iThrive Wellness Summit 2020

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Adventist WholeHealth Netwok

Eric Walsh

The United States of Addiction Winning America’s Chemical Civil War

And just pray that everyone can get out of this what I believe God has in it for us.

So let's just start with a word of prayer.

Father God, we thank you for this opportunity to study a word and to look at the affliction of addiction.

I pray Lord that you would lead as we talk Lord, speak through me.

And Father God may this be worthy, may these be words of comfort, hope for those who know someone who's struggling with these problems or may have them themselves.

Help us Lord to all become victorious over those things that so easily beset us.

All right, So we are gonna jump right in.

Our scripture reading is taken from 1 Thessalonians 5, 6 through 8, which says, therefore, let us not sleep as do others, but let us watch and be sober.

And they that be drunken are drunken in the night.

But let us who are of the day be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love and for a helmet, the hope of salvation.

As we go through this talk, I will come back around to the idea of salvation as a helmet and the hope of salvation as a helmet.

Our talk is entitled the United States of Addiction, Winning America's Chemical Civil War.

And many of you have heard of what is going on.

Romans 7 is our, where we're going to start.

Romans 7 verse 8 says, For I know that in me, that is in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing.

For to will is present with me, but how to perform that which is good, I find not.

For the good that I would, I do not, but the evil which I would not, that I do.

Now, if I Do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwells in me." Paul here talking to the Romans, who were a group who were a part of a city in Rome that was huge on parties and drunkenness.

Many of the believers there would have come out of such lifestyles and were probably struggling in the flesh as to how to leave behind their previous addictions.

Great challenge for those who had been converted into the church.

And Paul makes this honest, very transparent admission here.

Paul says that in his flesh, nothing good dwells.

He says the reason he this is true is because he has the will to do better but how to perform it he can't find.

He wants to do better, he wants to do good, but he cannot find how to do it.

He says, for the good that I would, I do not, but the evil, which I would not, that's what I do.

Then he says, now, if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, sin that dwells in me.

There is this connection between sin and the flesh.

Verse 21, I find that a law that when I would do good, evil is present with me.

For I delight in the law of God after the inward man.

But I see another law in my members warring against the law of my mind and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin, which is in my members.

And in this war and on this battlefield, you are held captive to your thoughts, captive to the flesh, even though you wanna do better, you know you should do better, you can't find a way to do better.

And verse 24, oh wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?

Oh, wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?

What a description of what addiction is like.

And when you look here, this is the United States of addiction.

I saw this cartoon with the hypodermic needles on the Statue of Liberty's head and Congress looks like they're asleep as we are in the throes of a terrible opioid addiction crisis with many overdoses and deaths.

So here, there's a bit of a pandemic of despair.

But suicide rates increased 35% between 1999 and 2018, according to recent CDC data.

These rates were elevated among medical professionals compared to other professions before the outbreak began.

It appears likely that the COVID-19 pandemic will lead to increased rates of mental health problems.

And we must recognize the pandemic that will quickly follow.

That of mental and behavioral illness, wrote Sandro Galea, MD of the Boston University School of Public Health.

And so we are looking at a time when we've seen a rise in suicides.

And they're saying that because of the coronavirus, this is going to actually get worse.

So let me give you a little bit more of this.

So 3 months into the coronavirus pandemic, The country is looking at this other 1, 1 of daily doses of death, isolation, fear, psychological trauma.

Federal agencies and experts warn that a historic wave of mental health problems with depression, substance abuse, post-traumatic stress disorder, and suicide.

Just as the initial outbreak of the virus caught hospitals unprepared, there are some who are very worried that the mental health system will also be overwhelmed by surges.

And so what are some of the things that we've seen happening?

For 1, you can see here, domestic violence, increases around the world, the use of opiates, alcoholic liver disease, suicides, all of these things are part of this wave of despair and during the lockdown they've seen some increases in parts of the world around domestic violence but even the alcoholic liver disease increases speak to the fact that people are using chemicals more and more.

So when you talk about countries that consume the most opiates, North America dominates, America and Canada.

And with America being far ahead of the pack, This is the number of doses, standard daily opiate doses per million people from 2013, 2015.

You can see here that America is way ahead of the pack.

The overdose deaths, I won't get too deep into these slides except to say you can see the year-over-year there's an increase in opioid deaths in the United States.

And we know that the frontal lobe of the brain is very important.

I talk a lot about this in many of my talks.

You know that it is the reasoning center of the brain, the planning center.

This is where social sexual behavior happens.

This is actually where God interacts with us.

I believe that when the scripture says that that God is gonna put a seal on the forehead.

It is a frontal lobe seal where reasoning happens.

As Isaiah 118 says, "'Come now and let us reason together, ' says the Lord.

"'Though your sins be as scarlet, "'they shall be as white as snow.

"'Though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.

If the devil can take away your ability to reason, he can disconnect you from your opportunity for salvation.

If he can take away your ability to reason, and 1 of the ways he can do that is to leave you in a state of intoxication perpetually to remove from you your sobriety.

And so that's 1 of the reasons why this is such an important topic.

When I worked 1 of the good things good parts of my training 1 of the most see 1 of those beneficial parts of my training as a physician was during my preventive medicine residency at Loma Linda University.

And while I was doing that residency, they sent us to the Veterans Hospital in Loma Linda to do addiction medicine training.

And I'll never forget listening to the men, the veterans of US wars, trying to regain their lives, overcome cocaine, opiates, alcohol, other drugs, other addictions.

And I remember them doing a chant where they said, God made the human heart so big that only he could fill it.

And I asked them, you know, what does that mean?

And they said, listen, if you try and fill the God-sized hole in your heart with anything but God, you'll become addicted to that thing.

And that was powerful to me, because they were right.

God has made a space for himself in each 1 of us, that we will never feel complete if we try and fill that space with something else.

You'll forever chase more sexual intimacy, or drugs, or alcohol, or whatever the case may be.

At the root of addiction, in my opinion, is a need to feel fulfilled.

And 1 of the places where this happens is in the spiritual realm.

So God made the human heart so big that only he can fill it was a powerful statement to me.

And as I mentioned earlier, we'll talk about the helmet.

Paul says the same thing here again, and he's using 617.

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The United States of Addiction Winning America’s Chemical Civil War

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