Author: Marc

…by April Wilson Smith…

I used to hate the word “recovery.” To me, it was a mark of shame, stating that I was permanently damaged and different from “normies,” as they call people without substance use problems in AA. Recovery signified a lifetime of isolation, avoiding social events and going to dull nightly meetings where people wallowed in the past. It also implied that I had a disease, which I never believed.

So I refused to use the word. If it happened to come up that I had had a problem with alcohol, I’d simply say, “That’s no longer an issue for me.” I wanted to erase the period of time when I had struggled to get over my alcohol problem, and make life a well-paved road without the giant bump of my alcohol crash and stint in rehab.

Then I started to work in harm reduction. I founded a SMART Recovery meeting, and went on to become an officer in the Harm Reduction, Abstinence and Moderation Support (HAMS) group. I met people who were at all stages of the struggle, from still using to fresh out of rehab to 18 years without a problem. I met people who were deeply in pain.

As I witnessed their pain, I began to reconnect with my own. It had been too difficult, at first, to remember the pain of passing out in the street or finding out the next day what I had said or done the night before. I didn’t want to remember the horror of withdrawing from alcohol more times than I can count, sometimes throwing up blood for days on end and nailed to the bed in a panic attack. I didn’t even want to remember those early days of abstinence when my senses first came back and I could smell the flowers in summer and taste blueberries and coffee as though for the first time.

After almost two years and working with countless people with substance use problems, I could feel my own pain again. And I realized something: to deny that there is a period of time when the pain is acute, and when healing has to be a priority, is to deny an essential reality of people’s lives. Of my own life. That’s when I started to use the word “recovery” again. But I do not believe that “recovery” is a permanent state. With proper self-care, support, and meaning in life, one can heal.

My path to healing was a jagged one. When I left a traditional Twelve Step rehab, I was grateful to be out of addictive crisis, but I was even farther away from finding my true self than I had been. In rehab, we were taught to identify as “addict” and “alcoholic,” and told that all our problems were due to our “disease.” We did little to address the issues that drove our addiction. Instead, we were taught that the answer to all problems was to attend Twelve Step meetings and work the Steps.

I got home and dutifully did my 90 meetings in 90 days as instructed, but it didn’t feel right. Gradually, I discovered writers who saw addiction differently. First Marc, then onto Carl Hart, Johann Hari, and eventually Stanton Peele and Kenneth Anderson. I saw a new way of looking at addiction, not as a symptom of a disease or indication that I was damaged for life, but as a behavior over which I could have control. As I read more, I gradually began to discover my own voice, and started to write. Reclaiming my own identity, not as an “alcoholic” but as a writer, activist and scholar was my way out, not only of addiction but of the narrow, confined life that rehab and AA had defined for me as “recovery.” And I found that my own painful experiences gave me a perspective that could help others. Today, having recovered means living a life that I don’t have to medicate away.

Two years after my 28 day stay in rehab, I find myself writing about substance use and mental health full time, and I’m doing my PhD on harm reduction. I hope that my work can help people who are going through that difficult period of healing. By using the word “recovery,” I honor their pain, and I honor my own. I also honor our triumph over the pain.

My substance problem is not who I am, but it is an essential part of my life experience. It has given me insight into things I never would have known about, and a kind of empathy I never had before I woke up on the concrete.

I am grateful for recovery. I am also grateful for the ability to move on.

…by Jenny Valentish…

Not everyone enjoys the label ‘sober’. I personally don’t call myself an ‘alcoholic’ or ‘identify as an addict’. I’m also far too English to use a dramatic phrase such as ‘in recovery’.

In my book, Woman of Substances: A Journey Into Addiction and Treatment, I don’t call myself ‘sober’ either, partly because the term reminds me of ‘sombre’, ‘sob,’ and ‘so boring’, but also because, since stopping drinking eight years ago, I’ve taken drugs. I ate a hash cookie at a dinner party; a psychedelic in the spirit of self-exploration; and then there’s been silly, teenage stuff for the ridiculousness of it – a whiff of amyl nitrite in the red light district of Paris, a balloon of nitrous while watching Twin Peaks. This freedom was a decision I made after two years of total abstinence, and it’s about joyous bursts, rather than the grinding self-medication of yesteryear.

Personally, having that pressure-relief valve feels safer to me. Telling myself ‘you can if you want’ doesn’t provoke the imp in my brain into leaping for the chandeliers because, as we all know, being given permission to do something immediately takes away the appeal. By contrast, telling myself I’m abstinent for life might result in an almighty blowout one day as the pressure builds. No system is infallible.

There will be people reading this with anger burning in their heart. To someone who is truly sober, my generous ‘you can if you want’ policy borders on betrayal. I know how that feels. I remember when a couple who had quit drinking told me that they’d each had a beer at a wedding, and reported with pleasure that they didn’t enjoy the beer and now they knew they didn’t need to wonder about it again. I felt an inexplicable fury. For me, alcohol was an absolute no-go zone; never worth risking. So that was the root of my rage: they’d made a decision that had worked out just fine for them, but it threatened my new blueprint for life.

Whatever your personal policy, drug and alcohol treatment shouldn’t be one-size-fits-all – and it isn’t, if you spend a little time investigating the options.

While some people classify as hardcore poly-drug users, most people have a leaning towards one type, such as sedatives, or stimulants. As a pertinent example, I’ve interviewed Marc Lewis, and he told me, ‘I don’t imagine I could continue moderate use of opiates, but a drink is okay for me because it’s not my drug of choice.’

Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, quit drinking in the thirties but experimented with LSD with Aldous Huxley in the 1950s. He even hoped LSD could prove to be beneficial to those in recovery. These days, debates rage on recovery forums as to whether opioid replacement therapy is okay for NA members, or whether a ‘marijuana maintenance plan’ is acceptable when attending AA. In fact it might make sense to go to an outpatient drug and alcohol service and collaborate on a plan that includes, say, moderate pot use in the service of quitting methamphetamine (this option is already available in the UK and Australia).

Geoff Corbett is a senior clinician who works with young adults in Brisbane, Australia. He tells me this:

There are always going to be outliers that AA and NA can put on a pedestal, but there will be another thousand people that AA and NA won’t work for, which is why we [in Australia] provide options. If we work from our harm-minimization framework, abstinence can be at one end and safer use can be at the other end. The client chooses options in between. It requires good assessment and really good treatment planning to look at achievable goals and put some parameters into place. We keep in mind that a person’s life is in flux and we can move the goalposts any time we want.

Australian dry-community website Hello Sunday Morning also has a flexible approach to tackling alcohol use. Founder Chris Raine has this to say:

Nowhere do we dictate what a person has to do to be a part of Hello Sunday Morning. Our wording – ‘reassessing your relationship with alcohol’ – turns it into a subjective experience. Even government campaigns in Australia are starting to use that kind of wording, and that’s a good cultural shift. It’s not about ‘Are you an alcoholic? Are you addicted or not?’ It’s about ‘What relationship with alcohol would you like?’ It could be none; it could be some.

Certainly for some people, abstinence is the only safe option – and they know that. There’s a spectrum of severity, and I can’t compare my former levels of dependence to, say, those of the brother of a friend who died after continuing drinking post-liver transplant, or those of my mate who winds up in a hospital or psych ward every time she drinks.

The most important thing is to accept that mistakes, lapses, relapses, busts, lessons, errant evenings, experimental breaks – whatever you want to call them – are statistically likely, no matter what route you choose. That means maintaining vigilance for old behaviors creeping back in, whether it’s six months, five years, or twenty years after you’ve curtailed your habits. Vigilance, purposefulness, meaningfulness, curiosity, goals and altruism – they’re your new stash. Keep them close.

For more about Woman of Substances, go to the Amazon page or the author’s website.

The relationship between addiction and emotional anguish — primarily anxiety and depression — is well known. When we look for root causes of addiction, we inevitably ask why so many people are suffering. Here I reflect a bit, and link to a mind-blowing video, on suffering and evolution.

Why is it so hard? Why is there so much suffering, in the world, in ourselves? That question comes up all the time, especially among us addicts (recovered or not). We’re not the only ones. We just tried to find a way out through the back door. The proportion of people in the Western World (e.g., the US) who suffer from anxiety and/or depression (and related conditions) is astronomical. And for today’s young people it seems to be getting worse, though that conclusion is conflated with changes in the way people communicate with each other and with mental health professionals.

One simple answer is that we evolved from physical matter to become the unfathomably sensitive and intelligent creatures we are. And evolution doesn’t concern itself with suffering. In fact suffering (struggle, loss, and death) is a big part of what drives it.

This question, always cycling though my dialogues with people in this community and others in my life, came back to me a few days ago when I received a long, detailed email from someone I don’t know, someone who has struggled on and off with addiction throughout his life. He told me of his childhood traumas and hardships, and of the brutal treatment received by his parents in an internment camp during World War II who, as a result, were never able to give him what he needed as a child. He sees himself as someone who has to struggle and persevere just to get through each day, fending off anxiety, depression, hopelessness, and meaninglessness — you know, the usual quartet of background singers.

What could I say to him? Advice? Meditation…sure, but he’s tried that and it hasn’t worked for him. Therapy? Tried that too. In a nutshell, there was nothing at all I could say to help him. I recalled my own explosive introduction to utter, fundamental helplessness, an experience on ayahuasca that I tried to convey to you in this post. Accepting one’s helplessness might be a way toward struggling less, or even giving up the struggle, and just living in the present, accepting the ebb and flow of forces that sometimes bring happiness but undoubtedly bring suffering and lead, inevitably, to loss and death. And certainly these forces are intermingled with the disconnection, competition, and often cruelty that we face from other humans who are, when you stop and think about it, just as caught up in their own struggles to survive from day to day and hold onto a bit of happiness.

You just want to scream: it’s so unfair!

But there are other ways to think about it. Fairness is a construction we learn at around age five, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the natural universe. It’s just a social norm, a code for resolving petty rivalries. It’s no more relevant to nature than tea ceremonies or Facebook.

In fact, we are lucky as hell to be here at all. And suffering is just part of the process that brought us here and that continues to give us the chance to evolve and, hopefully, to grow more intelligent, compassionate, and beautiful.

I’m in San Francisco now, mainly to spend time with my father, who just turned ninety. He’s had a rapid but luckily temporary decline in cognitive function. He’s doing better. I’m going home soon. On my way here, I bought a book called Dancing with Elephants. It’s about how to be present, engaged, and even happy in the face of terminal illness, oncoming dementia, and — you guessed it — the inevitability of death. Yeah, cheery stuff. But it’s written by a guy with Huntington’s Disease, a guy who is presently in the process of losing everything, his body and his mind. And he’s talking about connecting and accepting and loving. He’s nowhere close to despair. I’m only partway through and I can’t yet recommend it confidently, but take a look if you like. There are certainly gems of wisdom in the book, and even the fact that this guy can think this way and write this way is astonishing and uplifting.

Anyway, I have nothing more to say on the subject of suffering. But I want you to watch this video, especially if you’ve not seen it before. I recently rediscovered it, and I think it is wonderful. There is so much in it, complexity and symmetry, perspective, and a vastly comprehensive view of who and what we are. But there’s also a simple message: evolution isn’t easy, suffering and death are always with us, but there is tremendous beauty in how we got here and where we might continue to go.

…by Matt Robert…

We interrupt this broadcast for an important announcement from the fake news channel.  If you haven’t already heard, you are a worthless piece of shit who doesn’t have any business having a happy life, so you should just give up, say fuck it and use. You should just give up and settle for less, because this isn’t gonna get any better. Besides, nobody will know…or care.

Sound familiar?

One of the Trumpocalypse’s unintended contributions to the rational world was the reminder that not everything we hear on the news is real. Neither is everything we hear in our heads — especially the automatic negative thoughts blaring from our own fake news channel.

In some fake news stories of foreign origin the English is not quite right. In many of them, regardless of origin, the reasoning is not too solid. Likewise, sometimes the reasoning on our own fake news channel is a bit off: “So what if you got a degree in literature? You don’t know shit.”

Remember the fake news story about Hillary Clinton running a child pornography ring out of a pizzeria in NY city? And the guy who got a gun and drove hundreds of miles to the pizzeria to “save the children”? We too often act on the ridiculous messages that our fake news channel is sending us.

I’ve noticed that, when I was an in-patient or in a treatment program, the fake news network stopped broadcasting, or at least I couldn’t pick it up. I was always puzzled that whenever I was in treatment, I’d do great. Just being there sharpened my awareness. When I came out I’d go along great for a while and then tank. One likely reason: my fake news sources were back in action, broadcasting loud and clear.

So what to do? Well, you can’t change something if you don’t know what it is–and our fake news channel may always be there. Get to know yours — there may be more than one. My most popular channel is on the Self-Blame and Praise-Hater network.  “This just in: Everything bad that happens is your fault, and you don’t deserve any credit for a job well-done. And now a word from our sponsor: You suck.” I specifically and mindfully practice noticing when these subtle yet insidious rebroadcasts emerge unbidden.

Fake news triggers urges, and vice versa. The satellite feed for the lead story originated long ago and far away — for some of us the stories started in early childhood.  The stories can be as incessant as muzak playing over and over in your head. We have to change the channel to stay ahead of it…to stay in front of the fuck-its. Because when do the fuck-its happen? When terrorists demand action, now — no time to stop and think — or else.

Fake news is now not only a meme but an apt tag for the harmful diatribes that go off in our heads and often drive our behavior. But if we can recognize them, we can label them, and if we can label them, we can stop listening. If we can slow down enough to classify the news as real or fake, then, if it’s fake, we can turn down the volume — all the way down.

What are some things people do to change the channel on their fake news? Please let us know.

As neuroscience explodes with new ideas, new technologies, and new findings, ordinary people have a hard time absorbing the information that emerges. We are learning more details about networks in the cortex responsible for different kinds of thinking, reflecting, observing, and we know about regions lying beneath the cortex responsible for emotion and motivation. What are we supposed to do with this knowledge? Why is it so hard to integrate into our daily lives?

I think the main reason is that our thinking and feeling, our personalities, and consciousness itself are so immediate, so personal, that we can’t entertain the idea that they emerge from electrochemical pulses among a bunch of cells. Our experience is so intricate, nuanced, and private — it’s difficult to imagine that it comes from a remarkable bodily organ. This paradox has been a real problem for philosophers ever since the time of the Greeks. It was made famous by Descartes, who said there must be some part of us that does not come from our bodies: this was termed “mind-body dualism.”

What’s that got to do with addiction? you might ask. The thing is, most of us continue to see addiction as a personal problem, a nastiness that comes from our inner being, a reflection of the dark places we’ve been and the dark things we’ve thought and done. The dishonesty that often comes with addiction (the lying, stealing, etc) feels like an incontrovertible personal failure, unforgiveable (at some level) because…well because shouldn’t I be a better person?

The darkness, confusion, tragedy and destruction do belong to us. There’s no denying it. But they also belong to a brain that is an organ of our bodies. The brain functions according to the codes built into it over millions of years of evolution, most critically: attempt to minimize suffering and maximize relief. Stave off deprivation. And it puts those requirements above other goals, like obeying social conventions. This brain of yours has been adjusting to whatever has happened to you every single day since (and before) your birth. And some of what’s happened to you has no doubt been frightening, uncontrollable, and perhaps deeply traumatic.

Through all this your brain continues to adapt.

To accept that our thoughts and actions really do arise from our brains does not get rid of personal responsibility — that’s not what I’m trying to say. But it can be a crucial step in understanding that the things we do that we’d rather not do aren’t simple choices between right and wrong. They arise from a sequence of developmental adaptations in an organ that does its best to keep us going in a hugely challenging world.

To accept that your addictive impulses come from your brain opens an avenue to self-forgiveness. But remember: brains have developed incredible capacities to think, plan, and reason about consequences. Self-control is one of the brain’s crowning achievements. And since addiction leads irrevocably to suffering, maybe you can work with your brain, sort of as a partner, to make your life a lot happier than it is.

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P.S.  Thanks for the comments so far, guys. I love this community. Meanwhile, I wanted to share a link to a work-in-progress dramatization (a theatre piece) of a very serious gambling problem, especially in the UK and Australia. The problem is the deployment of rapid-fire electronic gambling machines called Fixed Odds Betting Terminals — a new generation of machines that can take enormous amounts of money in a very brief time. These things are destroying lives as quickly as any drug. Take a look at this.

By the way, the title “Crack Cocaine” is a misnomer — they plan to change it soon.