Addiction: Bad Tools, Elusive Problem

    I won't burden you with a lot of statistics. They're fairly useless in addressing this particular problem in any event. Between erroneous assumptions, inadequate definitions, and inappropriate methodologies, the measuring tools of these studies are faulty. It's like we're trying to measure the temperature of the Sun with a Ford tractor dipstick.

    For one example that was in the news: an alcoholic driving drunk takes her car and backs up into a crowd of people, killing several of them. The victims are not listed as having died as a result of alcoholism or addiction, although any fool knows that that's exactly what killed them. They are all listed as auto-pedestrian fatalities.

    My mother was a drug addict who died from a drug overdose, but the statistics say she died of heart failure. My father was an alcoholic who died from that disease, but the stats say he died from liver disease. One of the earliest records of my family is a mention in a four hundred year old Munich police blotter in which my ancestor was recorded as having been arrested for making "night noise." That was their euphemism for drunken and disorderly. Addiction has carpet bombed my family for centuries, yet, out of all the many deaths, not one is recorded as having died from addiction. My brother Bill got drunk, passed out in his house, and in the process set his house on fire, in which he died. I don't think fire was what killed him, but that's what the statistics say.

    It's not just the measuring tools that lie to researchers. The subjects—active using addicts—lie, as well. Addicts lie to parents, they lie to teachers, they lie to counselors, they lie to doctors, they lie to spouses, they lie to clergy, they lie to employers, they lie to their children, they lie to cops, they lie to themselves, and they especially lie to people conducting surveys related to addiction.


   Some of you may recall the Sobel study a couple of decades ago. The Sobels had a theory—which seemed like a good idea at the time—that alcoholism was not a disease but was, instead, a learned script which could be unlearned, allowing problem drinkers to safely return to social drinking. This was some welcome news in the halls of Alcoholics Anonymous, I can tell you.

    The Sobels took eleven alcoholics, put them through a course of unlearning their problem drinking scripts, then followed them by means of telephone surveys for a time thereafter. All eleven of their subjects successfully recovered from alcoholism and had safely returned to social drinking, according to their figures. The Sobels published their findings, and, I suppose, went on to solve their next world problem.


    Some years later, though, the news division of the American Broadcasting Corporation decided to do a follow up on the Sobel Study to see how their subjects had fared. ABC tracked down all eleven subjects, in person rather than by phone, and here is what they found: Of the eleven subjects of the study, ten had died from alcoholism. The eleventh was still alive, but only because he had put the plug in the jug and had crawled back to AA.

    ABC asked the Sobels about this and the pair of researchers were absolutely flabbergasted. The male half of the team simply could not understand. He said, "We called all of them at regular intervals to find out how they were doing. They all said they were fine."
    The Sobels simply didn't understand that the word "fine" among addicts means, "I don't want to talk about it."


    You may have noticed by now that I lump alcoholics and drug addicts under the same label: addict. I believe as I was taught in rehab: a drug is a drug is a drug. There are a few who object to this and hold that there is some particular difference between alcoholics and drug addicts. I'm not trying to confront anyone or rattle any cages here. All you're getting is my opinion. In my own case, however, the number one drug to which I was addicted was a substance called ethanol.

    Bacardi's ethanol. Miller's. Beefeater's. Seagram's. Wild Irish Rose. Ron Rico. Old Duke ethanol.

    Despite all of the competition provided by modern science, alcohol still remains this country's number one drug problem.

    "But, alcohol is legal."

    True. Alcohol is legal for adults, as are all of the other drugs to which I was addicted.


    But, isn't a drug addict different than an alcoholic?

   Believe this, folks, if it helps you get through the night, but my fellow recovering addicts call this argument, "Switching deck chairs on the Titanic." In Narcotics Anonymous the addicts make the distinction between an alcoholic and a drug addict this way: An alcoholic will steal your wallet.
A drug addict will steal your wallet, too, but he'll help you look for it.

    So, what are we really up against?

    No matter what we do, the problems surrounding addiction seem insurmountable. The money spent on drug education and law enforcement keeps going up, the amount, variety, and prices of drugs keeps going up, the number of crimes committed by addicts to pay those prices keeps going up, and the number of addicts who are imprisoned and who kill and who die for the sake of addiction keeps going up, which means that the total number of addicts and persons affected by this disease keeps going up.

    I've been at recovery from addiction for a good many years now. As a part of my own recovery, I have listened to the stories of thousands of addicts, both male and female, young and old, from all ethnic, religious, and economic backgrounds. The youngest addict I've ever seen in a Twelve Step meeting in this state was ten years old. He was hooked on alcohol. The youngest one I've ever heard about being in the program was seven. He was also hooked on alcohol, and neither one of them had stopped with booze.

    Here are some general facts I've picked up simply by listening to all of these stories. Whether your child goes to public school, private school, parochial school, boarding school, or is schooled out-of-state or even at home, by the time your child is in the fourth grade on average, he or she already knows on a first-name basis one or more fellow students who are active addicts. By the time your child is in sixth grade, he or she knows one or more fellow students who pay for their own drugs by dealing to other students. And, by then, when questioned by teachers, police, and parents, they've also learned to lie about it, whether or not they use themselves. Nobody likes a rat.


    Most of the addicts I know began using before they entered eighth grade. A very large percentage of that total began using before they entered third grade. In my own case, I started using in the womb. My mother was using drugs the entire time she was carrying me. I do not belong to a small minority.


    Well, what about drug education? If kids knew the consequences of getting into drugs, they'd avoid them, right?

    Right.

    Folks, the graveyards are filling with elementary and high school drug educated children and their victims.


    Let me illustrate my case this way: We had a newcomer at an NA meeting a couple of years ago. He was sixteen years old and had just gotten out of treatment. It was his first time at that meeting, and he shared his story with us. In the course of telling his story, he mentioned that he had been through the DARE program and had become a peer counselor, all of the while using pot, alcohol, and huffing gasoline. After he shared, someone asked him what DARE stood for. D-A-R-E. I can never remember myself—Drug Awareness something or other—a real strain for an acronym. Anyway, the boy laughed, and said, "I know what we say DARE stands for back in school: Drugs Are Really Excellent."

    I am not disparaging education, nor do I object to having a student at risk being counseled by his or her peers. What I want to warn you about is wasted effort. Every second, every dollar, spent on trying to convince active addicts that drugs are bad, bad, bad are wasted. Every moment having non-addicted children who—no matter what their training—haven't got a clue what they are tangling with counsel children in the grip of early stage addiction is not only wasted, it is dangerous. Non-addicted children doing the counseling are put in harm's way because of a thing most adults don't even handle very well: a life, sanity, and happiness destroyer called "codependency."

    You say prospective peer counselors are warned about codependency in their training?
Are those the same folks who warn young addicts-in-waiting that drugs aren't good for them?

    Tai fung. Big wind.

    Meanwhile, more children become active addicts, and more addicts die.

    Here's something to consider: At least ten percent of any population has the genetic predisposition to become addicts. Personally, I think ten percent is low, but that's the conservative estimate.

    This ten percent are already addicts.  They were born that way. They cannot be talked out of it, cajoled out of it, frightened out of it, warned out of it, educated out of it, loved out of it, guilted out of it, or threatened out of it by either parent, peer, teacher, judge, lover, or God.

    Addiction is part of their physical makeup. They are addicts waiting to be triggered into active addiction. As children and young adults, sooner or later they're going to tangle with something in the schoolyard, or a sip from Daddy's gin bottle, a medicine for pain or weight loss prescribed by a doctor or ordered over the internet, a slug of beer from an amused adult, spiked punch at a party, a pain-killer used by a dentist, or pain-management medications following an operation or treatment for a broken limb, or they're going to get mood altering drugs from their parents in the form of over-the-counter medications, or from their parent's personal stash of pot, pills, or other drugs. Some way or the other they are going to be triggered off. That is just the way it is.
The other ninety percent can play with alcohol and other drugs, and when they're ready to grow up—always supposing they live that long and aren't locked up in the butterfly palace dribbling oatmeal down their bibs—once they shuck the physical symptoms, they can leave the drugs behind. Regardless of how many brain cells they burned out, they aren't addicts.

    Idiots, perhaps. But not addicts.

    Maybe this is the population who might profitably use education on the damaging effects of drug use. I don't know. The main problem is that it doesn't matter how long you talk or how many experts you run in to your school to scare the students, the only persons the kids listen to or are going to believe are their friends and that kid selling all the party favors out on the playground.
The ten percent of addicts-in-waiting have a hard time hearing anything at all in the way of drug education because every one of them assumes he or she is a member of the ninety percent.

    The behavior of the addict is progressive, just like the disease. It begins with little lies, then the lies grow and become towering monuments of insanity. Little self deceptions grow to become universes of absolute fantasy. Little violations of trust, getting into your parent's liquor cabinet or stash, taking money from your spouse's purse or wallet, and endless lies, grow into major thefts, muggings, breaking and entering, prostitution, and even murder—or, in a great many cases, when the disease's price becomes too high even for the addict: suicide.

    Okay. By and large, what we are doing now is having little effect. But what can we do? Well, peer counseling is actually a useful answer, as long as real peers are used.

   Imagine this: What if you took all of those helpless parents, naïve children, ignorant counselors, and jaded paragons of law enforcement and replaced them with recovering addicts: Men, women, and children who have been in the grip of that strangler, who have fought the same monsters, dealt with the same guilt, pain, shame, and panic, and who know every little game and self-deception in your repertory because they've explored that territory themselves. You see, a fourteen year old addict's peers are not more fourteen year olds. A fourteen year old addict's peers are addicts: Addicted men, women, and children who are in recovery. That is what modern effective treatment does; that's what Twelve Step programs do.

 

"You ought to write a book about this place."

   When my turn came to tangle with both the phenomenon and the subject of addiction, I was just as ignorant as everyone else.

    The night of December 30th, 1981, I was thirty-nine years old, less than twenty-four hours from the new year, sitting on the edge of a hospital bed in a rehab in Minneapolis, Minnesota, looking through a window down at a streetlight that was almost obscured by one of the Midwest's deservedly famous blizzards.

    I was asking myself, "How— How did I ever come to this?"

    It was the loneliest night of my life, a moment that, if there had been any instant of my life that the powers of the universe could have erased, that was the moment. I was over a thousand miles from home, full of pain, full of shame, and really confused. I couldn't remember how I had gotten there. What's more, I was locked up with a bunch of drug addicts, and I couldn't figure out why. During my entire life, I had never done any drugs.

    In all the universe there was only one thing I was absolutely certain of as I sat on that bed on my first night in rehab: I could not be an addict.

    I could not be an addict.

    I wasn't the type.
    I didn't grow up in that kind of home.
    I didn't come from that kind of people.
    And, besides, I had been too smart to get into drugs.

    "Learn or die."

    That's one of the many upbeat slogans they had on the walls at Saint Mary's Rehabilitation Center. Another slogan, one that probably saved my life, was a Chinese saying:
    "The first step in escaping from a prison is to accept that one is in a prison."

    As I learned each new thing, what puzzled me was why I didn't already know this terribly important stuff. Just for openers, that the beverages I had been consuming and the prescribed medications I had been taking were dangerous addictive drugs. Alcohol is a drug, Valium is a drug, Ativan is a drug, Librium is a drug. I was addicted to all of those, which made me a drug addict.

    Somewhere, on some level, I must have suspected this, but somehow it didn't apply to me. So, there I was during my screening interview telling this psychiatrist "I don't need the medication for withdrawal. I don't have a drug problem."

    By then he had my blood test and tox screen. He knew what drugs I had been using, and in what quantities. This psychiatrist was also a recovering addict himself. He knew what I was going through, he knew the games I was playing on myself, and he knew what it would take to convince me that I was in big trouble. He let me do my own research: Three days of withdrawal hell during which I tried to explain it all away as nervousness about being in a new place. The perspiration was running off me in rivers because they kept the thermostats too high. I was having difficulty sleeping at night because it appeared that I probably had thirty-two abscessed teeth —even though I didn't have thirty-two teeth.

    On the third night, when the spiders started crawling on the walls, the worms started dropping on me from the ceiling, my joints were filled with molten lead, and my headache became so intense I could neither walk nor remember my own name, it finally got through to me: Those beverages, those medications—Those Drugs!—I was addicted to them. I was an addict. Finally, I gave in and took the medication for withdrawal.

    Did you notice what happened? What that rehab did to get my attention?
No one lectured me, pleaded with me, or threatened me, because they knew it would do no good. They used, instead, the most powerful tool they had at their command: the disease of addiction, itself.
I was already locked into proving to those people that I was not an addict. Therefore, I could not take the medications for withdrawal. I couldn't sneak out and get some drugs either, for a number of reasons: but mainly because that would be admitting I needed drugs.
And then those iron strong fingers of withdrawal began closing around my throat when they shouldn't be doing that if I wasn't an addict.

    I tried to talk those withdrawal symptoms away, rationalize them into non-existence, tried to convince myself that they were any and everything from anxiety attacks to another heart attack. When the pain became sufficiently severe, a floor counselor at the rehab sat me down and asked me about my drug use. After awhile, that little light bulb went on in my head.

    It's medical jujitsu: turning the power of addiction against the disease.

    Folks, as long as addicts live in their self constructed air castles, there is no hope for them. Pain is the eviction officer. The treatment in rehab is to use the power of the disease, the pain it inflicts and the contradictions it forces an addict into, against the disease, prying open closed minds enough for the light of a little bit of reality to slip in.

    I have never had such a dramatic profoundly life-altering experience as the one I had in rehab. Most of the addicts I went through treatment with felt the same way. While I was at Saint Mary's Rehab, every time a fellow patient found out that I was a writer, I could count on the next thing the fellow would say being, "You know, if I was a writer, I'd write a book about this place."

    It took a year, but I wrote the book: Saint Mary Blue. It was a tribute to many things: The process, the institution, the disease, the counselor who helped bludgeon me into recovery, and all of the really fine men, women, and children—my fellow patients—who were in the trenches with me, for me, and for themselves.

    Once I completed the manuscript, I sent it off to my agent, and the agent I had back then hated Saint Mary Blue. He telephoned me to say so. He said it was one big self-indulgent wallow in forbidden subjects, a lame story about a bunch of losers who will always be losers that no publisher would ever be interested in publishing. He couldn't understand what I had been thinking of in writing it.

    I was about to tell him it seemed like a good idea at the time, but I didn't. I was devastated. I thought Saint Mary Blue was the best thing I had ever written up until then. I was really confused. About then, though, something put a little question into my head. I asked my agent, "Tell me: Just where are you with this problem?"

    "What problem?" he asked.

    "Drugs," I said.

    Then he asked me, "Which drug?"

    "Never mind."


A Little Seltzer Down Your Pants

    In a way different than rehabs, Twelve Step programs use the power of the disease of addiction against itself, helping AA's and NA's into recovery. When the pain of addiction at last drives you through the doors into that first meeting, reality can begin seeping in. Then recovery can begin.
The trouble with this, of course, is that for every person who makes it through those meeting doors and into recovery, thirty to forty others wind up in mental institutions, prisons, and graveyards. Of those who do make it through the doors to their first meeting, I'm guessing perhaps twenty or twenty-five percent actually stay over the years, work the program, and remain in recovery.

    The odds—the stats—say that I shouldn't be standing here more than twenty-two years later, still in recovery. Very few addicts who get into recovery want to go back to what they were, but the disease—what I call the dragon—never quits. It's voice can, at times, be very convincing. I noticed early on that not everyone made it into recovery, and of those who did, only a fraction stayed. That terrified me, especially since my rehab had designated me a "hard case." —Not likely to make it.

    In a way, recovery is like being dropped into one of those role-playing video games. Our warrior is dropped into the castle to do battle with the addiction dragon, and along the way he picks up certain weapons to aid him in his encounters: Meetings, literature, following the steps, the wisdom and assistance of fellow recovery warriors, the guidance of a venerable war master sponsor, and the heaviest weapon of all, the two-handed five hundred pound telephone.

    There was one weapon I found in the bottom of my pack purely by accident: Laughter. If deadly seriousness and fanatic reverence to Twelve Step principles were necessary to work recovery, I would be dead. Just to keep from falling into that bottomless hole of depression, every now and then I had to poke my finger in the dragon's eye and make fun of him. Laughter was my main weapon of choice.

    Sure, it's useful when, in the midst of difficulties, someone says, "And today acceptance is the answer to all my problems . . ."
    But it worked better for me when a fellow addict said, "Be grateful: If the world didn’t suck, we’d all fall off."


    So, why did I write Yesterday's Tomorrow: Recovery Meditations For Hard Cases?

    Partly it was in protest against the usual meditation books offered by each of the Twelve Step programs. A typical meditation in AA's book, Today, goes on about how we used to be consumed with resentments back in the bad old days, but now that we're in recovery, we're all better now, live and let live, let go and let god, and don't forget to smell the roses.
    Of course, while I'm reading this, all I can think about is this clown who cut me out in traffic and these fantasies about what I'd like to do about it. The usual sort of meditation book also seems to be under the impression that once an alky or addict puts down the drink and the drug, he or she also loses the capacity to swear!

    I had been to too many Twelve Step meetings and was under no such illusion.

    There is some swearing in Yesterday's Tomorrow. I believe it was Mark Twain who said profanity offers reliefs denied even to prayer.
    The main reason for it, though, was expressed to me by the editor at Hazelden who bought the manuscript. "Barry," he said, "Yesterday's Tomorrow sounds like the meetings I go to."

    There are a great many stories that move from meeting to meeting, many of which have helped me by tickling my funny bone or kicking my butt when I needed it. None of these little tales had been approved by the world services of Twelve Step programs, and it was unlikely that they would ever be preserved unless someone gathered them and stuck them in a book. So I did.
    After it was published, the Hazelden editor and I were talking on the phone about the unauthorized slogan I mentioned in the introduction to Yesterday's Tomorrow: "Life sucks better clean."
He said to me, "Barry, I wish you'd given that title to Yesterday's Tomorrow. I would've loved to bring that title in front of an editorial conference." The editorial board at Hazelden, you see, is made up out of alcoholism counselors.

    Well, one of the things I did in the introduction of Yesterday's Tomorrow was to ask readers to send in any stories, experiences, and jokes, filthy or otherwise, that tickled their funny bones or otherwise helped keep them in recovery.  The response has been overwhelming.

    For example, here's an insight on how to handle problems, in the form of a parable I received from a reader in Massachusetts AA on the subject of problem solving strategies.

    An elderly woman phoned her telephone company to report that her telephone often failed to ring when her friends called, and that on the rare occasions when it did ring, her pet dog always moaned terribly right before the phone rang.
    Once the telephone repairman arrived, he climbed a nearby telephone pole, hooked in his test set, and dialed the subscriber's number.
    The phone didn't ring at all. He dialed the number again, and still it didn't ring. However, he could hear the ghostly moaning of a dog coming from the direction of the woman's house. A short time after that, the telephone began ringing.
    Climbing down from the pole and entering the woman's yard, the telephone repairman investigated and found the following:
    1. The woman's dog was tied to the telephone system's ground wire via a steel chain and collar.
    2. The wire connection to the ground rod was loose.
    3. The dog was receiving 90 volts of signaling current whenever the phone number was called.
   4. After a couple of such jolts, the dog would start moaning and then urinate on himself and the ground.
    5. The wet ground would complete the circuit, thus causing the phone to ring.
    All of which demonstrates that some problems CAN be fixed by pissing and moaning.


    I have piles of similar treasures, so when it came time to see if Hazelden might be interested in a sequel to Yesterday's Tomorrow, remembering the editor's title request, I titled the proposed book, Life Sucks Better Clean: More Recovery Meditations For Hard Cases.

    Yeah. That editorial conference couldn't throw him and my manuscript out of there fast enough. They weren't quite ready for Life Sucks. I think we are going to have to wait a bit for the sequel. Meanwhile, the great material is stacking up in my office. I got this example of a cry for help from an NA down in Alfred.


    A drunk staggered into a cathedral, reeled down the aisle, and at last stumbled into a confessional booth.  Father Dogood, who had observed the poor fellow's behavior thought he might be able to help and entered his side of the confessional.  The priest waited, and waited, then, after an additional period of silence, the priest asked, "May I help you, my son?"
    "I dunno." came the man's troubled voice through the grill.  "Got any toilet paper on your side?"


    I think as long as I am still sucking wind and can keep laughing, I'll stay in recovery.




What Works, What Doesn't

    Now, when I began, I said something about laying on you my views about what individuals, families, schools, businesses, and communities can do about addiction. Some of my views are controversial and a few of you, perhaps, may not like them. That's all right. I don't much care for them myself. I've thought about them a long time, though, and one of my conclusions is that the obvious answers to addiction—the popular answers—the ones you can get voters to support—are dead wrong.

    I don't have any studies to cite, I'm not running for any office, and I don't have any bills before the Legislature. In the twenty two years that my life has depended on finding and doing things that work, I've seen things that haven't worked and things that have.


    The main thing that hasn't worked is misidentifying the problem principally in the form of the War on Drugs. Drugs are chemical compounds useful for some things, not useful for others. Drugs don't plan, they don't feel, they don't think, they don't initiate campaigns, they don't chase anyone down and force them to use, therefore they cannot surrender, which means this is one war we cannot win.

    The first step is to accurately identify the problem.

    The problem is not lack of education.
    The problem is not lack of midnight basketball for teens.
   The problem is not Dungeons and Dragons, Doom Two, video games, the glamorization of drugs on TV or in the movies.
    The problem is not shaved heads, body piercing, hip hugger jeans, or black lipstick.
    The problem is not a decline in morality.
    The problem is not a decline in faith.
    The problem is not a lack of willpower or discipline.
    The problem is not war, poverty, unemployment, economic uncertainty, or homelessness.
    The problem is not racial injustice.
    The problem is not international drug cartels.
    The problem is not drug dealers.
    The problem is not drugs.

    The problem is a disease, and the disease is called addiction, and the first hard choice is to begin regarding this disease not as a moral or law enforcement problem but as a health problem.

    The main symptom of this disease is denial: Denial of its existence, denial of it's nature, denial of its consequences, and denial of its necessary treatment.
    The main dynamic of this disease is: Nothing comes between the addict and the drugs. Alcoholic or heroin addict, it doesn't care how you define or label it. It doesn't care about anything. It's a disease. However, it makes the addict care a lot about drugs and what to do with them.

    Everything else follows from that. The late stage addict will swear to anything, believe anything, think anything, give up anything, promise anything, and do anything to keep feeding his or her addiction.

    Then the obvious answer is to eliminate the drugs, right? If there were no drugs, then there could be no drug addiction.

    And if a toad had wings it wouldn't bump its ass every time it jumped.

    I believe it's time we grew up about what we can and cannot do about drugs.

    Right now there are one and a half million addicts locked up in this nation's jails and prisons, under a variety of charges, but basically as a result of being drug addicts. Every waking moment, every action, is controlled and supervised to one degree or another. Do you have any idea what they are doing behind bars right this minute?
    That's right. They are doing drugs.

    We have only so much to devote to making a dent in this disease. As organizations, as citizens, as individuals concerned for our families and ourselves, we have limits. Our resources, our funds, our energy, our enthusiasm, our patience, our hope—they are finite. Whatever you have left to scrape together, put it toward doing things that work even if it works only part of the time. Don't waste it on things that never work.

    The War on Drugs kills a lot of people, makes a lot of criminals and corrupt officials wealthy, burns up a lot of pot and poppy powder, fills up the prisons, but it hasn't prevented a single child from getting drugs.

    Something to consider: Did America end the use of alcohol by outlawing it with the ratification of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution in 1919?
    During prohibition, was there anyone who wanted a drink who couldn't get one? During prohibition, my father had a still in the basement of our house. An operating still was found in the basement of the Capitol Building in Washington DC. Certainly banning alcohol didn't affect alcoholism a bit, but it did manage to jail a lot of people, kill and maim a lot of people in gunfights and with bad booze, and, on the positive side, it did take several grubby gangs of petty hoods and elevate them into multi-million dollar enterprises.

    Right now we have an ever increasing list of substances prohibited by law, and piles of Federal, state, and local agencies, the Coast Guard, Federal, state, and local law enforcement personal whose job it is to make certain none of these substances ever make it within purchasing distance of a buyer.
    I know what the result of all this effort has been in Franklin County. How's Washington County doing? Is there anyone here in Machias who can believe for an instant that a druggie, brand new to this area, couldn't score the illegal drugs he or she prefers within an hour or two? Hop on over to the university, talk to a few folks?

    People, the Soviet Union, at the zenith of its KGB agent and militia saturated police state heyday, where both drugs and drug addiction were outlawed, addicts could find and get their drugs, as they still do.

    Here's something else that doesn't work: talk. Whether in the form of open, honest, touchy-feely sharing, well-meaning why-you-shouldn’t-use-drugs lectures in schools, hip TV commercials, or out-and-out threats by cops, teachers, and parents, talk doesn't work. The recent run of TV commercials, for example, says talk to your kids about drugs.

    "Son, don't use drugs."
    "Okay, Dad."

    Another problem solved.

    Today's parents: The ads fail to understand that they are addressing a generation who spent the sixties, seventies and eighties stoned out of their gourds and their children know it.

    Many parents think that talking to their kids about drugs means grabbing the kid, shaking a finger in his face, and saying in a stern voice, "If I ever catch you with drugs, I'll kill you."

    Well, why doesn't this work?
   The kid who isn't addicted will be hurt by your ignorance and mistrust. The kid who is addicted answers: ''Okay, Dad, I'll be sure not to let you catch me using drugs.''

    The same thing if you are an employer. If your company, school, or agency policy is to flat out fire anyone discovered with an alcohol or other drug problem, it won't make any difference to those who don't have a problem. To those who do have a problem, however, the first thing they know is to make certain the problem and its symptoms are well hidden from the boss and their coworkers. You institute mandatory urine tests? Suddenly ten percent of your employees are walking around with little bottles of someone else's piss in their pockets.

    Addicts are experts at hiding the problem, even into the latter stages of the disease. In rehab, among my fellow patients, were airline pilots, air traffic controllers, bus drivers, railroad engineers, police officers, attorneys, judges, nurses, pharmacists, psychiatrists, surgeons, and alcoholism counselors all of whom had been performing their demanding, vitally important jobs pickled to the gills and stoned out of their minds, and successfully hiding it. It was only when hiding the problem became impossible—when the damage to property and the risk to innocent lives made the fact of addiction so glaringly obvious— that steps toward levering these people into treatment had to be taken.


Bottom Time

    As it was told to me, the way people get levered into treatment is based on a study that was done a long time ago. A number of persons who had made it into AA were interviewed to find out what had led them to try sobriety. Most of them told the same story: They had "hit bottom," that is, a mountain of consequences—health, finances, employment, marriage, troubles with the law—everything had gone to hell all at once putting them in a place where they became willing to try anything in hopes of ending the nightmare.

    Most alcoholics and other kinds of addicts, however, spread out their failures, crimes, and pains over a lifetime, making each individual horror "not really that bad" by itself   —at least, not bad enough to get clean and sober. They manage to go on this way, usually, until they die.

    Verne Johnson and the folks at the Johnson Institute devised a method called "intervention" for these addicts whereby those close to the subject—family, friends, associates including his partners or immediate superiors at work—prepare all of the person's failures and horrors due to his using and present them to the addict all at the same time—in effect concentrating the pain, bringing up the bottom, using the strength of the disease to get through to the addict.
   
    Along with the evidence of the person's addiction, all enabling—all of the slack being taken up by others for the addict—is now at an end. That's right, booby: no one pays your rent, no one calls in for you at work or school when you're hung over, no one bails you out of jail, no one covers for you in class or at work, no one pays for you when you're using what you can get to buy drugs.

    What's more, your options are either to go into treatment and successfully complete it, or get out. Out of the marriage, out of the family, out of the house, out of the job, out of our lives. We love you and wish you well, but we are not going with you on your trip down to hell.

    It worked on me.
   
    It's also worked on a lot of men, women and children I know. It has also failed a lot of times. I've attended enough funerals to know who is winning this battle between the disease of addiction and the human race.

    So, where do you put your effort to do the most good?

    This applies to families and employers: Intervention: Bring the pain level up for your target addict. First, you need to get the training you'll need for an intervention. Before that, you'll need to find a counselor who knows what he or she is doing to provide the training. The market in Maine right now is choked with counselors who, with a few courses and a state certificate, couldn't find sand at the beach.  Filled with the arrogance of ignorance, they'll manage to shuck a few hundred or thousand dollars out of you and the addict before the addict finally quits altogether. There are a few exceptions, but finding them is your first challenge.

    Counselors: Find out where they were trained, how much training they've had and in what. Find out their views concerning treatment and Twelve Step programs. Find out what experience the counselor has. Is the counselor a recovering addict with some good sobriety behind him? Does the counselor attend regular program meetings? Ask the counselor to ask a few of his clients if he can give you their names so you can talk to them. You need to know: Does this guy know what he's doing? Lives depend on it.

    Important clue: If your prospective counselor doesn't think Twelve Step programs or treatment are really necessary, run, do not walk, to the nearest exit.


    Families have to do this work themselves, and it is important work. As I said, lives depend on it. This is just as true, though, for businesses, unions, and government employers. Having a substantial part of your work force hung over, high, or wired on drugs is costing you more than money, and having some clown from your health provider come down and put on a song and dance for the workers isn't going to cut it. You need competent, experienced, successful help.

    Now, let's say the intervention on your target addict is successful and the addict agrees to go into treatment. Where does he or she go? Where do you send them? If it was someone I loved, I'd send them to Fairview Recovery Services in Minneapolis, Minnesota and I'll tell you why.


    The Minneapolis rehab I went through, Saint Mary's, now called Fairview, worked with the Johnson Institute and was the prototype for the 28 day rehabilitation program. We considered ourselves the West Point of 28-day rehabs and we are real snobs about it. Under the name of Saint Mary's, this rehab began the effective treatment programs in the middle 'Sixties, and it has trained the staffs of rehabilitation hospitals all around the country, including a number of them here in Maine. When I got out of rehab in January of 1982, I did aftercare at the Seaton Unit in Waterville, whose staff I was informed had been trained by St. Mary's. I naturally became interested in the Seaton program, therefore, and learned by observation that they were doing their rehab program the same way that Saint Mary's had been doing it fifteen years earlier.

    Things have changed since the 'Sixties. I don't ride missiles in typhoons, stuff that worked at St. Mary's was improved, things that didn't work were either changed or dropped. Now it's almost forty years since Saint Mary's began it's program, and from what I can tell from the grads at Seaton, that unit is still doing it the way they were twenty years ago.

    Now, a caveat. I am not up to date about what is currently being done in Maine regarding chemical dependency rehabilitation. I got discouraged some time ago. Besides, I'm a writer, not an addiction therapist. For all I know, in deep secret, Seaton, Kelly, Westbrook, and the rest have completely overhauled their facilities, programs, and procedures and are completely up to date with the latest techniques employed by comprehensively trained modern staffs thoroughly integrated with the communities' Twelve Step support facilities.

    But, if that is the case, one wonders why they don't tell someone.

    But, I don't know, which is why I'd send my addict to a place I do know will be competent and will do the best possible job in treating the entire family. I don't know what it would take to overhaul and upgrade our local rehabs. Simply throwing money in their direction is pointless. We're not talking wages or facilities; we're talking about program method, content, and direction as well as increasing the overall level of competence. I suspect that competition—having their business go elsewhere—might work best.

    If you are employed by any of Maine's rehabs, or have been treated there, I don't mean to upset you. Rehabs in Maine are often similar to substandard center city schools: A kid determined to get an education can get an education at any school. An alcoholic or addict determined to recover can achieve recovery through any rehab. It's a matter of putting the addict wanting recovery where his or her chances of recovery are the best. When I went through rehab, Saint Mary's in Minneapolis had a recovery rate of 33 percent based on who was still in recovery at the end of their follow up period. Another third would relapse and need one or more additional treatments before they made it into recovery, and the remaining third went out and stayed out until they died.
 
    When I was going through treatment, I thought those recovery figures really sucked. I told this to one of the facilitators at Seaton and she replied that I must be mistaken about my rehab's recovery rate—it was much, much too high. On a plane trip a few years ago I was seated next to a fellow who was a nurse in a Methadone clinic in Chicago. When the subject turned to respective recovery from addiction rates, he said the recovery rate at his clinic was very discouraging. It was near zero.


    I personally want Maine to have the best trained, most up to date rehab facilities in the world, but that is not up to me. What is up to me is where I go when I need help and where I recommend others send those they care about.

Children: Recovery or Not?

    What I'd like to conclude with is what you can do, in addition to intervention and rehab, to help support a recovering addict in your own family once they either return from treatment or decide to try Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous.  Here is a telephone number: 1-800-974-0062. That is the NA Help Line. Or you can tell the kid to call up the NA web site on the net. Every phone book has the local number for AA, as well. Tell your kid that any of these sources can supply the newly recovering addict with information on the nearest NA and AA meetings. By calling in, your kid can even get a ride if he or she needs one.

    In rehab, even the outdated ones, your child will have been told that he or she is not responsible for getting the disease. They are told, however, that they are responsible for what they do about it: their recovery. Cut those apron strings at least in this regard, and do not go with your children to the meetings. In those meetings, the kid needs to focus on his or her recovery, not worry about putting on a performance to please you. For all you know, your kid is madder than hell at you and needs a place to express it without fear of retribution. If you want to go to a meeting, look up the number for Al-Anon. If you want sanity to enter your life, go to the meetings and keep coming back.

    Something else: You say you have a recovering addict at home and you still drink or use drugs? Stop. The odds for recovery—at best, never very good—fall through the floor if a person is trying to recover in a household where someone else is drinking, smoking, popping pills, shooting up, or is otherwise doing drugs.

    "But my daughter says it doesn't bother her."

    As though no kid ever lied to please a parent.

    Recovering addicts, which includes recovering alcoholics, are bothered by drugs, which includes alcohol in all of its forms.

    "Well, it's just beer and wine."

    They helped buy me my ticket into rehab.

    "But,  I don't use addictively," as though an addict could tell.

    I don't care. It doesn't matter whether you are using addictively or not. You need to get the stuff and all of its paraphernalia out of the house. The pot, the pills, the whiskey, the beer, the pipes, the bongs, the needles, the Jimmy Hendrix posters—get rid of them.
    You're trying to support your spouse or child in his or her efforts to recover from a disease that kills forty or more sufferers for every one it's forced to let live. Not one of the ones who made it did so on half-measures.
    Quit. Sober up, get clean, and get the stuff—all of the stuff—off the property.
    If you aren't an addict, it should not be a problem. If you can't be happy without the stuff, well . . . ask your recovering alcoholic or addict if you can borrow the meeting list. There are enough meetings so that you can attend a different one.

    Home isn't the worst problem for the addict leaving treatment. A boy or a girl in high school trying to get and stay clean is the lowest success in recovery age group. When the kid leaves treatment and returns to school, there are still a lot of boys and girls in school using drugs, as well as teachers, all of whom make the recovering high school addict an outcast for trying to stop.

     Why this pressure?

    Well, getting caught and getting clean draws attention to drug use at school, which is never popular among using teachers and students. The recovering addict usually knows who the other druggies are, and even if he doesn't, the other druggies think he does. The using addicts worry about being narced or ratted out.

    Using addicts are also frightened that sobriety—being clean—being a power of example—is catching. If it's possible for your kid to look at his life and clean up his act, the other addicts at school feel pressured to do the same. Instead of doing so, however, their answer is to try to get your kid back into the potions, herbs, and powders. If your kid goes back to the chemicals, no one has to look at anything. It's party time. There is a criminal amount of pressure to go back and use drugs put on recovering kids in school.

    You want to see a peer counseling group that can do some actual good? Seek out other kids in recovery, faculty members who are in recovery, and put together an on-campus support group for your school, even if you have to borrow them from other schools to get started. In addition to regular Twelve Step meetings, that would work. That would increase your kid's chances of surviving this disease.

    And you? In the face of this disease, what do you do?

    If at this point you're not in rehab or going to Twelve Step meetings yourself because you don't drink or use drugs, look in the phone book and on the web and find out about Al-Anon. Find out about Naranon. These are Twelve Step programs for friends and relatives of alcoholics and addicts. The subject is how to let go with love, and if you have ever said, "Well, he's the one with the problem!" you qualify. It's called "the family disease" because it doesn't matter who ingests the chemical, everyone gets sick.

    Incidentally, the number one symptom of codependency is the same as it is for addiction: Denial. If you're arguing with yourself about whether to go or not, take a look at who is holding down the other side of that argument. That slight smell of brimstone in the air is the dragon.

    Love, good intentions, common sense, obvious answers, political slogans, and useless and outdated methodologies have greased the skids to hell for a great many people I love—and that you love. As a sponsor once told me, "If nothing changes, it all stays the same."


    "To escape from a prison, one must first accept that one is in a prison."

    I'm on the other side of that wall now. I'm not special on that account. I'm very lucky. When I needed them, people who knew what they were doing—interveners, treatment personnel, and Twelve Step fellowships—were there for me.  I am grateful for that. But I've been to too many damned funerals. What would lift my heart is for all of us to be on the other side of that wall.