Center for Alcohol and Drug Abuse
by Lorine Parks
How to break the cycle that leads to alcohol and drug abuse? Today’s speaker produced convincing statistics to show that a home without a father figure seemed to be a common denominator for persons who end up in poverty, violent crimes, domestic abuse and mental disease.
Being poor, and a high-school drop-out seems to occur more when the home situation is father-less, our speaker from the Los Angeles CADA told us.
CADA stands for Center for Alcohol and Drug Abuse. Its mission? To save lives, promote families and protect the community by providing addiction counseling and healthy living counseling.
What can be done? Two keys are education, such as Anger Management, and financial literacy courses, such as the one sponsored by Wells Fargo which teaches how to balance a checkbook and live within a budget.
There are projects which support lower income fathers so they can remain in the household: Project Fatherhood and the National Fatherhood Initiative. Family Services also offers Parenting classes such as Mother and Child Coping Strategies. No, these skills do not always come naturally, especially when the biological parents are under-age teenagers.
One additional suggestion that we as a society can do is, reform the criminal justice system. Chemical abuse such as drug and alcohol addiction, should be seen as a disease, not a crime, and treated not by imprisonment but by rehabilitation.
Of the five centers operated in the San Gabriel Valley, the closest to Downey is the one at 11015 Bloomfield, in Santa Fe Springs, at the New Vision Residental Multi-Service Center, which offers residential services with inpatient de-tox and rehab services as well as an outreach to those living on the streets. Programs are funded by Medi-Cal, self-pay, contributions and provided through arrangements with the Los Angeles Public Health Department, and are court sanctioned.
Los Angeles CADA is having its fourth annual fundraiser and recognition dinner, and we are all invited to contribute. Being held on October 16 at the Doubletree Hilton in nearby Norwalk, it will honor community leaders who have shown compassion and courage in helping victims of addiction, violence, HIV/AIDS and family violence.