Remember that time Rush Limbaugh admitted that he was addicted to painkillers? If Rush Limbaugh demonstrated anything, it’s that addiction does not necessarily fit the normal stereotype of the homeless junkie who spends all his or her money on drugs. He isn’t alone and, in fact, about half of Americans know someone who is or has been addicted to drugs. Enter Hayver App.

Hayver App wants to use cryptocurrencies as an incentive to stay clean and sober. A version of Project Prevention that uses cryptocurrencies to reduce the impact of addiction on family members and society as a whole could also reduce the risk to clients by making payouts more anonymous without making it obvious that they now have a wad of cash. That means cryptocurrencies might have a reputation as being something that can be used to buy and sell drugs, but they can also be used to help addicts who are finally ready to start making responsible choices and recover from their addiction.

Hayver Targets The Relapse Problem

According to the experts on the Hayver Corporation team, as many as 97% of recovering addicts have a relapse in less than five years. However, if they can get better continuing support and monitoring with rewards for staying on the right path with tools like the Hayver app, that number could go down to 78%.

The Hayver app takes advantage of the use of deterrents to help prevent relapse through the use of random screening. As Hayver’s Chief Medical Officer, John Copenhaver, told me in an interview, “The main thing, after 40 years of research, has been shown that the daily possibility of being drug tested that day is the largest psychological deterrent to help people stay in recovery.”

Hayver also takes the flip side of the coin by offering the chance to receive cryptocurrency rewards for staying on the path of recovery. It might sound like common sense that, if getting a regular paycheck provides many people with enough incentive to stay at a job they dislike even though they may be strongly tempted to quit, then getting regular, nominal cryptocurrency rewards can help recovering addicts who are often tempted to relapse stay on track. Science is just now catching on to the fact that both carrots and sticks can get better results than just sticks alone.

According to Copenhaver, “They’re just now coming out with papers, just in the past five years or so, [that] are showing that real, tangible rewards also help people stay in recovery.”

So, according to science, rehab centers should provide an app like Hayver’s to help their patients stay clean and sober in the long term. This will help cut down on the problem of addicts who are constantly in and out of rehab and may even land in jail because the odds are against them and they don’t get any long-term support.

Incidentally, Hayver has an ICO in the works and will use the funds to enable the app’s cryptocurrency rewards and support charitable efforts to fight drug addiction.

Could Cryptocurrencies Help Addicts Make Responsible Choices?

Hayver seems to think so, as evidenced by the fact that it issues cryptocurrency rewards to recovering addicts for staying on track. If an addict is not ready for rehab but may be ready to start taking baby steps toward making more responsible choices, nonprofit organizations can help provide the added incentive to make those choices without increasing risk to the addict.

Project Prevention, for instance, offers a few hundred dollars to addicted women who agree to use long-term birth control options provided by this nonprofit organization. This can reduce the number of babies who are born addicted to drugs and wind up in foster care when the mothers are incapable of caring for them. One flaw in its model is that the payout can increase risk to the addicts who agree to this if it becomes obvious that they just cashed a check or were paid in cash and now have a bulky wad of money. A bulging pocket or purse puts the women at risk of being assaulted and robbed.

Cryptocurrencies can help reduce this risk by sending payments to a device that only the woman knows the location of. In fact, Project Prevention’s social media manager seemed to like the idea of accepting Bitcoin donations when I explained to her what Bitcoin is. It would be a short line of reasoning to figure out that it can also be used to give “cash” payouts to Project Prevention’s clients. Failing that, it may be possible for a socially conscious Bitcoin insider who recognizes that the world is not necessarily all black and white to jumpstart a similar effort to encourage addicts to start making better decisions.

So cryptocurrencies could be used to providing incentives for staying on track with long-term rehabilitation from a drug addiction. If the addict isn’t ready, cryptocurrencies can at least provide incentives for taking small steps on the path toward making better decisions and possibly getting the addict’s life back on track without adding more burdens. That makes cryptocurrencies a valuable tool for giving addicts better options than what they usually get from social services, law enforcement, and overstretched rehab services that constantly watch addicts repeatedly enter their programs.

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