Book Review: It Takes a Family

I just finished Debra Jay's new book, It Takes a Family: A Cooperative Approach to Lasting Sobriety and wanted to share a few thoughts with you. Bill White was one of the first people I heard challenge our failure to distinguish between treatment and recovery. Jay picks up this theme and details the limitations of treatment--that treatment is good … Continue reading Book Review: It Takes a Family

Learning from the AIDS epidemic

  The American Journal of Medicine has an interesting commentary examining parallels between the AIDS epidemic and the opioid epidemic. While the early history of government inaction, public fear, and stigmatization of HIV/AIDS is a shameful stain on this country's conscience, 30 years later we have achieved tremendous victories, and the disease has transitioned from … Continue reading Learning from the AIDS epidemic

sustained guidance into full cultural participation

I've posted recently on the role of class in addiction, policy, treatment and recovery. Here are a couple of sentences from Bill White on the topic. Those individuals needing professionally directed addiction treatment suffer from more than a singular, encapsulated problem with alcohol or other drugs. Need for addiction treatment—particularly prolonged or repeated treatment—is often a proxy … Continue reading sustained guidance into full cultural participation

Early mutual aid involvement improves outcomes

DJ Mac provides an outstanding summary of a recently published study on the pre-treatment and early treatment behavior of outpatient addiction treatment patients and their outcomes. He starts with this finding: The folk who tested negative for drugs early on didn’t seem to have worse drug problems, but they did have better mental and physical … Continue reading Early mutual aid involvement improves outcomes