Rob Russo (RobR62) found SMART Recovery several years ago and immediately clicked with the program. Six months in, he took the facilitator training and now facilitates three SROL meetings a week. Rob provides a space for other to connect and learn from one another in their continued path to recovery.

Watch on our YouTube channel

Learn more about becoming a SMART volunteer

Find Rob’s SROL meetings

Subscribe to the SMART Recovery YouTube Channel

Video storytelling is a powerful tool in recovery, and we are proud to share our SMART Recovery content free-of-charge, available anywhere, on any device. Our videos hope to inform, entertain, and inspire anyone in the recovery community.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel and be notified every time we release a new video.

PLEASE NOTE BEFORE YOU COMMENT:

SMART Recovery welcomes comments on our blog posts—we enjoy hearing from you! In the interest of maintaining a respectful and safe community atmosphere, we ask that you adhere to the following guidelines when making or responding to others’ comments, regardless of your point of view. Thank you.

• Be kind in tone and intent.
• Be respectful in how you respond to opinions that are different than your own.
• Be brief and limit your comment to a maximum of 500 words.
• Be careful not to mention specific drug names.
• Be succinct in your descriptions, graphic details are not necessary.
• Be focused on the content of the blog post itself.

If you are interested in addiction recovery support, we encourage you to visit the SMART Recovery website.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

If you or someone you love is in great distress and considering self-harm, please call 911 for immediate help, or reach out to The National Suicide Prevention Hotline @800-273-8255, https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/

We look forward to you joining the conversation!

*SMART Recovery reserves the right to not publish comments we consider outside our guidelines.*

SMART Recovery is partnering with researchers from the University of New Mexico for a study on alcohol recovery. Using the PERMA Model, Positive emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishments, they will evaluate the profiles among individuals who self-identify as being in recovery from alcohol use disorder (AUD), to help bridge the gap between the fields of positive psychology and addiction.

Study participants:

• Must be 18+
• Must take the two, online surveys in English
• Must identify as in recovery from an alcohol use disorder
• Will receive Amazon gift cards totaling $30

The study is open until Monday, May 16, 2022 or when the 250 number participants is reached, whichever is first.

For questions, please contact: Lead Researcher, Hannah Carlon, [email protected]

PLEASE NOTE BEFORE YOU COMMENT:

SMART Recovery welcomes comments on our blog posts—we enjoy hearing from you! In the interest of maintaining a respectful and safe community atmosphere, we ask that you adhere to the following guidelines when making or responding to others’ comments, regardless of your point of view. Thank you.

• Be kind in tone and intent.
• Be respectful in how you respond to opinions that are different than your own.
• Be brief and limit your comment to a maximum of 500 words.
• Be careful not to mention specific drug names.
• Be succinct in your descriptions, graphic details are not necessary.
• Be focused on the content of the blog post itself.

If you are interested in addiction recovery support, we encourage you to visit the SMART Recovery website.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

If you or someone you love is in great distress and considering self-harm, please call 911 for immediate help, or reach out to The National Suicide Prevention Hotline @ 800-273-8255, https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/

We look forward to you joining the conversation!

*SMART Recovery reserves the right to not publish comments we consider outside our guidelines.*

Dr. Nora Volkow recently spoke to the SMART Recovery community about how the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) is taking a holistic approach to helping those with substance use issues through prevention, treatment, and after care. As a follow up to that conversation, we talked with Dr. Wilson Compton, Deputy Director of NIDA and Dr. Will Aklin, Director of the Behavior Therapy Development Program, about the research happening in the advancement of substance use treatments.

In this podcast, they talk about:

• How their college professors got them excited and passionate about careers in scientific research
• Medications that help with various addictions, including a new focus on stimulant use disorders
• Bridging the gap between treatment and recovery
• Individualized, personal treatments
• Examples of harm reduction measures
• Creating a net positive to society
• The four pillars of overdose strategy: primary prevention, harm reduction, and evidence-based treatment, and recovery support
• Explaining the value of CBT and MAT
• How research helps us understand the impact of mutual support and recovery
• The research behind using Contingency Management to shape positive behavior
• Making treatment less intimidating and more welcoming
• Working across boundaries and departments, within the government, to address the drug abuse problems and find solutions

Additional resources:

Click here to find all of SMART Recovery’s podcasts

PLEASE NOTE BEFORE YOU COMMENT:

SMART Recovery welcomes comments on our blog posts—we enjoy hearing from you! In the interest of maintaining a respectful and safe community atmosphere, we ask that you adhere to the following guidelines when making or responding to others’ comments, regardless of your point of view. Thank you.

• Be kind in tone and intent.
• Be respectful in how you respond to opinions that are different than your own.
• Be brief and limit your comment to a maximum of 500 words.
• Be careful not to mention specific drug names.
• Be succinct in your descriptions, graphic details are not necessary.
• Be focused on the content of the blog post itself.

If you are interested in addiction recovery support, we encourage you to visit the SMART Recovery website.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

If you or someone you love is in great distress and considering self-harm, please call 911 for immediate help, or reach out to The National Suicide Prevention Hotline @ 800-273-8255, https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/

We look forward to you joining the conversation!

*SMART Recovery reserves the right to not publish comments we consider outside our guidelines.*

Fellowship Hall, a 96-bed private, not-for-profit specialty hospital offering abstinence-based alcohol and drug treatment based on the 12-Step Model of Recovery, located on a serene 120-acre country setting in Greensboro, NC, is currently seeking a Part-time Evening Front Desk Receptionist to work Monday-Friday, 4p-8p. Fellowship Hall has been established for 45 years and enjoys a stellar reputation as one of the premier treatment providers in the country. Our facility has been accredited by Joint Commission since 1974, and we offer inpatient care, detoxification, partial hospital, intensive outpatient, family programming, extended treatment, and structured living. We draw our guests from North and South Carolina, Virginia, and 23 other States.

The Evening Front Desk Receptionist position is responsible for three primary areas:

• Reception activities including but not limited to: answering all incoming calls to the facility, registering all visitors and providing services to the guests such as making change, selling stamps, accessing the safe, etc.
• Assist the Admissions team with new admissions from arrival until they are admitted.
• General office work, including scanning of documents, insurance cards and IDs, creating door tags, tracking packages,
• Assist with COVID screenings and temperature checks for all staff and visitors arriving to campus during shift.
• Order supplies and manage inventory of supplies. Coordinate distribution of special request supplies.
• Supporting Accounts Payable duties by managing invoice approvals, entering invoices for payment, paying invoices, and managing any questions or concerns from vendors.
• Providing support to the Outreach Department by manning the online chat system during the evening hours

Minimum Education: High School Diploma

Minimum Experience: 3 Years as receptionist or customer service-related work

Preferred Education: Workshops and inservices in substance abuse

Skills: Telephone communication proficiency
Good interpersonal relationship skills
Computer skills, proficient in Excel and WORD
Good organizational skills, Ability to multi-task
Exceptional customer service skills, internal and external
High degree of professionalism
Independently self-productive
Teamwork and Collaboration skills

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Dr. Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), recently published an article in Health Affairs Magazine that many in the recovery community consider “a game changer” in how it challenged received wisdom and old assumptions in the treatment of addicted individuals. In this interview, Dr. Tom Horvath, co-founder of SMART Recovery, assesses the article’s impact and how it may change the face of the recovery landscape forever.

Watch on our YouTube channel

Read Dr. Volkow’s article in Health Affairs Magazine

Watch Dr. Volkow’s lecture

Subscribe to the SMART Recovery YouTube Channel

Video storytelling is a powerful tool in recovery, and we are proud to share our SMART Recovery content free-of-charge, available anywhere, on any device. Our videos hope to inform, entertain, and inspire anyone in the recovery community.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel and be notified every time we release a new video.

PLEASE NOTE BEFORE YOU COMMENT:

SMART Recovery welcomes comments on our blog posts—we enjoy hearing from you! In the interest of maintaining a respectful and safe community atmosphere, we ask that you adhere to the following guidelines when making or responding to others’ comments, regardless of your point of view. Thank you.

• Be kind in tone and intent.
• Be respectful in how you respond to opinions that are different than your own.
• Be brief and limit your comment to a maximum of 500 words.
• Be careful not to mention specific drug names.
• Be succinct in your descriptions, graphic details are not necessary.
• Be focused on the content of the blog post itself.

If you are interested in addiction recovery support, we encourage you to visit the SMART Recovery website.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

If you or someone you love is in great distress and considering self-harm, please call 911 for immediate help, or reach out to The National Suicide Prevention Hotline @800-273-8255, https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/

We look forward to you joining the conversation!

*SMART Recovery reserves the right to not publish comments we consider outside our guidelines.*

“. . . the individual, family and community are not separate; they are one. To injure one is to injure all; to heal one is to heal all. – from The Red Road to Wellbriety, 2002” – as quoted by William White, Recovery Rising

Perhaps the most important insight in recent recovery history is that recovery community, through collaborative effort leads to restoration not only in individual lives but supports healing across entire communities, in all their diversity. Recovery capital is a function of self and community agency. We saw that insight take form twenty years ago, highlighted in the writings of Bill White, Don Coyhis and many others. Bill wrote about recovery rising and community as the primary change agent of healing. Don wrote about incorporating native community methods into healing processes. Not narrowly defined peer service, but the capacity of community to heal itself. It works across America in modestly supported pockets. Developing recovery capital is fundamentally about resourcing and supporting diverse communities to address their own needs. This meets a lot of resistance.  

We need to examine these headwinds if we are to keep moving forward. It is critical to take a hard look at how the recovery community gets sidelined and coopted in subtle or not so subtle ways. Head winds that create barriers to self and community agentry must be fixed if we are to get more Americans into wellness. These forces often stem from homeostasis, even as the state of things is woefully inadequate to the tasks at hand.

If we can reach a point where our voices are included in matters about us, our communities are strengthened, and we have real equity in the systems that serve us, headwinds can become tailwinds. To change, people and systems alike must come to terms with the impact of stigma on our recovery community. We must acknowledge that stigma of addiction and the discounting of persons with lived experiences is commonplace across all of our institutions. Stigma in the SUD realm often plays out across four interrelated dynamics:

• Cultural appropriation – The inappropriate or unacknowledged adoption of an element or elements of one culture or identity by members of another culture or identity. This is particularly true in respect to marginalized groups, which include the recovery community. Recovery initiatives not grounded in recovery are titled and run as such; treatment organizations rebrand services as recovery oriented for funding. Projects to collect our stories by outsiders are funded. Foundational elements of the recovery movement get appropriated when they become valuable. This extends to the very notion of recovery and all of its facets.
• Colonization – The action or process of settling among and establishing control over an indigenous people (in this case the recovery community). Control over what happens in the environment is delegated by entities in power to groups outside of the indigenous community to sustain control. This serves to undermine and inhibit the capacity of the inhabitants of recovery community to manage their own healing.
• – Healing methods and those permitted to provide such services shift away from the very recovery community who developed them. Barriers are erected to keep the marginalized group out in ways that the dominant group does not want or to prevent any shift of power to the marginalized group. Services become harder to provide. These barriers have the most severe and disparate impact on persons who are members of other marginalized groups, like BIPOC recovery communities.
• Cooptation – People from outside of recovery community organizations are placed in power over the role and function of recovery community groups to maintain the status quo. This serves to keep the recovery communities from developing a greater degree of agency over their own healing.

These are serious concerns not often spoken about in open dialogue out of very real risks of retribution but commonly discussed behind closed doors within the recovery community. Over the years, I have spoken to people around the nation in the recovery community who talk about how these dynamics play out. They include:

• Events or services initiated by the recovery community get taken over by treatment agencies or the government. We end up fighting to retain even window dressing levels of inclusion in our own projects.
• Pedagogy developed by us and for us get taken away and end up under the control of our bureaucracies, who then place barriers for us to access these very same methods of instruction. The process of learning and service provision begins to replicate the very challenges that they were developed to navigate around.  
• Recovery communities are disparately resourced, instead academic, and large human service organizations get the lion share of resources. When funding is set up for us, recovery community groups are often pitted against each other for scraps. This creates further divisions that sustains an unhealthy homeostasis.
• Who has control over our stories matters! Our stories get clipped into other groups agendas. We get written out of our own history. Our stories must be handled in ethical ways. Communities who are written out of their own teachings cease to exist in a generation. Revisionist history replaces the authentic history.

Even the most well-intentioned policy makers often end up unintentionally reinforcing these dynamics. Stigma is that powerful and that entrenched. If you are in a position of authority over our communities and you see people asking a lot of hard questions or becoming upset by what you are doing, perhaps share some of the power and strive to understand it and seek remedy in collaborative ways to strengthen agentry. The more common reaction is to quash it. Shut it down and move the process forward to meet predetermined objectives.

Signs of affirming recovery community agentry:

• Systems that affirm our very right to define ourselves and keep in check ever-present tendencies to define and control us have a better opportunity to effectively strengthen recovery through collaborative action.
• Systems accountable to those of us they serve and open to this responsibility with a sensitivity to the most marginalized subgroups can augment our strengths, engender trust and lead to more effective outcomes.
• As Recovery Capital is a function of community and is not just and individual process, systems that ensure that resources get to the members of the community are telegraphing that they understand communities are best suited to affect their own healing. The opposite of paternalistic care, which is rooted in stigma.

Last year, I did a series of interviews with some of the pioneers of the New Advocacy Recovery Movement. One of the parts of the interview with Bev Haberle that resonated with me as fundamental in a recovery-oriented change processes is the centering of our efforts in community grounded ethics. During this interview with Bev, when I asked what she was most concerned about in respect to the future, she expressed a concern that we may end up falling backwards if not careful to pay attention to ethics grounded in the community served. She noted:

“I recall one of the Recovery Community Centers I was involved with and how much effort we put into building an authentic advisory group. People who served on this advisory group / vision team were charged with keeping us focused on the needs of the community and making sure everything we did was done with high ethical standards. They were charged with being stewards of quality recovery support services that meet the needs of the local Community being served. There was a lot of open discussion about what we were doing and we worked hard to make sure we stayed true to our community mission. They often spotted things the rest of us missed. People coming into our centers with what on the face of it looked like beneficial things but who had hidden agendas or self-dealing schemes. As a leader, I knew we needed them as our anchor to our mission.”

Well-functioning systems spend a lot of energy examining ethics and making sure that they run in adherence to good principles. Even the best-intentioned systems do unintentional harm, but the best of them actively work to minimize and fix those harms. In Pennsylvania, we have horrific examples of disparate treatment of the recovery community. It happens in other states as well. What harms one of us harms us all. I see recovering people leaving our field in droves because of the impact of moral injury, as I noted in this article in Treatment Magazine last May:  

“Being in recovery makes many of us “those people” who end up getting disparate care. Every time I see it, I recognize it could be me getting disparate care and insurmountable barriers to accessing help. I could have ended up in a body bag instead of having a life. Every single day this very long week, I have spent time on the phone with people describing care denials of life-sustaining medical interventions under the lens of seeing addiction as a moral failing by licensed medical professionals, persons in long-term recovery who are being denied employment for decades-old legal charges and more. It is a normal week. It also hurts my soul.”

Disparate treatment creates systemic wounds that require healing. Healthy systems welcome tough dialogues and seek healing solutions to these wounds, dysfunctional systems shut down those discussions as too difficult and end up causing even deeper scars. What harms one of us harms us all. What heals one of us heals us all. These are tough subjects, but the work to heal these wounds can shift our headwinds to tailwinds and help heal whole communities. Ignoring these wounds deepen these harms and prevent collective healing. What kind of system of care do we want? The one I want to create deals with the tough stuff head on. If this was an easy process, we would have fixed it decades ago, it remains the challenge before us.      

Many people have others in their lives that struggle with alcohol addiction – or struggle with addiction themselves. However, because of the stigma around addiction, help is often not received as those with addiction problems keep their struggles bottled up inside. They fear societal repercussions of admitting their problem and seeking help. They may not even know who they can confide in, or where they should begin looking for help.

Alcohol Awareness Month, established by the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence (NCADD), takes place every April with the goal of educating people about the dangers of alcohol abuse and reducing the stigma surrounding addiction and recovery, so that those most in need of help feel comfortable asking for it. If your loved one is struggling with alcohol abuse, or if you yourself have been struggling, Alcohol Awareness Month urges you to seek help, start important conversations, and be a support system for those around you who might be struggling.

If you find yourself asking “How can I participate in Alcohol Awareness Month?”, use these suggestions to get an idea of what the month is all about.

Have difficult conversations with loved ones who might be struggling with addiction.

If you’ve noticed that a loved one is relying on heavy drinking to cope with stress, sit them down and talk it out in a low-pressure, relaxed environment. Let them know you’re there for them without judgement or accusation. Offer to help them find treatment or Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings in their area. Be a steady, unwavering support system for your loved one when they need it most. This could be the conversation your loved one needs to serve as a catalyst for seeking help and treatment. Or, they may continue feeling like they’re not ready to get help. Persist in communicating with your loved one in a firm yet loving way, helping guide them to the right decision.

For a comprehensive list of nearby AA meetings by state and city, visit the official site at https://alcoholicsanonymous.com/

Change attitudes.

You might have certain preconceived notions related to alcohol use and those who suffer from addiction. Actively work to change these stereotypes and redirect your thinking in a more positive, helpful way.

There are countless books, essays, and online articles revolving around the subject of alcohol abuse and addiction. Put in the effort to help your loved one succeed and begin doing your own research – maybe even begin attending Al-Anon support groups, which are similar to AA meetings but held specifically for family members and loved ones close to those suffering from addiction.

For a comprehensive list of nearby Al-Anon meetings by state and city, visit https://findrecovery.com/alanon_meetings/

Work to change attitudes of those around you as well. For example, sit down with younger kids and talk openly about alcohol use in the hopes of changing their own attitudes and continuing to erase stigma. Discuss healthy coping mechanisms with them and emphasize that negative feelings and situations cannot be erased with alcohol use.

Throw a clean party!

Those dealing with alcohol addiction often feel pressured to drink in party settings with their peers, who may or may not also suffer from addiction. They might feel like it is impossible to have fun or be social without alcohol. As a support system to a loved one suffering from addiction, give them an opportunity to see how enjoyable an alcohol-free lifestyle can be. Host a gathering where drinking alcohol is explicitly prohibited. Serve other drinks like mocktails, club sodas, root beers, and any other fun concoctions.

Since beginning in 1987, Alcohol Awareness Month has made a concerted effort to save countless lives nationwide from alcohol-related deaths by making people more aware of alcohol abuse and encouraging them to spread the word and help others. Take the message of Alcohol Awareness Month and apply it throughout the entire year – be a light for others in need and spread hope!

***

For more information, resources, and encouragement, “like” the Fellowship Hall Facebook page and follow us on Instagram at @FellowshipHallNC.

About Fellowship Hall

For 50 years, Fellowship Hall has been saving lives. We are a 99-bed, private, not-for-profit alcohol and drug treatment center located on 120 tranquil acres in Greensboro, N.C. We provide treatment and evidence-based programs built upon the Twelve-Step model of recovery. We have been accredited by The Joint Commission since 1974 as a specialty hospital and are a member of the National Association of Addiction Treatment Providers. We are committed to providing exceptional, compassionate care to every individual we serve.

SMART Recovery was proud to feature Dr. Nora Volkow, Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), as the inaugural presenter of the Jonathan Von Breton Memorial Lecture Series.

Her presentation was an eye-opening and informative Master Class in how NIDA-funded research programs and initiatives are yielding scientifically quantifiable results in addiction prevention, treatment, and after care.  She touched on a broad range of topics including more progressive and pragmatic ways to help individuals with Opioid Use Disorders (OUDs) through adaptations in the judicial system, increased role of telemedicine, Naloxone overdose education kits, take-home Methadone protocols, safe injection sites, syringe service programs, and free Fentanyl test strips to combat the tens of millions of Fentanyl-laced street drugs flooding the United States every year.  Dr. Volkow also shared data about the critical role that peer support programs play in intervention, addiction treatment and after-care, especially in the penal system, youth programs, and rural recovery settings. 

SMART Recovery is proud to be a long-time supporter of these and similar strategies, reflected in our successful NIDA-Funded InsideOut Program: A SMART Recovery Correctional Program®, Teen & Young Adults Program, and the Fletcher Group Rural Centers of Excellence initiative to bring SMART Recovery mutual support meetings to rural recovery homes across America.  Especially noteworthy was Dr. Volkow’s strongly-stated position on the need to overcome the stigma associated with addiction treatment so that more individuals feel empowered to get the help that they need, a position shared by SMART Recovery and reflected in our current Take on Addiction campaign.  

Watch the presentation on our YouTube channel.

Click here to view the presentation slides.

PLEASE NOTE BEFORE YOU COMMENT:

SMART Recovery welcomes comments on our blog posts—we enjoy hearing from you! In the interest of maintaining a respectful and safe community atmosphere, we ask that you adhere to the following guidelines when making or responding to others’ comments, regardless of your point of view. Thank you.

• Be kind in tone and intent.
• Be respectful in how you respond to opinions that are different than your own.
• Be brief and limit your comment to a maximum of 500 words.
• Be careful not to mention specific drug names.
• Be succinct in your descriptions, graphic details are not necessary.
• Be focused on the content of the blog post itself.

If you are interested in addiction recovery support, we encourage you to visit the SMART Recovery website.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

If you or someone you love is in great distress and considering self-harm, please call 911 for immediate help, or reach out to The National Suicide Prevention Hotline @ 800-273-8255, https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/

We look forward to you joining the conversation!

*SMART Recovery reserves the right to not publish comments we consider outside our guidelines.*

“I don’t even agree with myself 100% of the time” – me

It is a tongue in cheek self-quote. Cheap, but true and relevant to the piece. Perhaps you may even identify with it. Afterall, we all hold views that seem contrary or in conflict with each other. It is the essence of the human condition. What we understand evolves over time in a lifelong process.

Harnessing ways to improve our capacity to understand complex, multifaceted issues like addiction and recovery are vital to improving our outcomes. We need to evolve our thinking to do so.  It would serve us well to bring people together to examine our assumptions in service of common goals.  Strategies that move us forward and not pit us against each other as we also have a long history of enduring.  

We have examples grounded in our own history of people come together to accomplish hard things. This is why it is vital to understand what has come before us, to examine strategies that worked, develop insight into why they worked and consider what may have been missed or done in ways we can learn from to effect improved strategies moving forward. We also have to consider how to use what we learn to overcome new challenges.

I have been reflecting on my own (evolving) views on the New Recovery Advocacy Movement. At the beginning of the era in the 90s, I was working in a publicly funded treatment program. The very same organization I found help at over a decade before in the mid 80’s. Filled with people who understood and lived within the culture of recovery. I place I felt understood and supported. Where I was greeted with a lot of positive regard and empathy by people who had walked similar paths to the one I was on. I had a lot of say over my own treatment, including duration, frequency of services and content of my sessions. The very things I later found myself trying to protect as administrative burden and staffing regulations that served as barriers to recovering people entering into the workforce multiplied. Reimbursement rates inconsistent with the tasks at hand that made it increasingly challenging to deliver the very services that saved my life years earlier.

By the late 90s, I was reading the writings of Bill White on recovery-oriented systems of care and running the program I had been served in years earlier. I liked a lot of what he said, but other things I did not appreciate at all. I thought he was unfair to treatment and the contributions that many of us in recovery were making. While I had mixed feelings about what he was saying, I applied the recovery principle of examining and exploring my own discomfort to see if I was missing something. Looking for and examining my own blind spots.

I recall reaching out to him during this era to explore what he was writing about. I was pleasantly surprised when he wrote back. We had several great conversations. I felt heard. I better understood what he was writing about. I started to see more clearly what he was saying about the erosion of recovery in our systems of care. I increasingly agreed with his views as I grew to understand them. I suspect that such gradual shifting views through his writings and polite and respectful dialogue about these concepts helped change a lot of views in that era. We overcame the forces of division by embracing our recovery values.

I gradually came to understand that he was most critical of acute treatment models that were not oriented towards long-term recovery. The subtle erosion of focus on recovery in our care systems. An SUD workforce that has fewer and fewer people in it who had lived experience with recovery. Too many workers who had no frame of reference of what the people they were serving experienced in their respective recovery journeys. A system that increasingly failed to deliver the care and support people needed to heal. Thoughts that resonated with a lot of our community nationally. People coalesced around the emerging concepts to address these concerns.

His writings influenced and helped shift my views, but I had also been open to understanding his perspectives where they challenged my own views. I was open to examining my own confirmation bias. It got me to thinking about writing as a medium to explore ideas. It is a vital medium. Is a written article intended to be something etched in stone so that every word is to be considered as unending truth? Do we use writing to evolve ideas, to develop deeper insights and to find common ground, or to cancel out seemingly oppositional views and those who hold those perspectives?  

Few mediums allow us to explore ideas like the written word. I am also not sure anything else is as effective. But it takes time and energy to write and to read. One facet of how it is changing comes from social media, which has changed the way we write and think. Social media uses algorithms that feed into our own confirmation biases and allow us to avoid different ways of thinking or uncomfortable truths. It can magnify our worst traits. This article notes how rude behavior spreads like the flu on social media, a breeding ground for negative behavior. It can be used as a powerful bludgeon to shut down discourse and stifle thought and expression which unfolds in a Spiral of Silence. Dynamics toxic to positive change. How do we overcome these formidable barriers that make it harder to hold common ground? How do we make sure we spend enough time with not entirely likeminded people who are civil so we can examine our own views more deeply?

All communication is imperfect, every medium has flaws as do the sender and receiver. Yet most of our shining moments in world history center on times we overcame these challenges to champion greater truths. Our finest moments as a species relate to overcoming our differences. Yet, a lot of forces push against the dynamics of positive change. A good book on the topic is Them, Why We Hate Each Other–and How to Heal by Ben Sasse. My takeaway line from his book is that we no longer unite on things we agree on, we come together focused on things we hate. These two things have very different energies. Hate is a very destructive force. It seems far too often these days that hate and division are winning. We cannot let it. We cannot let darkness to prevail over light.

We also have to start by acknowledging the inherent flaws of our communication mediums and our own powers of perception. I did not fully appreciate what Bill White was saying in those early days because I was working as hard as I could to accomplish similar goals inside the system he was being critical of. I initially focused on his criticisms and what I thought they meant rather than what he was trying to say and our common ground. I could have reflexively rejected everything. To be lazy and reject his valid points where they challenged my beliefs. Instead, I chose to explore what he was saying with as open a mind as possible. Others did too.

We must examine our own flaws and blind spots in order to understand our common ground. Challenging our own flawed perception is a fundamental process in recovery. We do this to overcome addiction and can apply it in other ways as well. It is one of our superpowers.

Some thoughts emerge in respect to what we do next and things we should remain mindful of:

• All communicators are imperfect despite our best efforts.
• All communication mediums are imperfect. We need to factor this into how we receive information.
• All receivers of information are imperfect. We all have blind spots and biases.

When we consider those truths, we may:

• Question our own reactions to what we see and hear as we are imperfect receivers of information. Doing so can offer clues in our own biases and assumptions and help us see the truths in other perspectives.
• We collectively benefit when we evolve our ideas over time to identify our common ground.
• We cannot build anything up in the long run by diminishing each other.
• We have a lot to lose if we do not figure out ways to find and hold common ground. Not just in the recovery movement, but as a society in general.

Some open questions:

• How do we overcome the barriers created through social media and reduced social connection?
• What are our responsibilities to those who fought hard for us to get here and to those depending on us to carry this work to the next generation?
• What are our agreements on how we express and receive ideas across our ideological camps?  
• What do we stand to lose if we simply maintain the status quo?

We have some decisions to make about what we do and how we do it. What we do will determine how we will:

• Strengthen long term recovery facilitated by our diverse communities for our diverse communities.
• Ensure that our voices are included in meaningful ways in all matters that impact us.
• Develop future leaders and expand recovery to every American with a substance use issue.

We have a big agenda. Are we going to be big enough to come together to serve it effectively? History shows us we can when we decide to do so, together. The question is will we?

The answer to how we do so starts with each one of us and the effort we take to understand and incorporate our varying views into a broad recovery plank.

If effectively addressing addiction was easy and straightforward, we would have done so already. In reality, it is a multifaceted condition that defies narrow solutions. There are complex genetic and environmental factors that lend themselves more to a continuum of use, problematic use and addiction that is not consistent with either / or check box definitions we tend to use. This is why we still grapple with how to define and address addiction over so many decades. Oversimplifying the continuum of substance use dependence and its consequences remain a significant factor in why we have not developed society wide support.  

We have had our successes. Twenty years ago, the recovery community focused on long term, multiple pathway recovery strategies in order to expand recovery efforts across our entire society. Thank you, SAMHSA for spearheading it! We worked to shift efforts from acute care treatment to longer term community-based recovery-oriented efforts. It resonated because it was exactly what was needed at the time. Despite our diversity as a recovery community, we have often found common ground and goals in civil, solution focused discussions. This is an example of a strategy we did collaboratively with many groups working together. Our efforts paid dividends. Developing services that were widely supported by highlighting the value of recovery rather than focus on the pathology was key. But another facet of what worked is that we did so without sugar coating the devastation of addiction within our families and our communities.  

We should not ignore that when a severe substance use disorder (SUD) remains unaddressed, it ravages our entire society. In Portugal they have what they call Dissuasion Commissions that can pressure people to seek help (which is on demand, another thing we do not have) for good reason. They got rid of open-air drug markets. Portugal decriminalizing drugs but did not de-penalize drug use, a distinction I often hear missed. We should pay attention, even as our society is very different than Portugal. We seem to be only focusing on part of their solution. It is what we seem to do best.

How do we provide more nuanced messaging to support helping persons who experience problematic drug use with dignity and respect, while balancing the unique risks of drug use and addiction to our society? I recently ran across an article that Dr Keith Humphreys wrote that seems relevant to how we frame and address addiction as a condition, “how to Deliver a More Persuasive Message Regarding Addiction as a Medical Disorder.” I think it holds some answers.

As Dr. Humphreys notes, while addiction shares many features with other medical conditions like diabetes and heart disease, unlike those conditions, addiction has a high level of negative externalities. This impacts how decent and reasonable people respond to persons with addictive disorders. Given the impact of addiction on our society, we should expect that people have very negative views about us. As he says, it is common decency to note that there are victims of our drug use and that focusing on helping people like me recover is by no means an attempt to minimize that damage.

Having observed and experienced abysmal attitudes even in our medical care communities as noted last year in “take the drug addicts out to the hospital parking lot and shoot them,” it is evident that as a society we still hold very high levels of stigma against the entire population of people with SUDs. My organizations collaborative work with Elevyst and RIWI on an initial survey of perceived stigma in the United States, shows this in stark relief. We also found a whole lot of common ground, significantly more than any differences of views we have. It is a very productive process. That stigma is our biggest barrier is a consensus statement. We must improve public perceptions about us.

But the negative perceptions about us are understandable on many levels. Addicted persons like me (not in recovery) drive while impaired and end up killing people as a result. We can cause severe trauma in families and even become violent under the influence of drugs like alcohol and methamphetamine. We can pose risks to society that require law enforcement interventions. We should focus on ways that reduce the chaos and danger on our streets, keep people alive, and address violence concerns associated with addiction without reflexively throwing people who use drugs into cages. We should keep our eye on the goals of long-term recovery, the only true way to reduce the number of addicted people in our communities. We seem to be losing that focus, and I am alarmed.

Our big problem is that we tend to view addiction as either a medical condition or one in which we simply incarcerate everybody who has it. The latter is clearly not the solution. The reality it is a medical condition but also a public safety issue. It erodes all of our institutions. Turning it into an either / or problem oversimplifies it. Dr Humphreys reminds us that it is important to acknowledge these harms to society even as we call for compassion and develop more effective ways to improve public perception about us. Addiction is not diabetes or heart disease in respect to what it does to our society. Nuanced policies here would make sense. To get there we need to figure out ways to message the value of helping people recovery and also acknowledge the risk to society if we do not support more people into recovery.

We must develop accurate messaging if we are to improve public perceptions related to substance use and addiction in America. We also need to acknowledge the devastation our society is experiencing, including a 24% increase in alcohol related fatalities on our highways, overdose deaths that continue to move in the wrong direction and a likelihood of an increase in violent crime due to the increased prevalence of methamphetamine use on our streets. We risk seeing the balance shift to law-and-order centered solutions in the near future that throws the most marginalized of our brothers and sisters in prison cells in a wholesale process as society tires of the damage we are capable of. The pendulum always swings. That would perhaps be an even more devastating than our climbing death rate.

My own experience with addiction, recovery, and work for decades highlights the dichotomy of addiction. The vast majority of people who become addicted are great people. We then do a lot of damage to ourselves and those around us. We can be really destructive. I would not now consider doing a lot of the things I did in active addiction. I know that I am not alone in this. This is because of the way that addiction impacts both executive function and the limbic system. We know that persons who are addicted are not fully in control of their faculties. This is why we cause such devastation in active addition. Properly framing addiction by acknowledging the damage that our communities experience as well as the cycle of trauma that a lot of addiction stems from while focusing on developing and sustaining public support for recovery is critically important to strengthening public support for our efforts.  We should consider that:

1. People who use drugs problematically deserve our compassion and empathy.
2. Engaging persons who are using with the stance that they deserve respectful care will more likely lead to them seeking help and support and achieving wellness.
3. People experiencing addiction can at times put their own lives and the lives of those around them at risk. There are very real public safety concerns associated with substance misuse.
4. People with severe SUDs may also become involved in illegal or even violent behavior while in the throes of addiction. Such conduct is not indicative of who we are in recovery.
5. Helping someone with a substance use disorder recover greatly reduces the risk of dangerous or inappropriate conduct and is ultimately the most effective way to reduce the number of addicted people across our nation.
6. Given the proper care and support recovery leads to recovery, which is the probable outcome for persons with a substance use disorder. Focusing resources on this goal will expand the number of persons in recovery, improve the health and safety of our overall community and save a lot of resources in the long run.

Our own history of addiction treatment and recovery provides a note of caution. The history of recovery in America is not linear, just like all other facets of history. Bill White showed us that with his seminal work Slaying the Dragon. There is a “two steps” forward, one (two or even three) step(s) backward dance through the years. We tend to move from compassion and support to punitive responses to addiction over the long arc of time and then eventually back towards compassion and support. This occurs for a lot of reasons, one of which is how we oversimplify our messaging.

One thing that is illustrative of the problem is how we have disingenuously portrayed drug use. It has been devastating. Anyone who has watched reefer madness and has experience with cannabis would sense that the propaganda film dramatically overstates the risks of this drug. Like a lot of kids, I disregarded all the real risks as a result. I could tell what this film was showing was not true, so I ignored all the stated risks I heard in health class. I smoked pot and laughed through the movie. Now it is portrayed as having almost no risk, which is also not true. We will pay for that too.

In a similar way, normalizing destructive drug use on our streets will strike a large portion of our nation as an improper response they will ultimately not support. At least from my perspective. Understating the risks to society of normalizing problematic drug use may well lead to a backlash from the American public who suffer the collateral damage. Pretending that addiction is just like any other medical disorder and that persons who experience it may not pose additional negative externalities is disingenuous. Sugar coating the impact of people who use drugs on society is a very risky strategy.   The truth is that people who are addicted deserve compassion and that we also present very real public safety risks. We do a lot of damage as a result of addiction. They should be considered hand in hand, not as either / or. We have to acknowledge the complexities of our challenges to develop effective strategies. Starting there may help us get to the point where we can provide more pervasive arguments for supporting both harm reduction and recovery efforts, which can and do work hand in hand to support the health and welfare of our communities.

Just my two cents on a medical condition not just like the other ones.