans' religious faith in privatization. The profit motive is not the panacea they proclaim but rather a curse, at least where the business of treating addiction is concerned.  Based on information the Leedoms have so far uncovered,  I have reached the tentative conclusion that Ed Hughes is addicted to money, which he makes by treating and in too many cases mistreating addicts in his counseling centers.  No doubt some patients have been helped at Hughes’ Scioto County Counseling Center, but the financial and social costs to the taxpayers is astronomical and the number of people who are worse off because of his clinic is possibly much too high. The Second Chance counseling center in Boneyfiddle, in the former juvenile detention center, is more like a minimum security jail than a clinic, with the inmates preying on the community with petty thefts, as the residents of that area, of which I am one, have discovered. Hughes' counseling operations in Scioto County are magnets, drawing addicts from far and wide to Portsmouth. I have been told by a very reliable source that Ed Hughes once approached the 14 St. Community Center to ask if he could use that facility to treat drug addicts, but when he declined to discuss the finances of such an arrangement, an official at the center closed the door on Hughes and is thankful now that he did.

Since the reputed wealthiest man in Portsmouth is also, like Hughes, a former alcoholic, I suspect recovering alcoholics may be prone to process addictions, and particularly to a money addiction, which happens to be our national addiction. Something should be done to help those unlucky enough to be one of Hughes' Loved Ones. Since he now gets his high with money he makes on addicts, I think campaigning against him makes sense, and the most appropriate slogan might be, Just Say No to Ed Hughes.