Answer Addiction

Tag: book

  • Strung Out: An Interview with Erin Khar

    Strung Out: An Interview with Erin Khar

    When I was in a 12-step program, I had so much shame… Some people seemed pissed off when you relapsed. I get that it’s upsetting, but have a little compassion.

    Erin Khar is an award-winning writer known for her deeply personal essays on addiction, recovery, mental health, parenting and self-care. “Ask Erin,” her weekly Ravishly column, attracts more than 500K unique readers per month. Her work is published in SELF, Marie Claire, Redbook, and anthologies including Lilly Dancyger’s Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger. Her first full-length memoir, Strung Out: One Last Hit and Other Lies That Nearly Killed Me (Park Row Books, February 25), will be released this month.

    Khar battled heroin for 15 years. Her intro to opioids came in pill form at age eight. It was the year her parents split up. In Strung Out she writes, “My Dad had moved out and my mother drifted from room to room in our old Spanish house with a weightlessness that I could tell threatened to take her away.”

    Khar suffered from overwhelming feelings that she didn’t understand. “A panic spread across my chest, filling my body with heat, trapping me. I ran to the bathroom and locked the door. As I reminded myself to breathe, some instinct led me to the medicine cabinet.”

    With anxiety pounding, the third grader fumbled past Band-Aids and Tylenol and found her grandmother’s bottle of Darvocet, which warned: “May Cause Drowsiness and Dizziness.” She wanted so badly to stop hurting she popped two big red pills into her mouth, then gulped from the faucet to wash them down. The burning heat of anxiety soon gave way to a “lightness of little bubbles.” Erin felt like she might float out of her body; this was the escape she’d yearned for.

    Strung Out depicts one person’s journey against the backdrop of America’s opioid crisis. The book is written in gorgeous, accessible prose. Candor and vulnerability come through in a natural, believable voice, conveying what many trauma survivors know intimately: pain, anxiety, rage, depression.

    Khar snorted heroin for the first time at age 13. At first, she’d said no to the boyfriend urging her to try it; her stolen pills felt like enough. But her guy persisted, describing it as a much better high. It was also the quickest route to forgetting. When Khar was four, a teen boy began molesting her. The abuse continued for years. Like many survivors, Khar told no one and desperately tried to block it from her mind. 

    “I needed to be somewhere else, someone else,” Khar told The Fix. 

    Strung Out is a page-turner that follows the progression of addiction: Narcotics seem like a magical solution until the relief morphs into a monster roaring for more. Opioids are now responsible for 47,000 deaths per year—that’s nearly two-thirds of all drug-related deaths in the U.S. 

    Reading Khar’s book felt like listening to a confidante, a kindred spirit who “got me.” We sat down in a New York City garden to talk about the hell of addiction and colossal relief of long-term recovery.

    What idea sparked this book?

    I wrote Strung Out because it was the book I wish I’d had when I was younger. I want to open up the conversation. Why do people take drugs? And why can’t they stop? The more we talk about it the more we can get rid of the stigma and shame surrounding it. Many people still don’t seem to understand addiction. I want to encourage empathy and compassion and give people hope.

    I love that your then 12-year-old son asked if you ever did drugs. Can you tell me about that?

    At first, I pretended I didn’t hear him. [Laughs] I tried not to cringe at my deflection.

    I stalled by saying, “That’s a complicated question.” I didn’t know what to say. I did use drugs. A lot of them. Heroin was on and off from 13 to 28. That’s when I got pregnant with him. But how much should I tell him? I’d smoked crack, done acid, taken Ecstasy.

    You describe childhood guilt and shame vividly. Looking back, do you think that was rage turned inward?

    Oh yeah. It definitely had to do with early trauma. All I knew then was a nagging feeling. It wasn’t until I was 19 that I came to terms with everything. Before that, I minimized what happened to me, trying to shove [memories] aside. It took a long time for me to see that my therapist was right: my anger had sublimated into guilt.

    Do you look back now and understand your feelings of shame?

    Yes. I took responsibility for things because it gave me the feeling that I was in control. Can anyone process that kind of childhood trauma all in one go? I don’t know. Maybe it takes a lifetime to process? Maybe I’m still processing it.

    Do you get triggered due to PTSD?

    Yes. Even though I’ve done a lot of work on myself, I still have hypervigilance. My body reacts strongly to some situations, like if I’m startled by something, and especially if I’m asleep.

    Can you describe things that helped? Especially for anyone who is trying but can’t stop using.

    The first thing was accepting that I wasn’t going to be fixed overnight. Then it was forgiving myself for relapsing constantly. For me, whatever I’m dealing with, if I break it down into small, digestible increments, it’s a lot easier to handle. Focusing on the big picture is not helpful. That’s why they say a day at a time.

    How did you stop relapsing?

    By being honest about relapses. When I was in a 12-step program, I had so much shame. It was detrimental to worry about being judged at meetings. [Some] people in AA seemed pissed off when you relapsed. I get that it’s upsetting but have a little fucking compassion. [So] I hid relapses, which made it a lot easier to do it again. Finally, I was honest about [chronically] relapsing and that helped me stop. You do not have to relapse. It’s not a requirement of recovery but I don’t think that we unlearn things in 30 days or 60 days or 90 days or a year. I don’t think it happens that quickly. For anyone who struggles with addiction, we want immediate relief. 

    Like pushing a button?

    Yes. I wanted to be numb. Stop thinking. In recovery, my biggest life lessons were learning to have patience, be honest, and work on accepting things I have no control over.

    Did you find things easier when you began opening up?

    First, I had to get through my fear that people were always judging me. It took work. I wouldn’t say it was easy but yes, I did get better. 

    How do you feel about your upbringing now?

    I definitely don’t blame my parents for any of the choices I made. Even the choices when I was really young. I hid the sexual abuse and my depression from them. I hid my suicidal feelings. If my parents had stayed together and everything had been perfect, I may still have hid things. It may be a function of my personality.

    Today I have a really good relationship with both of my parents and they have a really good friendship with each other. I will forever be grateful that no matter what happened, through everything I did, they never turned their backs on me. I have a very different idea about tough love than I used to. When I was first trying to get sober, the general idea of interventions and dealing with somebody who was addicted was this hard line of tough love. 

    I used to deal with people that way. But now, I really don’t think it works. That doesn’t mean that you should enable people. But, for me, I was lucky. Despite everything I had done to my parents—years of lying and stealing—our family connection remained. That door was still open when I finally asked for help.

    Erin Khar talks hope, shame, and recovery:

     

    Order Strung Out: One Last Hit and Other Lies That Nearly Killed Me

     

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • How "Wired" Betrayed John Belushi's Legacy and Misportrayed Addiction

    How "Wired" Betrayed John Belushi's Legacy and Misportrayed Addiction

    While Belushi’s family and friends would prefer that “Wired” be forgotten, the book provides a fascinating glimpse into how we didn’t understand addiction and harshly judged people who struggled with it.

    “Woodward – that cocksucker!”

    You can’t blame Jim Belushi for being upset. In fact, many of John Belushi’s friends and family members were infuriated with the book Wired, which was written by Bob Woodward, the legendary Watergate reporter.

    Published by Simon and Schuster two years after Belushi’s death from an overdose, Wired was a stark and frightening portrait of drug addiction, but those close to Belushi felt its focus was too narrow, that it didn’t contain any of Belushi’s humanity or good qualities. Woodward put together the cold hard facts of Belushi’s addiction and piled up a number of horror stories, without capturing the whole picture of who the man really was.

    “Exploitation, pulp trash” – Dan Akroyd Describing Wired

    A swift counter attack on the book came from Belushi’s widow, Judy Jacklin. Dan Aykroyd denounced the book as “exploitation, pulp trash,” and Al Franken told Variety, “I hated Woodward’s book because I don’t believe he made an honest attempt to understand John, who despite his sometimes gruff exterior was a gentle soul. My former partner Tom Davis put it this way: ‘It’s as if someone did your college yearbook and called it ‘Puked.’ And all it did was say who puked, when they puked and what they puked. But no one learned any history, read Dostoevsky for the first time, or fell in love.’”

    The controversy made Wired a major best-seller, and the people close to Belushi, who spent untold hours telling all to Woodward, felt burned and betrayed. Woodward was seemingly befuddled by the controversy, and many found his obtuseness infuriating. Woodward told People he was sorry that Jacklin was upset, but “what is important is that Judy is not alleging inaccuracy.”

    While Belushi’s family and friends would prefer that Wired be forgotten, the book provides a fascinating glimpse into how many of us, like Woodward, didn’t understand the nature of addiction and harshly judged people who struggled with it.

    Today, the rise and fall of John Belushi would be written differently, and much more sympathetically.

    Robin Williams once joked that if you remember the seventies, you weren’t there. Not only was it an exciting time for comedy, but many in the entertainment business were out of their minds on cocaine. No one thought the high times would ever end.

    Belushi: A Regular Guy Who Became a Star

    John Belushi was a regular guy who became a star, thanks to the success of Saturday Night Live and Animal House. He was relatable and appealing. The public loved him.

    But his private life was more complicated. Belushi could be brusque and awful, and like many people with addiction, there was a terrible Mr. Hyde that came out when he used. But just as frequently he was kind, decent, and generous.

    Despite his talent and confidence as a performer, offstage Belushi was vulnerable and unsure of himself. Bernie Brillstein, Belushi’s manager, once said that the comedian was “sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes in need of a swift kick in the ass, more often in need of a hug.”

    When Belushi died at age 33, it shocked the public. In the pre-internet, pre-TMZ eighties, Belushi’s addiction to cocaine and heroin was mostly hidden from the public. 

    Belushi’s death hit hard. He was a major counterculture hero and a whole generation felt the loss. It was also a big indicator that the seventies were finally over. As Paul Schrader, screenwriter of Taxi Driver and American Gigolo, told journalist Peter Biskind, “The game was up. Some people quit right away, but the feeling was, the rules have changed.”

    In the world of journalism, Bob Woodward was a major star in his own right. He came from the same hometown as Belushi, Wheaton, Illinois, and his reporting on Watergate turned him and his partner Carl Bernstein into household names. He was portrayed by Robert Redford in the big screen adaptation of All the President’s Men, further cementing his legendary status.

    Was His Death a Sting Operation Gone Bad?

    As a political writer, drugs and the Hollywood fast lane were not in Woodward’s usual wheelhouse, but when Judy Jacklin reached out shortly after her husband’s death, he was intrigued. Jacklin felt there was more to her husband’s death than a simple drug overdose, and she believed Woodward, who was already admired by the counterculture for bringing down Nixon, could get to the bottom of it.

    Michael Dare, a former dealer and film critic who knew Belushi well, started asking around to find out what happened. There was apparently a rumor going around that Belushi’s death was “a sting operation gone bad.” Cathy Smith was a groupie who sold heroin to Belushi and gave him the speedball injections that killed him; some believed she was an informer for the LAPD.

    Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro were with Belushi briefly at about 2 a.m. the morning he died, and some suspected the LAPD were hoping to set up a big bust where all three would get nailed. According to the rumor, the drugs that killed Belushi were given to Smith by the police. Dare even claimed he heard that a cop “prepared the scene the way he wanted it to be found, then went down the block and waited for the body to be discovered.”

    Woodward never found any evidence of this, “not even as a wacko theory,” Dare said, and in retrospect the theory does seem ludicrous. But this was the primary reason Jacklin reached out to Woodward in the first place, and Wired is the result: a hard rebuke to that “wacko theory.” (Where Deep Throat told Woodward to “follow the money,” Dare told the reporter to “follow the drugs,” which he probably now regrets.)

    As far as personalities, Woodward and Belushi couldn’t have been any less alike. Many who worked with Woodward found him cold, aloof, an uptight authoritarian workaholic without much of a sense of humor. In other words, he was the wrong person to write Belushi’s story from the get-go. But could be disarming, and many people confused the real Woodward with the version of him they knew from the big screen: Redford-as-Woodward.

    In fact, when one of Belushi’s friends, Anne Beatts, was contacted by Woodward, “my secretary thought it was Robert Redford on the phone. Woodward was so charming, such a good listener, and we were so impressed meeting him. It was like, would Robert Redford lie to you?”

    Woodward was so good at getting sensitive information out of people, most of Belushi’s friends didn’t catch on to him until it was too late. (“None of us knew what he was really up to,” Aykroyd recalled.) In hindsight, Belushi’s peers realized they were naïve. Considering Woodward helped topple the White House, what made them think he could be trusted not to reveal anything they didn’t want to see in print?

    Woodward Wasn’t the Best Person to Write About Belushi…or Addiction

    There were other reasons why Woodward wasn’t the best person to capture a complicated personality like Belushi, or the complexities of addiction. Jacklin said that he took a complicated story “and made it very simple,” and one of Woodward’s colleagues told Rolling Stone that he “isn’t all that introspective. He’s a wonderful machine for gathering facts. He’s not good at insight…He wanted to go beyond the facts, and the gray areas were too immense…the facts about Belushi became his only refuge.”

    What was especially infuriating to Belushi’s survivors was that Woodward blamed the Hollywood system and many close to him for enabling his death. But for Woodward, who was accustomed to tackling American corruption, condemning Hollywood came naturally: “There was no friendship and a safety net in that circle to save him,” Woodward told journalist Alicia Shepard. “I think it would have been morally offensive for me to try to please.”

    Bernie Brillstein was one of Belushi’s peers who objected to Woodward’s characterization of show business. In his memoir, he wrote, “Woodward blamed John’s death on what he thought was a morally corrupt business that indulges its stars with reckless disregard for their well-being because so much money is on the line. That really offends me. We’d have to be scum. Inhuman. No amount of money in my pocket would have made me ignore John’s health for my own gain.”

    When celebrities like Belushi needed help, it was a different world. In the early eighties, we didn’t have rehabs on every corner or TV shows like Intervention. The underlying causes of addiction were not well understood by most doctors, and treatment options were still in the dark ages. (There’s speculation in Wired that Belushi’s addiction and mood swings could have been from a chemical imbalance like “manic depression,” but he was apparently never diagnosed.)

    Belushi’s Death Signaled a Need for More Addiction Treatment

    “We’d talked about institutionalizing Belushi but never did,” Brillstein explained. “The choices at the time were limited to hospital psychiatric wards and white-bread joints for alcoholics. Belushi’s death, perhaps the first high-profile cocaine casualty of the ‘80s, certainly signaled a need for drug rehab centers.” (The Betty Ford Center opened the same year Belushi died.)

    Aykroyd added, “Intervention back then was not a tool that was used. Today if we had a problem like this, we’d get six to ten people together, we’d get the guy in the room, sit them down and say, ‘It’s gonna stop. You’re going into rehab and that’s it.’ Back then that was not a technique that was wide-spread.” For a while, Belushi had a sober companion hired from the Secret Service who did a good job keeping the drugs away, but it was a triple overtime job that wasn’t sustainable.

    Years after the Wired fall-out, Jacklin and Tanner Colby wrote an authorized Belushi biography, and it’s fascinating to read both books back to back because together they give you a good idea of the intense highs and lows of John’s life. Jacklin’s book gives you the good memories, the brilliance of Belushi’s comedy, and the good side of his personality. Then when you pick up Wired, you realize what terrible, terrifying lows Belushi sank to in his addiction.

    If Belushi had lived, he would be 70 today. His comedy still stands the test of time, but he had so much more to give. Not long after he died, a fan left a note on his grave: “He could have given us a lot more laughs, but NOOOOOOOOOO….”

    If any good came from Belushi’s passing, it was that it scared a lot of people straight. SNL producer Bob Tischler recalled in the book Live From New York, “When John died, it changed me. I gave up doing drugs. And I haven’t done any since.”

    He Made Us Laugh, and Now He Can Make Us Think

    And while many felt that Wired gave an incomplete picture of Belushi’s life and legacy, Woodward definitely got one thing right: “Nonetheless, his best and most definitive legacy is his work. He made us laugh, and now he can make us think.”

    Or as Brillstein summarized, “Four years of television, seven movies, and we’re still talking about him. Isn’t that amazing?”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • David and Nic Sheff Help Adolescents Navigate Drugs, Alcohol, and Addiction in New Book

    David and Nic Sheff Help Adolescents Navigate Drugs, Alcohol, and Addiction in New Book

    Nic Sheff: “It’s what I say to kids who are struggling like I struggled. Hold on. Don’t give up. Get help, and it’ll get better.”

    In the new book High, best-selling authors David Sheff and Nic Sheff shift the failed War on Drugs mantra of “Just Say No” to the more enlightened “Just Say Know.” The book comes out on the heels of Amazon Studios’ film Beautiful Boy, which draws equally from David Sheff’s memoir Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction and Nic Sheff’s memoir Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines. Following the awareness generated by the film, the father-son team hope their new volume will become a comprehensive resource for young people to learn about themselves and addiction and in the process gain the ability to make informed decisions about their own behavior, particularly when it comes to drug and alcohol use.

    Subtitled Everything You Want to Know About Drugs, Alcohol, and Addiction, the book is written for middle-grade (5th to 8th grade) readers and is designed to provide the facts about substances and substance use disorder in language accessible to adolescents. Based on personal experience and years of research, the well-designed resource will help young people accomplish a series of objectives by embracing a new mantra, beginning with the Socratic directive to know thyself, and then use this knowledge to make intelligent, compassionate decisions.

    The following objectives of the Sheff team are constructed as a path to self-awareness:

    1. Know yourself.
    2. Figure out what you want in life.
    3. Weigh the risks of using.
    4. Know the truth and decide.

    As opposed to previous attempts to raise awareness by certain forces, High: Everything You Want To Know About Drugs, Alcohol, And Addiction is not a prescriptive tome with an accusatory voice, telling the reader how to live while wagging a finger back and forth. Instead, the father-son account is a deeply personal attempt to translate the traumatic experience of drug addiction within a family. In the process of this translation, the narrative becomes a caring exploration designed to prevent such trauma from happening in other families. It’s like an archeological dig into the horrors of addiction and the miracle of recovery, focusing on the nuts and bolts that make up both complex processes.

    From the microcosm of their own experiences to the macrocosm of an encyclopedic approach, the authors provide accurate information about substance use disorder and the dangers of a wide variety of addictions. This is not an encyclopedia, but what David and Nic Sheff manage to accomplish in under 220 pages is impressive. They cover a lot of territory in an easy-to-read format.

    The book is divided up into five main sections. The first part is a personal look at Nic Sheff’s struggles with addiction. While detailing how Nic managed to find the path of sustainable sobriety, the authors also provide a basic explanation of substance use disorder and alcohol abuse. The second part of the book is about alcohol and popular drugs in America, with descriptions of the various substances and what they actually do. It separates the myths from the facts. In the third section, the descent from using drugs to becoming addicted is described. A fourth section examines treatment and recovery options while being very honest about the likelihood of relapse. Finally, the last section is a thoughtful dialogue between father and son about what David and Nic Sheff personally have learned about addiction and recovery.

    In the dialogue, David and Nic Sheff have a conversation about why they chose to write together on addiction and their personal investment in the book. Nic discusses how such a book could have helped him when he was first heading into the dark woods of addiction. He says, “If I’d known to pay attention to how I was feeling, maybe I would’ve asked for help. Parents, doctors, counselors — they can help. And even if they didn’t know exactly how to help, they could’ve directed me to someone who could’ve. I really believe that.”

    Hearing his son talk about what could’ve happened as opposed to the devastating crystal meth addiction that actually occurred appears to be painful for David Sheff. What father does not want to go back and save a child from such suffering? When asked by Nic what he learned in the struggle to help his son find a path to long-term recovery, David doesn’t even know where to start.

    With emotion, he says, “I learned how complicated people are — how much we are all dealing with, and that life is really hard, and as a result, people are always looking for something to numb the pain, to distract us, to make us feel better. I learned that we can’t help people with addiction or other problems unless we look at the root of the problems, which are always complex — a combination of factors, including biology, psychology, and environment. And I learned about love. It’s more powerful than almost any other force, and it can help us get through what we don’t think we can survive.” 

    Combining the wisdom of the loving parent and the son in recovery from addiction, David and Nic Sheff apply their hard-earned experience in life and their expertise as writers to create a unique and valuable resource. Most importantly, the book takes complex ideas and makes them accessible to tween and teen readers. From addiction as a family disease and how drugs seduce the brain to the dangers of polydrug use and debunking myths about drugs (is marijuana addictive or not?), the co-authors cover a lot of bases. The aim is to provide a solid base of knowledge about all aspects of alcohol, drugs, and addiction while also keeping young readers engaged.

    Throughout the book there are personal stories from other people with substance use disorders combined with a wide variety of cartoon imagery, interactive questions, and informational graphs. Overall, there is a sense that both David and Nic Sheff know from personal experience what is at stake and they’re taking great care to make sure they attract and keep the attention of their potentially vulnerable readership. The book also includes useful appendices of addiction terminology, emergency phone numbers, and other helpful resources.

    The book closes with a passionate expression of Nic Sheff’s dedication to his ongoing recovery: “It’s what I say to kids who are struggling like I struggled. Hold on. Don’t give up. Get help, and it’ll get better.” 

    David and Nic Sheff’s deepest desire is to save lives. By providing accurate and helpful information within the context of their strong and emotional commitment to recovery, the father and son team take on one of the most challenging problems today. The United States has the highest rate of drug-related deaths in the world, with opioids accounting for the majority of the deaths. In most cases, those deaths are preventable. With High, David and Nic Sheff hope that accurate and accessible information will create understanding and self-knowledge in young people so that when the time comes, they’ll have the confidence to make decisions that may end up saving their own lives.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • My "Beautiful Boy": David Sheff on Bringing His Family’s Story to the Big Screen

    My "Beautiful Boy": David Sheff on Bringing His Family’s Story to the Big Screen

    While watching the film, I would look over at Nic sitting next to me and get so emotional. I would start to cry and I feel like I’m about to start crying right now because I came so close to losing him.

    In “The David Sheff Solution,” The Fix interviewed the National Book Award-winning author of Beautiful Boy about his struggles as the father of a child with a substance use disorder. Now David Sheff’s story is about to be vaulted to the next level of national prominence. On Friday, Amazon Studios released the feature film Beautiful Boy, starring Steve Carrell as David Sheff and Timothée Chalamet as Nic Sheff.

    As opposed to being intimidated by this move into the public eye, David Sheff is excited. Since helping his son Nic find the path of long-term recovery, Sheff has dedicated his time and energy to raising awareness and continuing his efforts to reduce –and ultimately remove—the stigma surrounding addiction. Without stigma, Sheff knows from firsthand experience, prevention efforts will improve and treatment will become more accessible. Indeed, Sheff’s ultimate goal in allowing his story to be brought to the big screen is to bring greater compassion and understanding for this disease. Given our similar focus at The Fix, we are thrilled to again speak with David Sheff.

    The Fix: Beautiful Boy is a rare combination of both your most deeply personal work as a human being and your most successful book as an author. Was it hard to decide to expose such a story to the world, particularly in a visual format that lacks the distance of the written word? Was it difficult to let go and give director/writer Felix Van Groeningen the space to tell your story?

    The direct answer is yes. It was hard. Even from the beginning, exposing our family to potential criticism in a public forum was worrying. It has been worrying from the very beginning when I first decided to write about what was happening to my family for The New York Times Magazine. I remember asking a friend of mine to read the manuscript after I first wrote it. She was an editor, and I respected her opinions. I must admit today that her response surprised me. She told me, “You can’t publish this. There is all this stigma against addiction, and your family will be judged harshly.” As you can tell, she really counseled against moving forward.

    At that point, I already had made the commitment. I had talked with everyone involved, including Nic, and we decided to move forward. When it came out, there were no negative consequences at all. In fact, it was the opposite. I heard over and over again from people who had been impacted by addiction. It was all about sharing stories, and people seemed relieved to be able to share. They had kept their experiences quiet because these were their deep, dark secrets. They also had felt that they would be judged. It was so positive that the article and then the book led to the creation of such an open dialogue in a variety of ways from in-person to on the phone to online messages in emails plus on Facebook and Twitter.

    It’s important to note that every word in that book I scrutinized. I wanted to make sure that I said what I wanted to say while also protecting everyone involved. It ends up being really complicated. I felt everybody had suffered enough, and I didn’t want to increase anyone’s suffering. As a writer, I tried to be as meticulous as I knew how to be. The idea of allowing someone else to tell our story was scary in a different way: I knew I would not have that kind of control.

    Before it happened, the idea of doing a movie had never really occurred to me. To begin with, the writing started as a way to get through the night. The writing was a way of expurgating this deep, dark turmoil that I was experiencing. When we were approached about doing a movie, the first guy turned out to be the right guy. We were approached by Jeremy Kleiner, one of the principals at Plan B Entertainment, and he was sincerely moved by both of our books. He cared deeply about this issue because he had been through it with friends while also being deeply affected by the Dad’s perspective and the family story. He felt it made it different from the vast majority of addiction memoirs. The key point he made was that addiction was not portrayed in either of our books in a simplistic or clichéd way. He made the commitment to make a movie that would show the complexity of addiction, the fact that there are no easy answers.

    Although Jeremy was just starting out at this time, we believed in him and in Dede Gardner, his partner at Plan B, along with Brad Pitt, who is the CEO and started the company. It seemed obvious to make the decision to make the movie with them. Since then, they have won Academy-Awards for making 12 Years a Slave and Moonlight, but this was before they experienced such incredible success. When they brought on Felix Van Groeningen, the director of the movie, I was even more convinced. He’s a genius, and I was incredibly impressed and moved by his past films. Like the producers, he was connected and committed to the material. I knew we were in good hands, and I knew they would tell our story in all of its complexity.

    Steve Carrell is an American comic icon. In movies like The Office and The Forty-Year-Old Virgin, he has made us laugh (although he showed dramatic chops in Foxcatcher). What do you think of his portrayal of you in this film?

    There is no doubt that he’s a comic genius, but he’s so much more as well. Steve is an astounding actor, and I knew that long before this movie. Indeed, Nic and I remember so clearly the experience of seeing him in Little Miss Sunshine together. He was heartbreaking in that movie in such a beautiful way, and it was a moving experience for us to see that film together when it first came out in the theaters.

    When I met Steve, he was so sincere, warm, and committed to telling the story right. The other thing I realized was that he connected to the story as a father. It was not the drug experiences that drew him to the story, but the opportunity as a father to play a father desperately trying to help a child. He understood the deep desire as a parent to do anything we can to protect our kids. He expressed how badly he wanted to play that role because of the emotional component of the story.

    I must admit, however, that when I saw the movie, I still couldn’t imagine anyone playing me. It just seemed too weird. It really is disconcerting when you think about it, and, as a writer, I tend to think about things. When I finally saw the movie from beginning to end, I feel like he nailed it. He captured how hard it is and how hard it was for me to go through this period in my life. He captured what it’s like to be a parent of an addicted child, somebody you love more than anything and all you want to do is save them, but you keep running into obstacles like the denial and the horror of addiction. He captured that difficulty of helping someone who is angry and rebellious and lashing out at you as you try to save their life. I lived through that anguish, and that anguish is in every nuance of his performance and his expression and in his acting. I really was blown away and felt that he got it. Before I saw him do it, I honestly doubted whether anyone could do what he has accomplished in this film. You see his optimism and his crushing defeat, then you see him become optimistic again and then his desperation as his son keeps relapsing. The up and down and up and down is so powerful, but even more powerful is the through-line of his love for his son.

    How did you and Nic decide to move forward with the movie project? Did you both feel from the beginning that your book and his book should be turned into a combined film? How did you decide to combine the Beautiful Boy story with Nic’s Tweak, or was this choice made by the filmmakers?

    The choice was completely made by the filmmakers. It was inconceivable at first that they would be able to pull off two such different takes on the same story in a single film. However, I had heard how valuable it was for other parents to read Nic’s book and develop a new perspective on what their addicted son or daughter was going through. At the same time, it was really valuable for a lot of kids to read Beautiful Boy to get a sense of what their parents were going through, both from the perspective of the how much they suffered and the depth of their love. Many kids don’t realize how much a parent’s love is a constant in the process of trying to help their child recover.

    Still, each story had been told in book form with over three-hundred pages dedicated to each story. The idea that somebody could pull it all together in a two-hour movie was hard for me to imagine. It was not at all our choice, and it felt like they were jumping into the deep end of a stormy ocean without a life vest. Also, there was no precedent for it. I can’t think of a movie that was ever based on two different memories; one from the parent’s perspective and the other from the child’s perspective. I wasn’t sure that it could be done.

    However, you really got the emotional journey through the parent and the kid. I knew it was going to be challenging, but, once they made the decision, they never looked back. Over the two years that it took to make the movie, they kept to the course, and I feel they did it masterfully. It was a hard choice to make in the beginning, and it definitely was the decision of the filmmakers.

    As an aside, Nic did amazing in his interview. I was so impressed by the depth of his compassion and the veracity of his gratitude.

    He’s an extraordinary example of recovery in practice. All the time, I hear from people who are so discouraged because they’ve been through years of watching a child’s descent into addiction. I hear it about other family members and friends as well. They just don’t feel like recovery is possible.

    We are so lucky that Nic made it. Any parent is lucky that has a child who makes it. Nic’s drug use was so extreme, and the combination of drugs that he was doing was truly dangerous. He put himself into so many life-threatening situations during those dark days. There were so many times when it could have ended up differently. Tragically—and I feel so deeply for them because I could have been there— so many parents now experience the unforgiving horror of that outcome where they lose a child. Given Nick’s recovery now, we were very lucky.

    My experience seeing Nic go through this process has been incredible. People that go through recovery and come out the other end don’t just survive. Because of all the hard work that needs to be done, because of all the suffering, because of all the self-examination required to get sober and then stay sober, they become some of the most extraordinary people that you’ll ever meet. In fact, John, you are a case in point, and that journey from addiction to recovery, as you know from your own experience, can be inspiring to other people that you meet along the way. People that come out the other side can have the most rewarding and fulfilling lives afterward.

    I hear from so many families that are close to losing hope or have lost hope. Their relationships have been shattered, and they can’t imagine them ever being put back together. My experience with Nic has shown that families that do explode; [families that] feel—amidst the ruins—that it’s almost inconceivable that they will survive it—they do survive it, and they can survive. Recovery is still a possibility. If they do the hard work and give it time, they can be closer than ever. I believe we can say that about our family.

    Nic and David Shef
    Image Credit: Reed Hutchinson for UCLA Friends of Semel

    If this movie could accomplish one goal, what would you want that goal to be? What do you believe can be achieved?

    I feel the biggest impediment moving forward to end addiction, to face this disease in all its difficulty, to prevent people from becoming addicted and to treat people that do become addicted, is the ongoing stigma. Too many people keep their problem hidden because they are judged. People don’t go get treatment because they are hiding the reality of their addiction. When people start to get treatment, if they have the normal challenges of the usual ups and downs, if they relapse, they are judged very harshly. Being judged in such a way is the last thing needed by somebody who is addicted. They already feel terrible about themselves. They are caught in a cycle that’s like a vise, and they don’t want to be doing the terrible things that they do to themselves and to their families.

    I hope the movie can show people that addiction is not about choice. It’s not about a young person going out and doing these things just because they want to have fun and party and get high. It might be about that a little in the beginning, but it quickly shifts. Essentially, it is about pain and suffering and a desperate attempt to find some sense of peace within themselves. Addicted people talk about this hole inside them that they are trying to fill. The hole can be anything from an undiagnosed psychiatric problem like depression or anxiety to untreated childhood abuse and trauma. Whatever it is, I have come to see that it is about a pain that the person is trying to self-medicate.

    If this film can help with anything, I hope it opens the door to greater compassion and understanding for this disease. Without the burden of the stigma, we can move forward and actually help the people that need our help. We need to help people by overcoming stigma by focusing on effective prevention and treatment. People who are addicted are not weak. They are ill, and they deserve our compassion.

    At the Colorado Health Symposium in August, you start your keynote address after watching the film’s trailer by saying, “I’ve only seen that once, and it’s hard to watch.” What parts exactly were so hard to watch? Was it a combination of Nic’s descent into addiction and your inability to stop it? Did you have any PTSD-like reactions to the film, or was it a cathartic experience that freed you from the lingering demons of the past?

    Wow! That’s a good question. I guess the answer is both. It brought it all back, and it’s not like I had forgotten. However, when we get past traumatic experiences in our lives, we do put them in a place that we can live with. I feel like I had done that to some degree, and it made watching the film challenging. The experience of seeing it again opened up the whole thing again, meaning it opened up the old wounds. I just remembered how hard it was and how hard it was to watch Nic suffer. I felt again how hard it was for all of us to survive as a family.

    At the same time, it was amazingly cathartic to process what we had been through as a family. It was another version of writing the book, which had been really cathartic as well. It also was an affirmation of the hard work Nic has done to get sober and to stay sober. It was a reminder of how lucky we are to have come out the other side. While watching the film, I would look over at Nic sitting next to me and get so emotional. I would start to cry and I feel like I’m about to start crying right now because I came so close to losing him. It was a reminder of how close I came to losing him.

    In another sense, it was cathartic because I felt like it mirrored the experience of so many other people. It was a reminder of how many of us are in this together. When Beautiful Boy first came out in 2008, I thought it couldn’t get worse in terms of the number of people that were dying from addiction. The number then was about 36,000, and that doesn’t include people dying from alcohol-related causes. Of course, we know that in 2017, it was 72,000 dying from addiction-related causes alone, twice the original number. Things have gotten so much worse, and that’s why I feel that this movie is coming out at just the right time. So many people are suffering, and I hope this movie can help bring us all together and make us feel that we are not alone.

    You talk about how hard the disease of addiction is on families. Should families see this film together? Should parents take their teenagers? If they do, how should they prepare both themselves and their kids for the film and what should they do afterwards?

    Wow! That’s another good question. I guess what I would say is that every family is different. A reality that many of us would prefer not to face is that every kid is going to encounter drugs as they are growing up. It’s a prevalent reality in the world. Many parents ask me if it’s too early to start talking about drugs with their child if they are a freshman in high school. The clear answer is no. It’s not too early to start talking about drugs to your young, young child. Drugs are pervasive in our culture, and kids are curious by nature. They are confused, and it’s our responsibility to provide them with quality information to help lift that confusion. It’s our responsibility to shed light.

    Still, every family and every parent has to determine what’s appropriate for their own child. When it comes to seeing this film, that decision needs to be made for each family. In general, if your child is mature enough to see explicit and disturbing scenes of drug use, then I think this film could provide an amazing way to start that conversation in a family. What does it mean to use drugs? Why do people use drugs? What are the potential consequences to using drugs? These are crucial questions. Before watching the film, there should be a conversation that provides some education. In other words, a conversation that opens the door to a conversation. The best part of such a conversation is if parents can get their kids to talk.

    It reminds me of this recent work I’ve been doing with Jarvis Masters, a California inmate at San Quentin on death row. I’ve spent a lot of time in the prison, and I recently sat in with a group of inmates in the program as they talked about their experiences and their lives. They are trying to face the consequences of their actions by doing restorative justice. When I was leaving, I happened to be going to talk to a group of teenagers that night. I asked these men: “I’m going to talk to these kids tonight. Is there anything I should tell them? Is there anything anyone would have said to you that would have helped you growing up so you could have made better decisions later on? Maybe you would not have fallen into addiction and fallen into crime?”

    A lot of the men had really interesting things to say. At the end, there was this one guy who has been super quiet the whole time. He said something under his breath, and I couldn’t hear him. I asked him to say what he had said again. He looked up at me and said, “When you talk to these kids tonight, don’t say anything. Just listen to them.”

    I thought that was incredibly powerful, and that’s the message I would give to parents. Try to engage your kids in conversation and really figure out who they are and what’s going on in their lives. Then, it’s super important to continue the conversation after the movie. Keep talking and, more importantly, keep listening.

    Finally, people in early recovery should be careful when deciding whether or not to see this film. Given the explicit drug use and the unvarnished reality of addiction presented in the film, it may not be the best choice so they should talk it through with their counselors, therapists, sponsors or whomever they are working with to maintain their recovery. The research tells us that such scenes of drug use can be triggering, and that’s the last thing we want to do with this movie. Part of the reason the movie is so powerful is because the filmmakers committed to telling the truth, and that truth is that drug use is not glamorous in the slightest, but rather horrifying to watch.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • The Eternal Holiday of the Alcoholic

    The Eternal Holiday of the Alcoholic

    When you drink constantly, you become numb, slipping down into a sub-life, a waking coma. You become a chaotic ghost that exists almost at one step removed from everything else.

    The following is an excerpt from Jolly Lad – The Expanded North American Edition, published this month by MIT Press and available here.

    After I stopped drinking in August 2008 I went to Alcoholics Anonymous a lot at first – most days in fact for about half a year. I don’t go that often anymore and I haven’t done any of the twelve steps but I’d still say the programme was a crucial aid to me quitting.

    I guess even before I joined the fellowship I already had an inkling of what AA would be like. I’d seen enough soap operas, so I was prepared. Generally speaking, it was as I’d imagined it – a neon strip-lit, magnolia painted room with trestle tables and stackable chairs – usually in churches, village halls or community centres. Careworn people in comfortable clothes, chatting, sipping tea, rolling cigarettes. The 12 commandments and the 12 traditions would be unrolled and hung on the back wall. The yellow card (“Who you see here / What you hear here / When you leave here / LET IT STAY HERE!”) would be placed prominently at the front, resting against a small tub for the collection of voluntary subs at the end of the meeting. There would be a literature table full of pamphlets, information sheets and books and a box containing chips, or commemorative engraved metal tokens, for those who had hit a notable anniversary in sobriety – including the most important one: 24 hours. There would always be one or more copies of The Big Book there – the text written in 1939 by Bill W, to help alcoholics.

    Chapter Three of The Big Book says: “Most of us have been unwilling to admit we were real alcoholics. No person likes to think he is mentally different from his fellows. Therefore it is not surprising that our drinking careers have been characterised by countless vain attempts to prove we could drink like other people. The idea that somehow, someday he will control and enjoy his drinking is the great obsession of every abnormal drinker. The persistence of this illusion is astonishing. Many pursue it into the gates of insanity or death.”

    I had been prepared to pursue the chimera of controlled drinking right through the gates of death myself. When I gave up I was close to dying and had nearly checked out accidentally once earlier the same year. But I’d made my peace with death. I had come to believe that alcohol was the only thing that made life bearable. And in a lot of ways it was.

    Image via Krent Able

    There was dirt, horror and disfigurement everywhere I looked. But after one stiff drink I could leave the house; after two drinks the fear started lifting and after the third drink I’d feel like an artist. Or to be more precise, I would see the world through the eyes of an artist. And after five drinks, well, I could take my pick of them. On a good day I felt like Picasso. But there were all kinds of days. Imagine being Gustav Klimt in Hull, the golden light of the low winter sun at 3pm in the afternoon radiating along The Avenues. Imagine being Walter Sickert in Manchester, the violent brown and black smudges radiating from your feet and along canal towpaths. Imagine being Vincent van Gogh in St Helens, the sky ablaze with stars. That is something close to victory, something close to beating death.

    They laughed at me and called me a piss artist. And how right they were. I was an aesthete with a broken nose in a stained shirt and inside-out boxer shorts, drinking the world beautiful.

    When you drink constantly, you become numb, slipping down into a sub-life, a waking coma. You become a chaotic ghost that exists almost at one step removed from everything else. You float through the film of your own life. You see the sublime in the augury of fried chicken bones and tomato sauce cast upon the upper deck floor of a bus. You can divine a narrative among the finger-drawn doodles on the misted windows. You can feel your destiny in hundreds of individual condensation droplets on the glass turning red, then amber, then green.

    Everything that you’d worried about a few hours previously… Where will I get the money from? What if he beats me up? Am I seriously ill? Am I dying? Have I got cancer? What will she say when I finally get home a week late? Will she cry when we eventually go to bed together? Will she pack her things and leave the next day? How near is death? What will it be like? Will I scream and cry? What is it like to die? And now, after some drinks, there is just the sweet sensation of your life passing you by with no struggle and no fuss. The rope slides through your fingers with no friction, just warmth as a balloon rises higher and higher out of sight. I have bottles and bottles and bottles and my phone is out of credit. A Mark Rothko night. A Jackson Pollock night…

    This is the eternal holiday of the alcoholic. Once you create as much distance from your everyday life as you naturally have from orange tinted Polaroids of childhood caravan trips or stays in seaside hotels and Super 8 film reels of school sports days, then you start to experience your quotidian life like it’s the sun-bleached memory of a happy event. You feel nostalgia and warmth for boring events that are unfolding right in front of you. You feel wistful about experiences that most people would find barbaric or gauche or unremarkable. You experience the epic, the heart- warming and the hilarious in post office and supermarket queues. You develop permanently rose-tinted glasses.

    But there’s no getting away from it, after a while the strategy starts failing. You start seeing everything through the eyes of Francis Bacon, through the eyes of Edvard Munch, through the eyes of HR Giger…Your vision becomes stained and cracked.

    It is pretty tough stopping drinking but it’s not like I want a pat on the back for it.

    Image via Krent Able

    I see alcoholism as a self-inflicted leisure injury to some extent, disease or not. But going on the wagon is nothing compared to coming to terms with what you are like sober. The trouble with stopping drinking is that the only thing it solves in your life is you being drunk or hungover and ill all the time. When you stop drinking, everything you drank to avoid dealing with is still there, as bad as ever. Mental illness, debt, depression, the impulse to self-harm, the impulse to commit suicide, anxiety, social dysfunction, eating disorders, body dysmorphia, stress, anger, violent rage… I started drinking when I was 13 and was drinking every day by the time I was 15. I stayed pretty much constantly drunk until I was 37. When I stopped I had no real idea what I would be like.

    Alcoholism is debt consolidation for your life. Submit to alcoholism and your life becomes incredibly simple. Drink becomes the only thing you care about – and you will end up just fine with letting all the other stuff slide to the extent that it doesn’t even matter if you die or not. The only real problem with this arrangement is what happens if you decide to stop.

    Picture a reservoir surrounded by mountains. You have been tasked with draining the massive body of water away to repopulate the area. But once the water has gone you are faced with the former town that was initially flooded and the now wrecked buildings which need to be pulled down. Call several construction firms. People have been fly tipping here for years. There is tons of rubbish here. You will need help to clean the area up. There are corpses wrapped in carpet and chains. It was the ideal place to dump bodies. You’ll need to call the police and the coroner’s office. The press are on their way. There are rotten and half eaten animal carcasses that need to be cleared up and disposed of. Environmental health need to be involved. You have never seen so many mangled shopping trollies, broken children’s bikes and unwanted cars. The clearance job will be massive. There are burst canisters of toxic waste that have long since leached into the ground. It will be years before you can do anything with this land. The water was merely the stuff that was making this area look picturesque. What you have left in its place is an area of outstanding natural horror. It probably feels like you should have left well enough alone.

    Before claiming a seat by putting my coat on the back of it, and even before queuing up for a coffee, I went into the gents to try and freshen up. I scrubbed my hands hard and splashed freezing cold water onto my face – prodding the dark purple streaks of flesh under each eye with a fingertip. I stood for some time looking into the mirror as the water dripped off my face.

    What did I look like? A middle-aged man with long hair in a heavy metal T-shirt. The beard of someone who slept behind a hedge on an A-road roundabout. Face permanently blotched red down one side with hundreds of burst capillaries after spending three days awake doing amphetamines in 1996. A Monday night which culminated in nurses shouting: “Shave his chest, shave his chest!” A nose broken 17 times and eventually surgically rebuilt. Forehead like the cover of Unknown Pleasures. Right eyelid drooping down over a partially sighted eye, scarred and damaged beyond repair.

    George Orwell said we all get the kind of face we deserve by the time we turn 40. I had mine hammered irreversibly into place by my 25th birthday. Ostensibly I looked like the same person, but somehow as if reflected in the back of a rusty soup spoon instead of a mirror.

    Image via Krent Able

    I was comfortable with going to AA now that I’d been going for nearly two years but still, the back of the room suited me just fine – it’s not a Kate Bush concert, you’re not missing anything if you don’t sit in the front row.

    Comfort was not on the agenda the first time I went to AA however. My first visit to the rooms might as well have been my first day at senior school, or my first day in prison, for all the stress it caused me. I went while visiting friends up north and it was terrifying. A bare concrete room with old school chairs, bare lightbulbs and spiders in the corners. A retirement age man with a nose like a red, purple and blue blood sac mumbled brutal things as other broken people looked at their feet. When I stepped outside into the freezing cold night after the 60 minutes were up I had to sit on a garden wall for ten minutes, staring at the ground under an orange sodium light. I was unable to stand properly because of anxiety and I was still dizzy with fear walking away afterwards. It struck me quite clearly that there might not even be any point to giving up drinking, that it could even make things worse in some ways.

    It’s bad form to talk about the meetings or AA at all. Tradition 11 says: “Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio and films.” I’d like to apologise for speaking about AA here, even if it is just in very general terms. I would never repeat what anyone else said there; I never talk there myself, I just sit and listen. I wait for the reassurance of identification and nothing else.

    “I was like that once. I was that bad. I never want to go back to that again.”

    Buy Jolly Lad here.

     

    This excerpt has been lightly edited for context. All identifying details of AA meetings have been changed.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Dopesick: An Interview with Beth Macy

    Dopesick: An Interview with Beth Macy

    It takes the average user eight years and five to six treatment attempts just to achieve one year of sobriety. And in an era of fentanyl and other even stronger synthetic opioids, many users don’t have eight years.

    As recently as a few years ago, the opioid crisis could be referred to as a “silent epidemic,” perhaps in part due to its degrading nature. Opioid addiction is frequently described using metaphors of slavery, or enslavement, and those within its clutches are liable to feel acutely ashamed. No longer, however, is it possible to argue that the scourge of opioid addiction is being overlooked.

    No doubt that is partly due to the growing enormity of the problem. For each of the past several years, more people have died from drug overdoses than American service members were killed during the entire Vietnam War.

    Meanwhile, energetic and compassionate journalists have been doing outstanding work, covering the crisis from various vantages. Chief among them is Beth Macy, a New York Times-bestselling author, who first began noticing the effects of opioid addiction as a reporter for the Roanoke Times, where she worked for 25 years until 2014. Now she is out with Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America. Gracefully written and deeply reported, Dopesick should act as a vade mecum — a handbook, a guide, an essential introduction — for anyone who may be seeking insight into the deadliest and most vexing drug epidemic in American history. 

    Beth spoke to The Fix over email:

    The Fix: The first chapters of your book, on the origins of the opioid crisis, cover some material that others have explored (most notably Barry Meier, in Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic). Still, I don’t have the sense that many people are aware of the role that Purdue Pharma played in setting off current epidemic. Briefly, what is their culpability? And why do think their crimes aren’t crimes better known? 

    Beth Macy: I think Meier’s book, Pain Killer, was too early, initially published in 2003, and it was largely set in central Appalachia — a politically unimportant place. Also, let’s not overlook the role that Purdue took in stifling Meier. As I write in the book, company officials had him removed from the beat after his book came out, arguing that he now had a financial stake in making Purdue look bad.

    After the 2007 plea agreement, in which the company’s holding company, Purdue Frederick, pled guilty to criminal misbranding charges and its top three executives to misdemeanor versions of that crime, Purdue and other opioid makers and distributors spent 900 million dollars on political lobbying and campaigns. Purdue continued selling the original OxyContin formula until it was reformulated to be abuse-resistant in 2010, continued for years after that pushing the motion that untreated pain was really the epidemic that Americans should be concerned about. Their culpability in seeding this epidemic is huge.

    You weren’t able to talk directly with any of the Purdue executives who made fortunes from OxyContin, and who criminally misled the public about its addictive potential. But you spent an afternoon interviewing Ronnie Jones, who is currently serving a lengthy prison sentence for running a major heroin distribution operation in West Virginia. How were Jones’s crimes (and his rationalizations for his behavior) different from those of the Purdue executives you wrote about?

    Great question. Jones refused to see that he brought bulk heroin to a rural community in ways that overwhelmed families and first responders in the region with heroin addiction; he told me he believed he was providing a service — his heroin did not have fentanyl in it, he argued, and it was cheaper than when people ran up the heroin highway to get it in Baltimore (and safer because they could stay out of high-crime places).

    At the 2007 sentencing hearing, Purdue executives and their lawyers repeatedly claimed they had no knowledge of crimes that were happening several rungs down the ladder from them; that the government had not proved their culpability in the specific crimes. According to new Justice Department documents unearthed and recently published by The New York Times , that was simply not true. For two decades, Purdue leaders blamed the users for misusing their drug; they refused to accept responsibility for criminal misbranding that resulted in widespread addiction and waves of drug-fueled crime that will be felt in communities and families for generations to come.

    You quote a health care professional who said that previous drug epidemics began waning after enough people finally got the message: “Don’t mess with this shit, not even a little bit.” That provoked a thought: Shouldn’t we be long past this point with opioids? On the one hand, I’m enormously sympathetic to anyone who is struggling with addiction. But it’s frustrating to realize that the opioid crisis is still building. Why aren’t more people as risk-averse about heroin as they obviously should be?

    The crisis is still building because the government’s response to it has largely been impotent. And it’s been festering for two decades. Opioid addiction doesn’t just go away. It takes the average user eight years and five to six treatment attempts just to achieve one year of sobriety. And in an era of fentanyl and other even stronger synthetic opioids, many users don’t have eight years. I hope we will soon get to the point of public education where no young person “messes with this shit, not even once,” but right now we still have 2.6 million people with opioid use disorder. Even though physicians have begun prescribing less, we still have all these addicted people who should be seen as patients worthy of medical care, not simply criminals. Too often that doesn’t happen until we’re sitting in their funeral pews.

    One of the women you write about, Tess Henry, slid down a long road. You got to know her and her family quite well, over a number of years. And some of the other stories in this book are just as heartbreaking.

    It was a lot of pain to absorb and process, yes. And yet my heartache was nothing at all compared to what these families are going through.

    In a couple instances, Tess reached out to you directly, asking you for help. How did you calculate how to respond?

    I took it case by case; I just went with my gut, and I got input from my husband and trusted friends along the way. I decided it was okay to drive Tess around to [Narcotics Anonymous] meetings, recording our interviews as I drove, with her permission. But it wasn’t okay when she texted me late one night to come get her from a drug house. (I referred her plea to her mother and recovery coach instead.)

    I occasionally gave her mother unsolicited advice because I cared about her and I cared about Tess, and I felt I had access to objective information about medication-assisted treatment that Patricia didn’t have. When Tess was murdered on Christmas Eve, I put my notes away and for several days just focused on being a friend to her mom. But I did accompany the family to the funeral home when they made arrangements (taking occasional notes), and I was there in the room of the funeral parlor with her mom and her grandfather when they said goodbye to her. It took funeral technicians two days to prepare her body for that. It was the most heartbreaking scene I’ve ever witnessed. There was no need to take notes in that moment. I will never forget it as long as I live. I said a tearful goodbye to our poet, too.

    Was there ever a risk, over the course of your reporting, of becoming too involved in the lives and predicaments of the people you were writing about? 

    Always there’s a risk, but I’ve been doing this for more than 30 years now, and I know that my greatest skill — which is that I get close to people — can also be my Achilles. When I trust my gut and try to do the right thing — always also getting advice from editor and reporter friends along the way, including my husband, who is just so smart and so spot-on always — it usually works out.

    I’m grateful to have read Dopesick. But at various times it left me infuriated, appalled, and depressed. Can you leave us with anything to be hopeful about? 

    There are some pretty heartening grassroots efforts that I spotlight at the book’s end, mostly involving providing access to treatment and harm-reduction services. And Virginia just became the 33rd state to approve Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, which will help 300,000 to 400,000 people in the commonwealth have access to substance use disorder services. Seventeen more states to go! There is so much more work to be done, especially in Appalachia, where overdose deaths are highest and resistance to harm reduction programs (easy-access MAT and syringe exchange and recovery) can be severe. My goal is that Dopesick not only educates people but also mobilizes them to care and create what Tess Henry called “urgent care for the addicted” services in their own hometowns.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Neil Strauss' Evolution: From Pick-Up Artist to Relationship Expert

    Neil Strauss' Evolution: From Pick-Up Artist to Relationship Expert

    “Your relationship success has nothing to do with your partner, it’s really all about you and working on yourself…Until you do that you’ll always fall in love with the same kind of person.”

    Neil Strauss has an enviable list of accomplishments. A nine time best-selling author, he got his start as a music critic writing for The New York Times and Rolling Stone; he has toured with and written about heavy metal bands, and penned books with some of the greatest rock stars. He’s written about how to survive in a post-apocalyptic world from a survivalist’s point of few, harboring skills such as flying a plane, delivering a baby, and fashioning a knife out of a credit card.

    Strauss’ The Game: Penetrating The Secret Society of Pick Up Artists, is one of the top two most shoplifted pieces of literature from Barnes and Noble. The other one? The Bible. Both are similar in appearance and in length: hardcover leather with gold embossed titles on the cover.

    Even though it’s been over a decade since its debut, The Game, which many view as the holy grail on how to seduce and lure women into the bedroom, was recently released in its 11th hardcover edition. To Game fans, Strauss is somewhat of a Messiah. He delves into the elusive PUA (Pick Up Artist) scene and morphs from geek to the ultimate ladies’ man. He goes undercover, adopting the name “Style,” and by making adjustments and using certain puzzling techniques that verge on reverse psychology, he discovers that suddenly he can have any woman he wants. He explains lingo including terms such as peacocking: to wear something flashy and unusual in a crowded venue to get a romantic prospect’s attention; sarging: to go out to look for willing participants to try PUA moves on; kino: touching your object of desire sporadically during a conversation to establish a connection and build trust; and closing: sealing the deal and ending things with a kiss and/or a trip to the bedroom.

    Eventually Strauss left the PUA community, but not empty-handed. He began teaching others how to wine and dine women by starting “StyleLife Academy,” which made him an unexpected celebrity and hero to many men. His admirers also included an unlikely group: the FBI. The Game was required reading for agents. Few details are known other than Strauss was personally invited to train them in an undisclosed location. He applied the same techniques he honed for picking up women to teach FBI agents how to open a conversation and gain the trust of suspects, with the ultimate goal of closing: luring confessions out of the bad guys.

    One cannot play the game forever, so where does the hero go next? When it came time for the sequel, Strauss went in a radically different direction.

    The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships is the exact opposite of a dating guide; it’s about Strauss’ journey from to player to monogamous man. His painfully honest candor is refreshing and as the title states, it’s an uncomfortable book. Some of the most brilliant work comes from pushing the limits of our comfort zones, and Strauss shares all, revealing details of his adventures into the world of polyamory, orgies and open relationships. On the occasion of The Truth’s re-release in paperback several weeks ago—with a new subtitle: An Eye-Opening Odyssey Through Love Addiction, Sex Addiction, and Extraordinary Relationships—we had the opportunity to talk to Strauss about emotional health, healthy relationships, and who he hopes his book will appeal to.

    “You write a book and you never know who the audience is, men who are struggling with intimacy and relationship issues in general, and women too.” Strauss tells The Fix.

    The Truth details how life has changed for the author post Game. After years of playing the field, he’s met the right girl at the wrong time. When she discovers that he’s had a fling with one of her friends, he checks into treatment for sex addiction in hopes to better understand himself and to save their relationship. He quickly comes to realize that what he experienced during his childhood has a lot more to do with the way he’s wired than he had thought. He accepts that he will have to make peace with his past, a realization that resonates with many individuals, whether they’re in recovery or not.

    “Whatever issue someone is experiencing, whether it’s sex addiction or something else, you have to get to the core of it. We all have core wounds that take place in our first 17 years. Those imperfections get passed on and whatever label you want to put on it doesn’t matter, you just have to fix it.”

    Few authors are recognized beyond their words on a page, but whether or not he intended on it, Strauss has become a guru in the topics of life, seduction and love. It’s no longer about how to get the girl; with the massive success he’s had, there are now men and women enrolled in Stylelife Academy. He’s gone beyond instructing others how to be the ultimate PUA. It’s about guiding others to live their lives to the fullest.

    “I think I’m fortunate. I love learning about people and new things. I found something that changes my life and solves my problems [and] I want to share that,” he says of the journey that has led him to where he is today: a settled down family man with a beautiful wife and son.

    So what comes after The Truth? Stauss has no plans to stop sharing what he’s learned with others. He’s preparing to lead a workshop called The H.A.V.E.: The Human Anti-Virus Experience, a three day intensive workshop where he’ll meet and teach those who want to do some serious work on themselves.

    “If everyone took a course between high school and college, the world would be a much more comfortable place. Emotional health needs to be taken as seriously as physical health. There needs to be something for people to take to de-program everything they were taught growing up and all of their false beliefs. I couldn’t find one out there that didn’t seem dark or culty so I created one.” He’ll share what’s he learned over the years, and bring in the very instructors who guided him on his path to self-realization.

    It’s easy to get distracted when speaking with an author who has such an array of experiences, and has the kind of life that so many only dream of. After a conversation with Strauss, it’s clear why he was awarded “The greatest pick up artist who ever lived.” The charisma is there and he’s filled with sincerity. Of course there are so many questions I want to ask him, but before my time with him is up, he leads me back to The Truth, and leaves me with valuable advice:

    “There are a lot of bad single-sided myths about relationships in our culture. Your relationship success has nothing to do with your partner, it’s really all about you and working on yourself. You can’t accept your partner as they are unless you work on yourself. Until you do that you’ll always fall in love with the same kind of person.”

    When asked what the future holds, Strauss told us he’s far from finished: “I have so many books I want to write. I want to keep telling amazing and better stories.”

    The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships is now available in paperback. For more information on what Neil Strauss is up to, how you can attend The H.A.V.E. and learn other survival skills, go to www.neilstrauss.com.

    View the original article at thefix.com