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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (March 24, 1988)
Ta 3\JL\^000 Z_-Z ic» 4*rv^/^ ^ ^txx^ ^ ■■■HNiBilHHiHIliiiaiiiHHMlIIB '~' s HZVS. 000 0<3?,4 i "O S-XTa^/S. o^. -m Alcohol that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from alcoholism. ” J\ desire to stop drinking is the only membership requirement and the group is supported solely from contributions, he says. The primary purpose is to “stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety. ” Brazos County residents can attend meetings four times a day. seven days a week at the Brazos Club. On weekdays, the meetings are at noon, 6 p.m., 8 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. On weekends, the meetings are at 10:30 a.m., 2:30 p.m., 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. The members work together to lend each other support and follow twelve steps of AA. When he first started attending meetings. Rusty had a sponsor to help him through the rough times when he thought he might need a drink. “Sometimes I’d call him in the middle of the night when I really needed a drink, ” Rusty says. Now Rusty helps other alcoholics stay sober. One alcoholic working with another seems to help people in the recovery process. Rusty says. “When another alcoholic comes in fresh off a drinking jag, I know where he’s coming from,” he says. Not all alcoholics need the extensive in-patient program to recover, and therefore Greenleaf also provides outpatient counseling, an aftercare program and educational programs for family members of alcoholics. Noah says Aftercare meets once a week for former patients and their families to discuss past associations with chemical abuse and to offer encouragement to attend AA meetings. After being discharged from the inpatient program, patients are required to attend Aftercare meetings for two years and attend 90 AA meetings in 90 days. If patients follow this routine and stick with the program, they have a better chance of not relapsing, Noah says. One out of every 30 to 40 alcoholics will relapse, but it may just be a slip, Noah says. Without the proper recovery, however, a recovered alcoholic could relapse and progress to the previous level of drinking within two weeks. Most Greenleaf patients are poly drug abusers, who may have a preference for alcohol or a preference for cocaine, but they usually do more than one drug, she says. “The poly-drug use has been a trend in the past 10 to 15 years. ” she says. “They usually started on beer and could get by on that all day. Then they graduate to hard liquor because they get drunk quicker. I’ve heard some people say they can throw a beer back as fast as any other drink. But beer and liquor are still the drugs of choice.” A day manager at a local nightclub says fruity drinks are ordered most frequently there. He also says alcohol consumption has remained constant for the past few months, but it did increase last summer. Don Ganter, owner of the Dixie Chicken, says 98 percent of his patrons will only drink one or two beers, and girls usually drink less than that. “We are a college bar and are not here to create alcoholism, ” he says. “Several people in the community who are alcoholics will come in and are not welcome. Our focus is on the A&M students over 21 that might want one drink a day. It’s a social deal.” y\lcohol and drug addiction affects the abusers and their families, so Greenleaf and Al-Anon both offer Dennis Reardon and Ann Coombes, coordinator and assistant coordinator of the Center for Drug Prevention and Education, discuss preventative programs stressing prevention and education in dealing with drug and alcohol abuse. Ann Schulmann, marketing director of Greenleaf Hospital, and Lisa Powell, chemical dependency counselor, participate in a group discussion at Greenleaf. services to help the families. Noah says the four day family program educates people about dependancy and is an intensive program. Often probation officers, parole officers and counselors attend to learn more about various problems, he says. Students who think they have a problem can call a crisis line at the The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous 1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable. 2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. 3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understood Him. 4. Made a searching and fearless moral imventory of ourselves. 5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of out wrongs. 6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. 7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings. 8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. 9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. 10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it. 11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out. 12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs. hospital for advice on what to do about their problems. Without Greenleaf and AA, Rusty says he does not know where he would be today. “I was going down that road and I had no other way out, ” Rusty says. “They really saved my life. I see the miracle that happened to me. ”