Andrew McMills is a brilliant speaker and a highly entertaining lecturer. If you come to his class on DUI or alcohol and other drug abuse, you will see, he is clearly an expert on this subject. Nonetheless, some may not know, Mr. McMills used to be a police officer and quite a heavy drinker himself, and after three DUI arrest was dismissed from the police force. Since then, after reassessing his attitudes and ambitions, Andrew McMills straightened a few things out in his life, sobered up, went back to school, got his Bachelors if Science in Psychology, and  Masters degree in Public Health. Now, he works for Alert Driving Inc. (ADI), teaching reckless drinkers about what alcohol and drugs would do to the body and how it can change the world around them.

It’s interesting, how the content of his lecture applies to nurses in our society as well. When LVN nursing student come to his lecture as part of their VN School field trip, they learn not only some interesting facts from the history of World Health Organization and Laws associated with alcohol and drug abuse, but so much more. Mr. McMillss highly involving discussion, motivating the VN students to participate, teaches them to think and listen, and then think again. After such a lecture, a future LVN would walk away from it reflecting upon their own habits.

Mr. McMills’ lecture was focusing on much more than drugs and alcohol abuse. It was concerned more with addictive behaviors that had nothing to do with substance use. According to the definition provided by McMills, an addiction is a repeated, compulsive, uncontrollable behavior with life-changing consequences, which gets repeated in spite of the negative outcomes. This definition can be applied to obsessive-compulsive behaviors, behaviors in interacting with other people, including addictions to various behaviors, such as codependence.