Pubdate: Wed, 02 Aug 2006
Source: St. Paul Pioneer Press (MN)
Copyright: 2006 St. Paul Pioneer Press
Contact:  http://www.twincities.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/379
Author: Jodi Mailander-Farrell, Public Access Journalism
Note: Jodi Mailander-Farrell is a reporter for the Miami Herald.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Cannabis)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/rehab.htm (Treatment)

RECOVERY

The New Activism: Addiction Recovery Prepares To Move 'Out Of The 
Basement' Into Public Health Arena

"In the end, when we don't stand up and speak out, we hide behind our 
recoveries, we sustain the most harmful myth about the disease - that 
it is hopeless." - William Cope Moyers, author of "Broken: My Story 
of Addiction and Redemption" ---

Dorian Grey Parker - doctor of divinity, licensed clinician - lived 
on the streets of Hartford, Conn., most of his 42 years, addicted to 
alcohol and cocaine. He's not proud of that.

Yet last September, he was among more than 2,500 recovering 
alcoholics and drug addicts, surrounded by supporters, who marched in 
his hometown Recovery Walk, a radical, in-your-face display by people 
struggling with one of the most invisible ailments in America.

Determined to sink the message of successful recovery into the heart 
of the American consciousness, a new advocacy movement is urging 
people to go public with their recovery stories. This small but 
growing group of activists are hoping to end discrimination and drum 
up moral and financial support by modeling their efforts after the 
public awareness campaigns that pushed breast cancer and AIDS onto 
the country's radar screen.

For a community of people - believed to number in the millions - who 
have learned to live with their addictions, overcoming an age-old 
silence is the next big challenge.

"We've got to get the message out there," says Parker, who has opened 
a recovery house for other addicts since he got clean eight years 
ago. "I show up for the newcomers, who are finding hope in seeing 
people with multiple years of recovery, and I come out for the 
clueless. There is such a moral stigma attached to this disease. It 
all comes from not understanding, but we can change that."

The emerging movement to bring addiction out of the basements and 
anonymous meeting halls where most self-help groups gather isn't led 
by a single person or organization. It's an amorphous, evolving 
school of thought bubbling up from national, state and local recovery 
groups, all part of a sprawling underground network as diverse as 
addiction itself. There are now recovery support meetings for Native 
Americans, African Americans, women, Mormons, Jews, Buddhists, 
Christians, pagans, bikers, gays and lesbians, artists, pharmacists, 
couples, seniors, nuns and Spanish speakers, among others. They are 
united in their goal to make alcohol and drug addiction a public health issue.

Instead of being viewed as a moral weakness, activists argue, 
alcoholism and drug addiction should be considered a chronic disease 
that can be treated just like asthma or cancer.

"I still don't think the general public believes that an addict or 
alcoholic ever gets well," says Phillip Valentine, executive director 
of Connecticut Community for Addiction Recovery, a state-based 
advocacy and support group that organized the first Recovery Walk six 
years ago. "Many, many people have long-term, sustained sobriety and 
you may not know about it. We need to put a face on recovery so 
people won't be so afraid or fearful or angry at it. It's not a 
hopeless condition."

One obstacle to actively reaching out to those in recovery: Nobody 
knows exactly how many Americans have achieved it.

Mark Willenbring, director of the Treatment and Recovery Research 
Division at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in 
Bethesda, Md., puts the number of Americans in recovery from alcohol 
abuse alone at 9.2 million, based on probability samples. But there 
is not even a guess at the number of former drug addicts in stable 
remission, not to mention alcoholics who also abuse drugs.

"It's a crying shame we don't know," says Alexandre Laudet, director 
of the Center for the Study of Addictions and Recovery at the 
National Development and Research Institutes in New York, which plans 
to conduct a national survey to get a better grip on the total.

"The problem is there are multiple databases everywhere and you can 
search and slice them three ways to Sunday in terms of how many 
people have used drugs and alcohol in the past month, year, by age, 
gender and race, but we have no idea how many people are in 
recovery," Laudet says. "I know people ... in their 60s and 70s who 
have been in recovery 30 or 40 years."

A clearer picture of recovery successes would help policymakers, 
treatment centers and researchers improve treatment and the recovery 
process and learn how to deal with the long-term consequences often 
related to substance abuse - health issues, such as HIV/AIDS, 
cardiovascular disease, liver and kidney disease, and emotional or 
social problems, such as job loss and divorce.

Complicating matters is the fact that recovery is essentially 
individual growth, very difficult to assess statistically. How do you 
measure success for an ailment that has no cure? Add to that the 
constant danger of backsliding; research has shown that half of those 
in recovery experience at least one relapse. Although a risk may 
diminish over time, it remains a reality. One of the very few 
long-term studies on drug users - a 33-year follow-up of narcotics 
addicts published in the Archives of General Psychiatry in 2001 - 
found that 25 percent of a large sample of opiate users relapsed 
after 15 years of abstinence.

Still, as a general rule of thumb, most treatment experts view 
recovery in the same terms as cancer: Five years of little or no 
alcohol or drug use and you can start to breathe easy.

"Recovery is not only someone who is no longer using alcohol or 
drugs, it's someone who's got on with life so they are once again 
part of the community," says Pat Taylor, executive director of Faces 
& Voices of Recovery, a five-year-old nonprofit based in Washington, 
D.C., that lobbies to make recovery a public issue. "It's not just 
that you're sober, but that you've gotten your life on track."

As part of its national campaign, the group has issued a 45-minute 
video to help people tell their recovery stories. There are now radio 
shows, Web casts, art shows, bookstores, a film festival and a 
proposed cable TV channel devoted to recovery. There's even a 
recovery cookbook: "The Sober Kitchen: Recipes and Advice for a 
Lifetime of Sobriety" by Elizabeth Scott, a professional chef.

William Cope Moyers, the son of famed broadcaster and author Bill 
Moyers, unwittingly became the unofficial poster boy for the movement 
when he started speaking publicly in 1996 about his own alcohol and 
cocaine addictions. An award-winning journalist for 15 years with CNN 
and newspapers around the world, Moyers first experimented with 
marijuana as a teenager in the 1970s. Like many college kids, he was 
into binge drinking on weekends. But drinking turned into hard drug 
use and by the time he was 30, he says, he was addicted to crack cocaine.

"I was working for Newsday on Long Island and I was a very good 
reporter, but neither my employer nor my wife nor my church had any 
idea that I was living on the streets of New York as a crack addict," 
Moyers says. "Alcoholics and addicts are very good at covering their 
tracks. I always tell people in early recovery that if you invest as 
much time in your recovery as you invested in your use, you're going 
to be OK. I hit bottom in August 1989 in a crack house in Harlem 
after an eight-day binge on cocaine."

Moyers is now vice president for external affairs for the Hazelden 
Foundation, a drug rehabilitation center in Minnesota where he was 
once a patient. He travels the country, drawing attention to the need 
for more treatment facilities, money to access them and the 
importance of coming out of the recovery closet.

"My first public speech was to a Rotary club in St. Paul and I got up 
thinking I'd speak from an authority's position as an employee of 
Hazelden," says Moyers, who relapsed three times before achieving 
long-term recovery 11 years ago. "I rattled off all these statistics 
and began to notice people dozing off. It was a tough crowd. So I 
chucked my speech and told them, 'I want to talk about this disease I 
have.' Everybody sort of sat up. That's when I learned the real power 
in the authenticity of experiences of people like me. Nobody can 
impeach my credibility when it comes to being a recovering drug 
addict. I made it despite myself. For that I am grateful and I want 
to give back."

Moyers says his goal now is to change public policy. His memoir will 
be published by Viking Publishers in September. But he says other 
stories need to be told and heard.

For those who choose to keep their stories to themselves, there's 
good reason. Not only is addiction painful and embarrassing to talk 
about, publicizing it can threaten jobs and change relationships.

Recovery advocates do caution that going public is not for everyone. 
The National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, one of the 
oldest advocacy groups in the country, suggests that people have at 
least two years of sobriety under their belts first. Bill White, a 
senior research consultant at Chestnut Health Systems and author of 
the seminal 1998 book, "Slaying the Dragon: The History of Addiction 
Treatment and Recovery in America," says "... as much as a positive 
effect it can have, people do make sacrifices when they do this kind 
of stuff. They face the same adversity that the first gays and 
lesbians who came out of the closest did. People lose jobs, families 
can fall apart over it."

The numbers back that up. One-quarter of people in recovery report 
they had been denied a job or promotion or had trouble getting 
insurance; and four in 10 said they experienced shame or social 
embarrassment, according to a 2001 national survey called "The Face 
of Recovery." In the same survey, 20 percent feared being fired or 
facing discrimination at work and nearly 40 percent were very or 
fairly concerned that other people would find out about their problem.

People in recovery routinely encounter public and private policies 
that were created as a deterrent or punishment to alcohol and drug 
abuse. On paper, the penalties might make sense; in practice, they 
often are counterproductive to people trying to put their addictions 
behind them.

Those with alcohol or other drug diseases pay higher insurance 
deductibles and co-payments for treatment, get fewer visits and days 
of coverage, and have more restrictions on the amount they can spend, 
even when their insurance benefits cover treatment - if they are 
insured at all, according to Join Together, a project of Boston 
University School of Public Health that formed a national policy 
panel in 2002 to address the discrimination issues. The panel found 
that the Americans with Disabilities Act is applied very narrowly in 
these cases and that employees who seek treatment are frequently 
fired before they can get help.

And while many people with drug convictions leave jail or prison with 
substance abuse problems, federal laws ban them from receiving 
welfare or food stamps to support themselves while they get 
treatment. Unless they complete a treatment program, they are banned 
from public housing and receiving federal financial aid for a period 
of time, making it nearly impossible for them to re-establish 
themselves in society. Most states include substance abuse treatment 
in their mental health benefit laws, but 13 states cover only 
treatment for alcoholism.

There have been strides in recovery rights. Advocates celebrated last 
year when Congress partially lifted a ban on financial aid that 
prevented more than 100,000 students with drug convictions on their 
records from receiving loans, grants, scholarships and work study 
opportunities. Recovery advocacy groups lobbied for years to lift the 
ban, arguing that those convicted of murder were entitled to 
financial aid, but people with drug records were not.

There's another reason why people in recovery tend to stay under 
wraps - the tradition of anonymity.

Promoting a low profile is an effective way to encourage people to 
seek out help and protect them from discrimination and scrutiny. It 
also preserves the integrity of self-help groups like Alcoholics 
Anonymous (AA), the largest of its kind with nearly 56,000 groups in 
the United States and Canada - and very strict rules on members 
speaking in public. Four of the 12 traditions that outline how AA 
groups and members should operate stress the importance of anonymity. 
Tradition 12 drives it home the hardest, calling anonymity the 
"spiritual foundation" of all the traditions, putting the common good 
above personal aims.

The group treasures its anonymity tradition so much that staff 
positions within its headquarters rotate every two years, partly so 
no one becomes comfortable as a spokesman for the organization. As 
for its members, they can speak as recovering alcoholics on radio, TV 
and Internet interviews, but not as AA followers. They can only speak 
as AA members if their names and faces aren't revealed.

"We're not a secret society," says Irene K., a staff member at AA's 
General Service Office in New York who, like the other 10 staff 
members there, insists on not using her last name. "We don't want to 
be. We want to be able to go out into the world and speak to 
classrooms, judges, nursing homes, defense attorneys; to tell them, 
'This is my story. I'm an alcoholic.' ... We're delighted to let 
other folks know we exist. But we have a public information 
commitment to do it within the bounds of the 12 Traditions."

Moyers, who chronicles his involvement with AA and one of its 
self-help sisters, Narcotics Anonymous, in his new book, is braced 
for a backlash. While he never has acknowledged his participation in 
12-Step programs in his speeches, Moyers says he couldn't avoid it in 
his autobiography. "It's a disservice if I don't tell people how I 
got well," says Moyers, who still attends a 12-Step group in St. Paul 
at least once a week and on the road when he travels. "I embrace and 
live a life of recovery grounded in the 12 Steps. I don't ever reveal 
what is said in meetings. I have the utmost respect for members of 
the 12-Step community whose perspectives on the anonymity issue 
differ from mine.

"This is a very contentious issue and I respect both sides of the 
debate," he says, "but I will tell you that I believe this 
misunderstanding of the traditions has made it very difficult for 
those of us in advocacy to mount a sustained and successful effort."

"This whole business of anonymity is where the thorn is," says Robyn 
Leary, who hosts a weekly radio show called "Recovery Talk" on 
WDFH-FM in New York's Hudson Valley. Leary gives her guests the 
option of using their names.

"It's not a matter of insisting that everyone go public," says Leary, 
who has organized an "Under the Influence" film festival. "It's a 
voluntary calling. I do think anonymity is going to keep people in 
recovery in the basement of churches. It's going to prevent more and 
more people from getting treatment.

"If you're a member of the 21st century, it's a matter of being 
socially responsible," Leary says. "If you personally are not in 
recovery, I can prove that someone you love is. A new generation 
needs to learn that there's only one thing recovering alcoholics 
can't do - and that's drink."
- ---
MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman