What do you do if a loved one is addicted? It's a question now facing millions of Americans who often get mixed messages about how to help someone struggling with addiction to drugs or alcohol.

Many families across the country are desperately researching treatment,

counseling, retreats, medications, support groups hoping for solutions to a problem that only

seems to get worse every year as overdose death rates

skyrocket and more potentially fatal chemicals permeate the nation's robust market for illicit drugs. Solutions are not only hard to find, but they can vary.

Does someone need to quote, hit bottom to stop using drugs and alcohol?

Do they need tough consequences to stop? Or for some is it more

effective to use a softer approach that tries to guide the person away from

substances and support them in the process.

Some parents especially say they had to take difficult steps.

Once things really got bad at home, we had our son arrested.

That's Nancy Verrigar, who told the Today Show in 2018 that it was only

after that arrest, that her son, J.P. went into treatment. And when he got out of treatment, we said you have to stay in,

treatment was down in Florida, and we said you have to stay in Florida.

You can't come home.

You're going to go to a halfway house house and if you don't go to a halfway

house you're going to be homeless. So we really had to enforce that.

Someone said to me that Christmas that JP was homeless and he was calling us every day in Florida.

We hadn't seen him for seven months.

He was asking us to wire him money and a very close friend in recovery said that leaving our son in Florida at

Christmas just leaving him no food you know he said I'm hungry sorry click

was the most loving thing to do.

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