Answer Addiction

Tag: Dorri Olds

  • Transfixed: 5 Movies That Stared into the Darkness—and Light—of Obsession

    Transfixed: 5 Movies That Stared into the Darkness—and Light—of Obsession

    Any one of these Tribeca favorites will provide a solid cinematic escape, especially if you’re in the mood to dig a little deeper into the human psyche.

    Summer isn’t known as the best season for movies—but this year has some fine offerings. Perhaps film studios understand our chronic need to chill after each long day of WTF news. If you’re feeling stressed, you are not alone. Taking a movie break can provide liftoff—far away from the news into another place and time. These recent movies will take us time-traveling to focus on human frailties and quirks of the mind.

    Some pictures on this list are somber in parts. We see persistent inequalities and what seem like insurmountable obstacles. Yet, each film also shows how people rise above their circumstances, inspiring me to keep on keeping on. Despite nagging obsessions that may try to suck you into a leviathan hole, you can triumph and channel your compulsions into positives.

    Puppies remain the best antidepressants but movies are a close second. And air-conditioned theaters, ahhhh.

    1. Rocketman

    “You’ve gotta kill the person you were born to be to become the person you want to be.”

    It was a given I’d be dazzled by Rocketman because I’m an Elton John fan. But I had no idea how Oscar-worthy this flick is nor how deeply it would affect me. I mean, everyone knows the formula of a rockumentary: Our hero sets off on a dream then hits a soul-stomping struggle. Nail-biting, we witness their crushing despair (while feeling half-jealous of their unwavering determination). Ultimately, their refusal to quit becomes an unhealthy obsession. We’re worried. That is, until the adrenaline rush that comes with their meteoric success.

    Favorite offerings in music biopics (Bohemian Rhapsody, Amy, Ray) levitate us to fantastical heights. And even though we know what’s coming, our hearts inevitably crack open when the star’s fame bubble bursts. From gig to gig, loneliness ensues. Our beloved musician plunges into addiction. Some survive. Many don’t.

    John has been open about his war with chemicals, yet he’s still standing stronger than he ever did, lookin’ like a true survivor, feeling like a little kid. He’s been sober for nearly three decades—that’s why he lived to watch his odyssey on screen vs. the typical post-mortem tribute.

    Last year’s Bohemian Rhapsody earned four Oscars including Best Actor for Rami Malek who became Queen’s Freddie Mercury. This year’s rock feature is even better, perhaps because Dexter Fletcher directed Rocketman from start to finish instead of rescuing the Queen biopic after original director Bryan Singer was fired. Lee Hall (Billy Elliot) wrote Rocketman’s winning screenplay. Lead actor Taron Egerton, who sings throughout, morphed into John. Jamie Bell (Billy Elliot) is superb as John’s career-long lyrics writer and closest friend, Bernie Taupin.

    The high-budget cinematography by George Richmond is mesmerizing, as are the glorious replicas of John’s eye-popping costumes by Julian Day. The cast includes Bryce Dallas Howard as John’s jaded mother, Steven Mackintosh as his distant father, and Richard Madden as salacious and smarmy manager John Reid. Scene stealer Tate Donovan plays Doug Weston, owner of L.A.’s star-making nightclub the Troubadour. Despite some sad subject matter, you will be levitated. I’ll stop here. No spoiler for the best scene in this outstanding film.

    2. Burning Cane

    This powerful indie brings you into an African American, god-fearing community in rural Louisiana. Helen Wayne (Karen Kaia Livers) lumbers across a yard toward an aging dog, trying to treat the poor pooch who is riddled with mange. Her strained movements and brow full of sweat communicate a hard life under the scorching Southern heat. Years of disappointment have settled into her features.

    Wayne is determined to help the animal out of discomfort but despite her repeated efforts and pleas to god for help, nothing is working. With the poor dog’s rash worsening, she heads to church for strength. Her faith is strong but it can’t soothe her daily feelings of helplessness. The dog isn’t the only loved one she is pained over. She bears witness while two men descend into alcoholism.

    One is the Reverend Pastor Joseph Tillman (Wendell Pierce). The other is her only surviving child, Daniel (Dominque McClellan). Recently out of work, her son has become a reluctant stay-at-home parent to his young son, Jeremiah (Braelyn Kelly). The boy seems checked-out, so removed that he seems dissociated; half-alive. His mom works long hours and Jeremiah is left with his hard-drinking, self-pitying dad who throws him a half-hearted tidbit of childrearing now and then. Despite its tough topics, the film is deeply engaging with Livers as a heroic woman trying to keep everything from falling apart.

    Burning Cane took home three awards after premiering at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival (TFF). It’s mind-popping that Phillip Youmans, the youngest filmmaker accepted into the festival, won its top prize: Best Narrative Feature. Youmans seems an old soul. He wrote, directed, shot, and edited the feature film during his final years of high school and took home the award for Best Cinematography. And Wendell Pierce’s portrayal of the alcoholic preacher earned the Best Actor honor. Now, age 19, Youmans said, “The church is regarded as a beacon of hope and guidance, but it is also used by some to manipulate and control voices within the community. Making this film was therapeutic because it allowed me to work through my own personal conflicts.”

    In an interview with BlackFilm, Youmans said, “The biggest inspiration behind Burning Cane was my upbringing in the Baptist church. I had a lot of questions that I never really got any answers to in terms of my ideological differences with the church. That’s where the emotional root of it is, but in a more literal sense, the film is about me humanizing the sorts of people I grew up with [who] surrounded me in that southern black ethos.”

    Not only is he the youngest filmmaker ever to enter and to win at TFF, he is also the first African American to win their highest award.

    3. The Quiet One

    The Quiet One wowed audiences last month at TFF and was quickly scooped up for distribution. It hits theaters June 21. This is filmmaker Oliver Murray’s debut documentary.

    The doc begins with an intriguing visual perspective of its subject, Bill Wyman, a founding member of the Rolling Stones and their bass player for 30 years. The opening shot is as if you’re staring at the faraway end of a long road. Not only a clever metaphor, it’s the “A-frame” device used in alluring masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance. That artistic aid grabs and directs the viewer’s eye to the subject. On each side of the “A” we see what appear to be endless cabinets, shelves, VHS tapes, notebooks, film reels, books, mysterious shapes, and unknown objects.

    Murray takes us through Wyman’s museum-like collection of photos, videos, and memorabilia, with voiceovers predominantly by Wyman but with additional narration sprinkled throughout from Eric Clapton and Bob Geldoff. With the discipline required by a musician to master an instrument, Wyman also diligently kept a diary to record his 82 years on the planet.

    I’d assumed that all of the Stones indulged in the hard-partying lifestyle of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards due to their access to boatloads of money, the superpower of fame, a gazillion groupies, and cling-on fans who would’ve done anything just to be near them. But Wyman never fell into that typical rock ’n roll trap of addiction, though he did struggle with his own demons. We see indications of Wyman’s obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) in his meticulously archived life.

    Oliver Murray, the doc’s writer and director, granted The Fix an exclusive interview, candidly revealing something about himself:

    “Coming from a music background myself, I’d seen friends go that way. It never happens overnight from what I’ve seen. It’s when you look back and see such brilliant potential went to waste. I think the sadness for Bill [Wyman] is especially around the early death of Brian Jones. It is still an open wound for him. He goes back into his archives every day. So he comes across figures like Brian.”

    Twenty years have gone by since Wyman left the band searching for a less fraught life. Meanwhile, the Stones are still going. Murray said that from Wyman’s viewpoint, “Brian should have had a long, healthy life. That’s the bit he has to live with but also keep his own life going forward. You can only analyze by going backward. I think Bill gets equal amounts of nourishment from the archive as he does sadness because with his compulsion to go back, to study his life, trying to understand it, he relives it.”

    Murray acknowledged Wyman’s severe OCD and described the bass player as a completionist.

    “The way Bill lived in the Stones was not suited to someone with OCD,” said Murray. “Like in the film, he said, ‘Fuck it, I’m going to do this.’ But it became a wild beast. Being in the Stones was like living in a goldfish bowl.”

    I found the doc fascinating. Murray reveals a complex man you probably know little about. Even a hard-core Stones fan or semi-informed loyalist to the band will find new information here. I expected to hear more about Wyman’s huge scandal 35 years ago regarding the vast age difference between the rocker and his second wife. It was a predictably short marriage. This documentary shows Wyman’s world as it is, without judgment.

    For me, the archive itself was the fascinating star.

    4. 17 Blocks


    Courtesy of Tribeca Film Festival

    Documentary 17 Blocks, which also premiered at TFF last month, introduced me to the treacherous D.C. neighborhood only 17 blocks from the U.S. Capital. Washington’s wealthy “suits” drive by on their way to six- and seven-figure jobs, earning tax breaks while the working class and poverty-stricken struggle to feed their children. The irony is sickening. A local shop prints the names of people who were killed by guns on T-shirts for grieving loved ones.

    In this high-crime area, nine-year-old Emmanuel Sanford-Durant began filming his family in 1999. His passion to record rubbed off on family members and for two decades, the Sanford family documented their daily lives which included poverty, racism, oppression, devastating violence, and drug addiction. The footage is raw and breathtaking, as is their resilience.

    Twenty years of intimate moments span four generations, beginning with Emmanuel, his older brother Smurf, sister Denice, and mother Cheryl. In between multiple hardships, we are treated to a family full of love, redemption, and hope.

    After the premier screening, Filmmaker Davy Rothbart and members of his Sanford “family” took the stage. The packed crowd welcomed them with a deafening standing ovation. 17 blocks won TFF’s award for Best Editing in a Documentary Feature.

    Rothbart described his strong connection with Cheryl to The Fix.

    “She always says she ‘adopted’ me. I knew Smurf because we played basketball. I showed Emmanuel my video camera and showed him how to use it. Ten years later, in 2009, I’d grown close to the family and it was a thrill to see Emmanuel graduate high school, get engaged. He was excited talking about becoming a firefighter.”

    A few months later, disaster struck. On New Year’s Eve, Smurf’s drug dealing led to an unthinkable tragedy. Rothbart rushed to be with the Sanfords as soon as he heard. Despite her anguished state, or perhaps because of it, Cheryl demanded Rothbart keep filming. Cheryl wanted him to show everything—the failures, struggles, and crime. During the editing process, she insisted Rothbart include Cheryl’s battles with addiction. Not for pity, but to show the underbelly—the institutional violence of high crime and poverty that creates trauma in entire communities.

    Too many are living in chronic poverty with limited options and turn to drugs. Cheryl also wants to show that even in the face of harsh living conditions, recovery is possible. Smurf survived his feelings of guilt and loss by turning his life around. It’s inspiring to hear Cheryl talk about therapy, family love, and facing her demons.

    5. Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project


    Courtesy of Tribeca Film Festival

    I’d never heard of Marion Stokes until I saw Matt Wolf’s documentary, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project. In 1975, just as the 24/7 news cycle was taking hold, Stokes began recording television sporadically. Then in 1979 the Iranian Hostage Crisis triggered a sense of urgency. She set multiple VCRs to tape all day and night, every day. She kept that up for 33 years until her death in 2012. Stokes left behind an astounding 700,000 VHS tapes—all labeled. The doc explores her life before and after her obsession took over.

    The public didn’t know that television stations had been throwing away their archives for decades. What Stokes saved is now being digitized. Many of her recordings are the only video evidence of what was going on during the three decades she taped.

    Stokes owned multiple Apple Computers, approximately 50,000 books, and piles of furniture. While watching the movie at TFF, I wondered if she suffered from more than hoarding and OCD. Was she also prescient, predicting a future era of #FakeNews? Or maybe that’s just a titillating thought. She worked as a librarian and read constantly; she may have based her beliefs on the history of wealthy people manipulating information in order to oppress the less fortunate.

    Stokes obsessively recorded programs on multiple televisions set to different channels. Her determination to preserve history is surprising because it wasn’t generally known that broadcasters didn’t save what they produced. Stations could dispose of programs and deny they ever existed. She saw the potential danger of people promoting “alternative facts.”

    To some, she may have been labeled paranoid. We know better. Stokes knew that angles could shape information and influence audiences.

    Marion Stokes died on the day of the Sandy Hook Massacre. Her VCRs continued to record, capturing the unfolding tragedy. 

    Any movies you’d add to this list? Let us know in the comments!

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • You Are What You Eat: How Chemicals in Food Affect Your Mood

    You Are What You Eat: How Chemicals in Food Affect Your Mood

    Low-nutrient foods, plentiful in the American diet, are made of ingredients which can cause the same effects in the brain as mind-altering substances.

    Lifestyle diseases include diabetes, obesity, stroke, heart disease, smoking, and substance use disorder. According to the CDC, heart disease, cancer, and diabetes are the leading causes of death and disability in the U.S.

    Trying to Quit Everything in Sobriety

    When I finally quit rum and cocaine, I wanted to change everything about my lifestyle immediately. With close to no impulse control and without alcohol and drugs to distance me from my feelings, I was a revved up raw nerve of angst. My original plan was to quit smoking, lose ten pounds, and quit picking the wrong guys. Thankfully, when I was newly sober I made a new friend, let’s call her “Anne.”

    “I’m getting fat,” I told Anne two weeks after we met. “I need to go on a strict diet. I can’t let myself put on even more weight now that I’m quitting cigarettes.”

    Anne said, “Crash diets rarely work and smoking is one of the toughest habits to break. The way to get healthy is to tackle one problem at a time. For now, maybe putting down drinking and drugging is enough.”

    Anne gave me that excellent advice decades ago. We’re still friends and it’s been educational watching her change over the years. Unlike me, she preferred living at a thoughtful and slower pace. Many of her great habits like meditation, mindfulness, and exercise rubbed off on me.

    After two years clean, I met a woman who’d had throat cancer. She had a huge scar across her neck and talked like a frog. I ran home that night, threw out my brand-new carton of Newports and quit cigs cold turkey. I began going to the gym. Two years after that big change, I went to Weight Watchers and lost 12 pounds and I’ve kept it off. But I was still in love with sugar and picked up compulsively chewing Bazooka Joe. Anne didn’t like sweets, which I could never understand. She said they made her feel like she’d had too many cups of coffee. She also drank decaf.

    Addicted to Sugar

    I’d been a sugar addict since childhood; I used to sell my lunches to kids on line in the cafeteria and sneak to the corner store for Milky Ways and Snickers. Due to the high cost of dentists, I finally switched to sugar-free gums like Extra and Trident but when an old filling was pulled loose, I was done with gum.

    Everyone knows that sugar isn’t good for you, right? I’d read Sugar Blues as a teen while dating a health nut. And I knew that diet soda wasn’t full of vitamins and nutrients, but I didn’t want to dig too deeply into its ingredients. Anne mentioned it a few times so I’d glanced at articles about aspartame here and there but the truth is, I avoided learning about it because I didn’t want to know. I love soda. I’ve tried to give it up many times without success. Based on Anne’s suggestion, I switched to water but couldn’t keep it going after a few short spurts. The longest I ever went was two weeks — water was boring. I always gleefully ran back to Diet Coke and Diet Cherry Pepsi.

    In 2017, Donald Trump announced “We’re going to be cutting regulations at a level that nobody’s ever seen before.” Since then, I’ve wondered who is approving what and if anyone is checking anything anymore. For all we know, big companies are paying big amounts of money to keep us eating crap. That’s when it first hit me that I should become a more informed consumer; I knew it was stupid to keep ignoring what I was ingesting. But by that time, I was in the habit of making changes slowly and not in the informed way Anne did. I was putting off quitting anything else but it was starting to gnaw at me.

    The Diet Soda Trap

    At a recent work conference, I met a handful of health and wellness experts. While chatting I asked, “How bad is it that I’ve been addicted to diet soda for-like-ever?” Talking stopped, heads whirled toward me, jaws fell slack and I felt like an idiot.

    “It’s full of toxic chemicals,” one said, finally breaking the silence.

    “Aspartame is the worst,” said another.

    A third woman chimed in with sarcasm. “It’s great if you love mood swings and gaining weight.”

    That evening I googled articles about aspartame and additional sugar substitutes. The more I read, the more it reminded me of the immutable hold that cocaine had had on me. When I was in rehab I’d learned that my addiction had nothing to do with me being a “bad” person or having weak, wimpy willpower and everything to do with brain pathways and ingrained habits. By the time I left treatment, I had a newfound understanding that no matter how many times I’d tried to quit snorting sparkly white powder, my brain was as trained as any of Pavlov’s dogs. Through the repetition over many years, my brain had developed deep grooves and these ingrained patterns became triggers for my Pavlovian compulsion to sniff out and snort up rewards.

    So here I am with all this knowledge that any self-destructive habit I want to break is going to take work. It means changing my lifestyle until I build new brain pathways or at least block off the old ones.

    Soon after reading more about aspartame, I received a timely email from Jaya Jaya Myra (née Myra Rodriguez), with a link to her new TEDx talk. I remembered Myra’s strong background in neuroscience, which gave her opinion more weight in my mind. I knew she looked for solutions to her problems by studying her own brain, and that she sometimes found life-changing answers. Myra became a nutritionist, healer, Tedx-talker, and bestselling author of the book Vibrational Healing: Attain Balance & Wholeness. Understand Your Energetic Type, which I’d already read.

    I was impressed by the new talk, so I asked her to meet me for lunch.

    The Connection Between Trauma and Illness

    “I cured myself of debilitating fibromyalgia,” she said as we sat in a diner. “Doctors couldn’t help me. The pain was debilitating and I lost everything—my job, my marriage, the bank foreclosed on my home, I couldn’t take care of myself or my three kids. When I was at my lowest point, I knew I had to figure out how I went from being totally healthy to completely debilitated.”

    She described a long road to self-discovery that included meeting a Native American healer and Eastern medicine practitioners. “In Western medicine,” she said, “they focus on treating the symptoms, but fibromyalgia is a mysterious illness with no known causes or cures. Doctor after doctor treated me like I was an emotional female and it was all in my head.”

    The only way to get better was to pinpoint the source of the problem. She went into therapy, worked hard, and found out she had repressed traumatic childhood memories. Her mother was an alcoholic who couldn’t take care of herself or of her daughter. Myra was neglected and traumatized and had developed self-destructive habits that made things worse.

    I told her about my recent research. “Diet stuff can cause many more problems because of chemical sweeteners,” she said. “Aspartame is used in diet soda, sugar-free gum, yogurts, and so much more. It’s one of the worst sugar substitutes because it tricks your brain into thinking, ‘Ooh, sweet taste. I’m going to get a reward. But diet sodas don’t do that, they inhibit good hormones and neurotransmitters like dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin. So you’re not satiated and it makes you crave more. It actually increases your appetite and wreaks havoc with your moods—depression, anxiety.”

    Next I reached out to Emily Boller, author of Starved to Obesity, a self-help book about her journey out of food addiction. “Modern-day foods are completely abnormal,” she said. “They promote disease. I never chose depression. I didn’t want an addiction to food.”

    Like Myra, Boller believes that eating disorders are symptoms of underlying conditions “like depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.” And, like Myra, Boller had experienced her own trauma. “My son Daniel died by suicide in 2012, in part it was due to his addiction to artificial and processed foods. He had type 1 Diabetes.”

    If Daniel’s blood sugar got too high, the avalanche of brain-damaging spikes would create a medical delirium called metabolic encephalopathy, with symptoms like psychosis. He was only 21 when he died. Losing her son sent her into shock, then a “suffocating depression.” She’d struggled with food since childhood—first with binge eating and weight gain which brought on cruel teasing in school. In her teens, she swung the other way, dangerously into anorexia. As an adult she became obese.

    Craving Low-Nutrient Foods

    “You know that you’re addicted to a certain food if you try to give it up but the cravings are so strong you cave,” said Boller. “Our bodies weren’t meant to eat artificially sweetened shakes, diet soda, sugar-free Jell-O, pudding or protein bars.”

    Boller raves about her doctor, Joel Fuhrman, MD, a six-time bestselling author and president of the Nutritional Research Foundation who specializes in preventing and reversing diseases through nutrition. Boller credits Dr. Fuhrman for teaching her a whole new lifestyle. What she shared was in keeping with what Jaya Jaya Myra had said about aspartame, chemicals and nutrition.

    Dr. Fuhrman taught Boller about addictive substances. “They activate the reward system and cause the brain to demand more and more.” Boller learned that willpower is no match for addictive drives and that low-nutrient foods — high in calories, intensely sweet, salty, or fatty — make up the majority of the standard American diet. “The ingredients cause the same effects in the brain that mind-altering substances do.”

    Here’s one way to think of addiction: Imagine walking in a field of grass. When you walk to one spot, you make a connection that gives your brain a good feeling, just like when an opioid floods your brain with a rush of dopamine. Now, imagine going back to that spot so you can have that pleasurable experience again. With each repetition you have matted down the grass in the field into a pathway. It would be odd to walk any other way than along the pathway that directly leads to the brain’s reward. When your brain doesn’t get the expected reward, it keeps craving it and looking for it.

    “That’s why whenever you want to change a habit,” said Myra, “you need to replace it with something positive until you build a new pathway.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • "Little Woods" Explores Family Bonds, Poverty, and Opioids in Small-Town America

    "Little Woods" Explores Family Bonds, Poverty, and Opioids in Small-Town America

    “I hadn’t set out to make a political film but my personal point of view about what’s happening right now is horrifying. I mean whatever way we’re dealing with the opiate crisis, it isn’t working.”

    Writer-director Nia DaCosta’s first feature Little Woods is fresh off the film festival circuit and now playing in theaters nationwide. The movie earned multiple awards including Tribeca’s prestigious 2018 Nora Ephron Prize. It’s the kind of thriller that makes you lean forward—a nail-biter. Tessa Thompson and Lily James keep the audience transfixed.

    This is a tale of two sisters living in Little Woods, North Dakota, a fracking town in rapid decline. Ollie (Thompson) is the stronger, tougher sib. She’s the one who gets things done. Unfortunately she got too careless as a drug runner and was caught transporting opioids across the border from Canada. When Parole Officer Carter (Lance Reddick) reminds Ollie that they have only one more meeting before she’s free to start a legit job in Spokane, his concerned look foreshadows looming problems. He says, “Please stay out of trouble,” but the audience understands: Uh oh. Something bad is gonna happen.

    Deb (James) had been the most popular girl in high school so it’s not a surprise that she paired up with the most popular guy, Ian (James Badge Dale). But now Ian is an alcoholic and deadbeat dad to their son Johnny (Charlie Ray Reid). Frail Deb is a broken and broke substance abuser with a knack for screwing up her life.

    The estranged sisters are together again in the house they grew up in, each feeling exhausted and alone despite their close physical proximity. They are separately grieving the recent loss of their mother after a prolonged illness, in which Ollie stayed to provide care while Deb did her own thing. Their family history is fraught with resentments.

    Easing their mother’s pain was the impetus for Ollie’s initial border-crossing opioid-gathering mission. Canadian prescription painkillers were cheaper. That was how the trafficking started; we get the bigger picture when Deb asks Ollie why she got caught.

    “I forgot to be scared,” Ollie said. “I liked it too much.”

    There is no money left after their mom’s death. Mortgage payments are overdue and Ollie finds a foreclosure notice on the front door. She is ready to just walk away, to blow this depressing town and let the bank take the house. With a new job to look forward to, she feels hopeful for the first time in longer than she can remember.

    Then everything comes to a screeching halt.

    Deb reveals that she is accidentally pregnant by Johnny’s no-good father.

    Deb tried to handle things herself: She went to see a doctor but was told that without insurance, the cost of prenatal care combined with the fees for the birth would run between $8,000 and $9,000. Disillusioned, she opts for an abortion only to discover that North Dakota abortion centers were shuttered. Finally, desperate, Deb researches where she can get a legal abortion in Canada.

    When Deb breaks down and tells Ollie the news, including that she’ll have to travel hundreds of miles in order to get an affordable abortion, the stronger sister kicks into high gear like the super-duper codependent she is. With only one week to pay the bank at least half of the $6,000 they owe on the mortgage, Ollie decides she can’t leave destitute Deb and Johnny homeless.

    That’s when I wanted to scream, “No! Go to Al-Anon!”

    But Ollie risks her freedom, her new job, and her safety to make one last drug run. The heart-pumping action begins. Luke Kirby plays the frightening drug dealer.

    Nia DaCosta talked to journalist Dorri Olds for The Fix.

    “They told me in film school, ‘Write what you know,’” said DaCosta. “At first, I took that literally. But I didn’t want to write about my life, I wanted to explore other worlds.”

    DaCosta figured out that she could use the same principle to write about topics she didn’t know but could learn if she was able to relate emotionally.

    “We look at poverty and addiction as personal failures, moral failures,” said the Brooklyn-born, Harlem-raised 29-year-old. “I had a great family. I mean we weren’t well off but growing up in New York City, I could walk to a hospital. I can get to a Planned Parenthood. Lives of deprivation, like Deb and Ollie’s, [were] completely unfamiliar to me.”

    Determined and hardworking, DaCosta spent time in Williston, North Dakota to write the fictional town of Little Woods. She was stunned by how little she knew about how dark life is for so many people in America, especially women.

    “I wanted to present what was happening. This is reality. This is where we are. Medications are overprescribed to a startling degree. I remember getting 20 Vicodin pills when I got my wisdom teeth taken out. I didn’t need any of the pills.”

    Alarmed, she threw them out.

    “I hadn’t set out to make a political film but my personal point of view about what’s happening right now is horrifying. I mean whatever way we’re dealing with the opiate crisis, it isn’t working. That is heartbreaking.”

    DaCosta confirmed that trafficking opioids was never about getting high for Ollie. But after smuggling affordable painkillers to help her mom, Ollie found out how much locals would pay for the ill-gotten opioids. The town of Little Woods attracted men who came for the oil drilling jobs, hard manual labor that resulted in body aches and chronic pain. The more Ollie became known as the go-to for “meds,” the more it went to her head. She liked being a badass drug dealer. In a town where there were few options, especially for women, she liked her tough persona and getting to hang with the boys.

    “It gave her a purpose,” said DaCosta. “It gave her a place where she mattered; a way to stand out.”

    The filmmaker decided to add substance misuse to Deb’s problems after she spent time in North Dakota researching for the movie.

    “I remember talking to people, and it was just a part of the ecosystem. Everyone I spoke to either knew someone, or they themselves had substance abuse issues and had been involved with it in some way.”

    Even though she didn’t set out to make a political film, DaCosta’s movie explores interrelated social, economic, and health problems that the U.S. is grappling with. In the red states, clinics that perform abortions and other health services for women are being shut down. Many fear that Roe vs. Wade may be overturned. The opioid epidemic has reached astonishing numbers. Click here for more information.

    Nia DaCosta and Tessa Thompson discuss Planned Parenthood:

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • It's Never Too Late to Change: New Books by Writers in Recovery

    It's Never Too Late to Change: New Books by Writers in Recovery

    If stress has been dogging you and your bandwidth is low, it’s okay to turn off your gadgets so you can refuel. Pick up a book instead and indulge in some battery-free entertainment. Here are 4 faves, all by sober writers.

    Your nerves shot? Mine, too. Winter is a slog and I can’t wait for spring. When I can’t stand one more minute of worrying about the planet, polar bears, politics and hate, I still choose escape. But… instead of rum and cocaine, my go-to is a good book. So, if stress has been dogging you and your bandwidth is low, it’s okay to turn off your gadgets so you can refuel. Breaks from YouTube and the 24/7 news cycle can do wondrous things for the mind. I went radical this week and even turned off my cell. Twitter can consume me if I let it.

    This month I made time to curl up on the couch with my dog and disappeared into these gems:

    Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction
    by Judith Grisel (Doubleday, Feb. 19, 2019)

    “My response to being overwhelmed by the deep void was to leap into it.” — Judith Grisel

    Judith Grisel writes about the grizzly years of self-destruction. Stories show the author at her messiest. In a decade, she’d consumed a cornucopia of substances; by age 23, she was a self-loathing mess.

    The strength of Grisel’s bestseller is her intimate knowledge about the nervous system and addiction. Grisel peppers the pages with unsettling anecdotes, but she does it sans self-pity. Like a journalist, she reports embarrassing and creepy things.

    “I ripped off stores and stole credit cards when the opportunity presented itself, I was still able to maintain, at least to myself, that I was basically a good person. To an extent, for instance, I could count on my companions, and they could count on me. I say to an extent, because we also knew and expected that we would lie, cheat, or steal from each other if something really important were at stake (that is, drugs).”

    I never tire of drunken-drugalogues, and Grisel doesn’t disappoint on that front. But telling these stories is not to shock or manipulate readers, nor is Grisel trying to prove she was “a bona fide addict.” Her purpose is to illustrate the bleak existence of those who cannot stop drinking and drugging.

    When Grisel “finally reached the dead end” where she felt she was “incapable of living either with or without mind-altering substances,” she sought help. After a 28-day rehab and months in a halfway house, she managed to pull her life together. After seven years of study, she earned a PhD in behavioral neuroscience and became an expert in neurobiology, chemistry, and the genetics of addictive behavior.

    This book doesn’t brag about having the answers, but shows what a sober neuroscientist has learned after 20 years of studying how an addicted brain works. She makes it easy to understand why it’s so difficult to get sober and maybe even harder to stay that way. It irks me when people say they never think about drugs or alcohol anymore. My first feeling is rage—probably because I’ve never experienced anything like that, despite working hard on myself during 30 years in recovery. Grisel refreshingly writes about the temptation that’s always there.

    Grisel’s writing communicates succinctly: “A plaque I later saw posted behind a bar described my first experience [with alcohol] precisely: Alcohol makes you feel like you’re supposed to feel when you’re not drinking alcohol.” In another passage, she quotes George Koob, chief of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism: “There are two ways of becoming an alcoholic: either being born one or drinking a lot.” Grisel is careful to explain so you don’t get the wrong idea. “Dr. Koob is not trying to be flip, and the high likelihood that one or the other of these applies to each of us helps explain why the disease is so prevalent.”

    When she writes about her experiences, it’s candid and clear, and it feels like she’s a friend and we’re chatting in a café. I found myself frequently nodding with identification—like a bobblehead on a car dashboard. It’s a fascinating, absorbing, satisfying book about addiction.

    Widows-in-Law
    by Michele W. Miller (Blackstone Publishing, Feb. 26, 2019)

    There was a huge turnout at The Mysterious Bookshop in downtown Manhattan on February 26. The event was the book launch of Michele W. Miller’s second novel, Widows-in-Law. Lawrence Block, the wildly successful, sober crime novelist, sat beside Miller in the role of interviewer, and he was as entertaining as ever.

    See Also: Lawrence Block: One Case at a Time

    Miller, a high-level attorney for New York City, said, “Widows-in-Law is about an attorney who dies suddenly in a fire, leaving behind a first wife who’s a streetwise child abuse prosecutor.” She then jokingly added, “who might resemble me a little bit.” That got a big laugh because many attendees knew that Miller had previously worked as a child abuse prosecutor.

    In a thick and endearing Brooklyn-Queens accent, Miller described the deceased’s second bride. “You know, legs up to the eyeballs…[a] gawgeous trophy wife.” Block jumped in with praise: “That’s the one that resembles you.” Miller blushed and said, “See? That’s why we keep him around for a hundred books. Another big laugh, another inside joke: throughout Block’s astounding career, the well-loved crime writer has churned out 100 books.

    Miller quickly regained her composure and got back to the novel’s setup: Emily is a 16-year-old from Brian’s first marriage, to Lauren. Shortly before Brian died in the fire, Emily moved in with Brian (and his new wife). Lauren hoped they could reel in the out-of-control teen.

    The Miller thriller works well. It’s a fast read with dramatic and believable scenes and dialogue. I wanted to dig deeper and find out how much of the novel was fictional. Many novelists write about the worlds they know. Miller agreed to one-on-one time to discuss the three badass women at the center of the story.

    “Emily’s mom Lauren is my main character. Her backstory includes being a homeless teenager during the 1980s and ‘90s,” Miller said. “Her parents were whacked on drugs so Lauren left. She stayed at a shelter on St. Marks. It’s an iconic recovery building in the East Village.”

    When I asked which parts of the novel are autobiographical, Miller paused, sucked in a deep breath, then let it out slowly.

    “Okay,” she said. “Here goes. I’m in my 30th year clean. I was a low-bottom heroin addict.” Miller’s past included a felony arrest for cocaine possession. She was facing 15 to life. To avoid spoilers, suffice it to say that explained why some of the scenes seemed so thoroughly researched.

    “The book touches on my experiences with jail, illegal after-hours spots, and the complete chaos of addiction,” said Miller, who is now the director of enforcement for the New York City Conflicts of Interest Board. “Basically, that means I’m the chief ethics prosecutor for the city.” She’s aware of the irony. Before getting clean, Miller ran in the same circles as hitmen, such as the infamous Tommy Pitera.

    “Yeah, we got high together,” said Miller. “People knew him as Tommy Karate because he was into martial arts. But it wasn’t until a book that I found out he was a brutal killer who cut people into little pieces. I was traumatized. We hung out, getting high. I don’t know why he didn’t kill me. I guess he liked me. Maybe because I was an accomplished martial artist?”

    Miller is proof of how much your life can change when you get sober. She’s lucky to have survived her druggy past that included hanging out with murderers. Lawrence Block said, “Michele Miller has had more lives than a cat, and they’ve made her a writer of passion and substance.”

    After you read Widows-in-Law, check out Miller’s first novel, The Thirteenth Step: Zombie Recovery (HOW Club Press, November 4, 2013). It’s another fast-paced doozy and a finalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards. Kirkus Reviews wrote, “A humorous and surprising satire of both the zombie apocalypse and the culture of addiction… wholly original… satisfying…. The care taken in both characterization and prose earns the reader’s time. A well-written, thoughtful treatment not just of a popular literary trope but of a nagging social issue.”

    The Addiction Spectrum: A Compassionate Approach to Recovery 
    by Paul Thomas, MD, and Jennifer Margulis, PhD. (HarperOne, Sept. 4. 2018)

    Paul Thomas, MD, is board certified in integrative and holistic medicine and addiction medicine—he’s also in recovery.

    “Addiction isn’t about willpower or blame,” he said. “It’s a disease that, like many other conditions, exists on a spectrum.” The spectrum is about how severely you crave your substance of choice when you don’t have it. It’s about how serious your health consequences are. Death, of course, is the worst end of the spectrum.

    The Addiction Spectrum offers a system that bases the individual’s needs on where they are on the spectrum. Thomas offers seven key methods for healing, whether you’re active in addiction or already in recovery. “Doctors need a new approach to treating pain,” said Thomas. He mentioned the hazards of painkillers within the medical community, “My wife is a nurse and recovering opiate addict,” he said. 

    The book is about any addiction—alcohol, marijuana, opioids, meth, technology. Co-author Jennifer Margulis, PhD, is an award-winning science journalist who’s been writing books about children’s health for over 10 years.

    “Making love, eating delicious food,” said Margulis, “these activities release dopamine and make you feel good. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to feel good. But using heroin or abusing prescription opioids or even excessive computer gaming or binge eating will harm your brain. Too many young people think, ‘Hey, I’m just having fun.’ But there is nothing fun about dying from an overdose.”

    But what is it about right now that can explain the drug epidemic?

    “We’re animals, wired to avoid danger and seek pleasure,” Thomas said. “We scan for threats and have an immediate fight, flight or freeze reaction. We’re talking about dopamine and epinephrine (adrenaline) responses.”

    Margulis agreed: “with cell phone alerts, video games, 24/7 news and high stress from work or school, we are overloaded. We can become addicted to food, social media, cigarettes, and a bunch of other substances and behaviors.”

    Both Thomas and Margulis agree it is time to start looking at the root causes. Why is there an increase in mood disorders, fatigue, and addiction? The book answers so many questions and I learned a lot about how to treat my body and mind better. The writing style makes it easy reading—nothing too tough to get through and very practical.

    The most anticipated book on my list isn’t out yet, but I’ve been lucky enough to read a sample chapter.

    Strung Out
    by Erin Khar (HarperCollins|Park Row Books, Feb. 2020)

    Erin Khar’s much-anticipated memoir will hit the shelves in early 2020. It’s the story of Khar’s decade-long battle with opioids, but it goes even further by searching for answers. Why is it that some people can do drugs and stop, while others become addicted? She explores possible reasons for America’s current drug crisis and its soaring death toll. The CDC statistics are staggering. From 1999 to 2017, more than 700,000 people died from drug overdoses, and 400,000 of those died from an opioid overdose. This epidemic is devouring our nation.

    Khar’s writing beat includes addiction, recovery, mental health, relationships, and self-care. She also writes the “Ask Erin” column for Ravishly.

    For a decade, beginning at age 13, she kept her heroin use a secret from friends and family. When she was caught by her then-fiancé, she went to rehab and her book describes her harrowing withdrawal. Three years later, at age 26, she relapsed. Four months later, her using had dragged her to the bottom.

    Khar, who has written for The Fix, told me, “I’ve been clean from opiates for 15 years!” That’s an enormous achievement for any addict, and in that decade and a half, she’s completely changed her life.

    From Khar’s essay in Self magazine:

    “If you had told me 15 years ago that I would be a happily married mother, living in New York City, doing what she loves for a living… I would have laughed.”

    She hopes that her book will help shatter the stigma; stop the shaming. She describes its genesis: “I wrote the short story ‘David‘ for Cosmonauts Avenue. Agents contacted me about writing a memoir.” After reading her essays, and following her writing career, I’m eager to read a book by this heroine about heroin.

    Every one of these books is written by a sober writer. They are living proof that people’s lives can change at any time.

    Mine sure did.

    Do you have favorite sober authors? Please share them with us in the comments!

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Blackouts and Memory Gaps: How Alcohol and Trauma Affect the Brain

    Blackouts and Memory Gaps: How Alcohol and Trauma Affect the Brain

    Dissociation is most common in trauma that involves a betrayal of trust. This is a survival mechanism that protects our need for social support.

    Sober October has ended and now (hopefully sober) November begins. Fall brings the annual three-fold challenge: Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s. This year, the midterm elections have created a fourth stressor and some of us are barely muddling through. Recent events have been especially terrifying—mass shootings, pipe bombs, a new report of catastrophic climate change, and the ongoing nightmare that is the Justice Department’s current mandate.

    Recently, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) called for an investigation into allegations made by Julie Swetnick—one of the brave women who accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct. Unbelievably, Grassley ordered the FBI to open a criminal investigation—into Swetnick.

    Grassley said that Swetnick’s sworn affidavit was not true. Was this just his opinion? It wasn’t based on FBI reports because he and fellow Republicans would not allow the feds to thoroughly investigate her claims against Kavanaugh—nor anyone else’s.

    “During the years 1981–82,” Swetnick said in her sworn statement, “I became aware of efforts by Mark Judge, Brett Kavanaugh and others to spike the punch at house parties I attended.” She also stated, “In approximately 1982, I became the victim of one of these gang or train rapes where Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh were present.” Swetnick said she’d seen Kavanaugh drink excessively at these parties and described him as a mean drunk.

    CBS News video:

    The Brett Kavanaugh Hearing

    In late September, Kavanaugh accuser Dr. Christine Blasey Ford went before the U.S. Senate during Kavanaugh’s SCOTUS confirmation process. There were times during her testimony that I felt sick to my stomach. It was as if she were telling my story. Dr. Ford stated that some of her memories were seared into her mind. She also acknowledged that she wasn’t able to recall every detail from that day. But who remembers every detail of any event?

    It was reassuring when Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) acknowledged this:

    “Ford has at times been criticized for what she doesn’t remember from 36 years ago. But we have numerous experts, including a study by the U.S. Army Military Police School of Behavioral Sciences Education, that lapses of memory are wholly consistent with severe trauma and stressful assault.”

    But the Republicans were not interested in further investigation and, despite the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements and all of the highly publicized Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby survivors, much of the country remains obtuse when it comes to the shared traits of traumatized women: remembering some things but not others, and not telling anyone what happened to them for decades.

    Ford’s assault happened at a party when she was 15, in 1982. When I was 13 I was gang-raped by classmates at an outdoor gathering. Ford tried to forget what happened. So did I. She didn’t want to think about the worst night of her life. Neither did I. It took both of us decades to tell anyone. Ford said: “I convinced myself that because Brett did not rape me, I should just move on and just pretend that it didn’t happen.” Confused and freaked out, I, too, decided to pretend my rape didn’t happen and believed that would “erase” it.

    Ford told the committee: “I tried to yell for help. When I did, Brett [Kavanaugh] put his hand over my mouth to stop me from yelling. This is what terrified me the most, and has had the most lasting impact on my life. It was hard for me to breathe…. Both Brett and [his friend Mark Judge] were drunkenly laughing during the attack.”

    Through much of the hearing I was shaking and sobbing, wiping my eyes so I could see. The identification triggered the sensation that I was reliving my experiences. When she said her mouth was covered, it felt as if mine was, too. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. The laughter from the boys that hurt me is burned into my memory. When I went public with my story in January 2012, I wrote: “[My friend] grabbed me, clamped his hand over my mouth….I tried to scream but it came out muffled. They laughed. I gagged.”

    I became so upset watching the live video that I almost called a close friend. I stopped myself because I knew she’d say, “Stop watching it!” Inspired by Ford’s bravery, I felt a sisterhood during this historical moment. It felt like my duty to bear witness.

    During the hearing, Senator Feinstein addressed Ford: “You were very clear about the attack. Being pushed into the room, you say you don’t know quite by whom, but that it was Brett Kavanaugh that covered your mouth to prevent you from screaming, and then you escaped. How are you so sure that it was he?”

    Ford responded: “The same way that I’m sure that I’m talking to you right now. It’s just basic memory functions. And also just the level of norepinephrine and epinephrine in the brain that, sort of, as you know, encodes—that neurotransmitter encodes memories into the hippocampus. And so, the trauma-related experience, then, is kind of locked there, whereas other details kind of drift.”

    Alcohol Blackouts

    The second half of the Senate hearing was shocking. Who but an alcoholic would mention beer nearly 30 times in a job interview? This was to determine if Kavanaugh was right for a lifetime position on the highest court. He whimpered, cried and lashed out. Did baby need his bottle? When Sen. Klobuchar asked if Kav ever had a blackout, he responded, “Have you?” Twice.

    Video clip of that part of the Kavanaugh Hearing:

    A few days after the Kavanaugh hearing, still feeling wrecked, I reached out to neuroscientist Apryl Pooley, PhD, an expert on the brain and memory and the author of Fortitude: A PTSD Memoir, which documents her road to healing from rape, child abuse, PTSD, and addiction.

    Both Dr. Pooley and I were blackout drinkers. We discussed how unpredictable alcohol is. In my teen years, I blacked out if I drank too much too quickly or hadn’t eaten. But in the last few years of rum and cocaine, I could go into a blackout after one gulp, or I could guzzle 5-6 drinks and feel totally sober. Pooley said her experiences were similar.

    But both of us found it difficult to believe that Kavanaugh was telling the truth at the hearing. It’s possible he didn’t know that he blacked out, but that is highly unlikely. After many of my drunken binges, friends would refer to things I’d said or done that I had no memory of. When I asked them if everybody knew I was that drunk, they’d say no. “You seemed normal, maybe a little high.”

    Pooley said, “I’d be walking around and having conversations. People wouldn’t know if I was blacked out. When someone is blacked out, it means their blood alcohol level is so high that it’s impairing that part of their hippocampus, that part of your brain that encodes those memories.”

    She said that everything you’re doing and seeing may or may not be getting stored in your brain. I asked her about being in and out of consciousness. Sometimes I could remember a snippet of an evening. Chatting with a friend at a bar, but then I had no idea how I got home.

    “That’s called a fragmentary blackout,” she said, “or a brownout. That happens when you are blacked out for a while and then come out of it. That can mean that you’d metabolized some of the alcohol, enough of it to regain that function.”

    She also said that some people might think a blackout means passed out or unconscious, which can also look like you’d just fallen asleep.

    Blackouts from Trauma

    According to Pooley, Ford was correct when she spoke about how the brain and memories work. Ford stated that a “neurotransmitter encodes memories into the hippocampus” which explains that trauma-related experience can be “locked in” whereas other details can “drift.”

    Pooley expanded on that: “When recalling memories of trauma, they can pop into your head if you’re triggered, or when asked about a detail.”

    That reminded me of every episode of Law & Order: SVU. Olivia Benson always asks a traumatized victim specific questions: What did they look like? What were they wearing? Can you remember anything unusual? A logo on a hat, shirt or vehicle? The sound of their voice? What they said?

    “Right!” said Pooley. “Those questions can trigger a flashback. The survivor may remember details about the event but not be able to verbalize them. To an outsider, this may look like they don’t remember or are lying. If the survivor was dissociated at the time of the assault, when they remember it later they may seem surprised or confused at their own memory.

    “If survivors feel unsafe when questioned, they may not be able to use their pre-frontal cortex to understand the questions and retrieve certain memories. That’s because their brain was focused on survival. If triggered, they may experience emotional and sensory memories that are as intense as the trauma itself.”

    Aha! That’s why I was shaking and crying while watching the Kavanaugh hearing. And for days afterward. The PTSD had caused my body to react by reliving what happened to me.

    Research backs up Ford and Pooley’s explanations. Memories may be fragmented and certain details missing.

    “But,” Pooley said, “what the survivor does recall is incredibly accurate. Sometimes you hear the term ‘repressed memories,’ which is probably more accurately referring to memories that were stored during dissociation. Dissociation is a survival reflex that can occur when escape is—or seems to be— impossible. A threat may be perceived by the brain as inescapable because of a physical barrier.”

    Ford was afraid she was going to die when she described Kavanaugh’s hand over her mouth. In my case, dissociation happened when I was pinned by five guys. I’d tried to break free. I floated up to the trees and watched. I could see what the boys were doing to me but it took on a surreal quality. It served as a buffer. I was literally scared out of my mind and my body.

    “A threat can also be perceived by a psychological barrier,” said Pooley. “Dissociation is most common in trauma that involves a betrayal of trust. This is a survival mechanism that protects our need for social support. When the trusted individual betrays you, this is a social threat and social threats are real threats.”

    Ford and I both experienced that. She’d gone to what she expected to be a friendly party with people she knew. I thought the guy who tricked me was my friend. He said he wanted my advice about his girlfriend. Flattered, I practically skipped over. That’s when he clamped his hand over my mouth and threw me to the ground and the other boys surrounded me and held me down.

    Pooley explained: “Many people believe that life-threatening trauma only refers to threats to physical safety—like the presence of a weapon—but humans need social support for survival. So, social threats like bullying, ostracization, or anything that threatens social standing can be interpreted by the brain as life-threatening. If abuse or assault is perpetrated by a trusted individual, not only is the event traumatic, but the social threat of losing the sense of safety from that person [or people] is traumatic as well.”

    If trauma leads to dissociation, Pooley said, that can lead to amnesia. Traumatic amnesia is so common that it’s even included in the diagnostic criteria for PTSD.

    “When all or part of the traumatic experience cannot be remembered,” said Pooley, “the risk for developing PTSD greatly increases.

    Throughout the hearing, and frankly, throughout these past few years, I’ve often felt an overwhelming temptation to get high. My mind and body are so wound up that I crave some kind of relief. Rum and cocaine still hover in my mind, pretending to offer salvation. Thankfully my years in recovery have taught me not to listen to my head when it’s trying to get me high, not to keep secrets, and to make time to meditate, keep a journal, draw, hug my dog, and most importantly, remember to breathe.

    If you are shaken by the Kavanaugh Hearing, and especially if it has kicked up flashbacks, there is help. The same is true for anyone who is scared about the midterm election or having panic attacks and high anxiety.

    You can reach out to RAINN, the nation’s largest sexual violence organization. Their website is RAINN.org or you can call their hotline 24/7 at 800-656-HOPE. For any kind of mental health help including addiction, PTSD, or thoughts of harming yourself please visit the National Alliance on Mental Health’s list of hotline resources.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • 2018 Reel Recovery Film Festival Returns to New York

    2018 Reel Recovery Film Festival Returns to New York

    The fest is the brainchild of Leonard Buschel, founder of Writers in Treatment (WIT), a nonprofit organization that helps alcoholic and addicted writers get clean.

    Calling all cinephiles! The REEL Recovery Film Festival (RRFF), which is celebrating its 10th year, is back for its 6th Annual New York City Edition. The festival kicks off its public program at 8 p.m. Friday, Nov. 2, with a screening of the Eric Clapton documentary, Life in 12 Bars. Click here for a free ticket to the documentary (or any movie at the festival), courtesy of Clapton’s treatment center, Crossroads Centre Antigua. The CEO of Crossroads, Nicos Peraticos, will be in attendance to give a short talk and introduce the film.

    For the full Nov. 2–8 schedule, visit the RRFF website. Note: All tickets are General Admission so, word to the wise: arrive early in order to nab yourself a seat.

    Every year since RRFF sprouted up in New York, I’ve attended this awesome week-long festival and had a blast meeting sober people. The fest is the brainchild of Leonard Buschel, founder of Writers in Treatment (WIT), a nonprofit organization that helps alcoholic and addicted writers get clean. WIT also publishes the Addiction Recovery Bulletin newsletter, and created the annual Experience Strength and Hope Awards. This year’s big award winner was Jane Velez-Mitchell for her New York Times best-selling memoir, iWANT: My Journey from Addiction and Overconsumption to a Simpler, Honest Life.

    Buschel spoke to The Fix about how he got here and what makes this year’s RRFF so special.

    “After 26 years of abusing everything from Valium to vodka and cocaine to codeine, I crashed and burned. I smoked breakfast, drank lunch and snorted dinner.”

    Finally, beaten to his bottom, the depressed and close-to-hopeless Buschel schlepped himself into 12-step recovery at the Betty Ford Center.

    “I’d prayed at the Western Wall,” he said. “I’d sat in temples of Kyoto, cried my eyes out at the Anne Frank House, but it wasn’t until I went to Betty Ford that I decided to get clean. I was horrified at the time, thinking it was some Christian enclave. Thankfully, I learned that wasn’t the case.”

    “This year’s RRFF received generous support from the Addiction Policy Forum,” Buschel said. “So thanks to them we have some really special events that didn’t happen at the Los Angeles RRFF week in October that just ended. So, one movie that’s just for our New York crowd is the first theatrical screening of the Eric Clapton documentary, Life in 12 Bars.”

    Such a perfect title since Clapton loves the blues.

    Buschel continued: “We had to find a bigger venue this year because our audience has grown so much since we started. Judging by last year’s enthusiastic turnout, we are expecting an audience of around 2,000. So, this year, it will be at the 100-year-old Village East Cinema, which is a New York City landmark. Another special treat is on Monday afternoon at 3 o’clock when we’ll have another complimentary screening, the Bill W. documentary.”

    The documentary’s director, Kevin Hanlon, will be at the theater and will give a talk. The film, which was created using old archives, is a moving documentary about AA founders Bill W. and Dr. Bob. Seeing those two on the big screen when it first came out gave me such a thrill. In my humble opinion, it is definitely worth watching the movie a second, or third, or fourth time.

    Addiction specialist and psychodrama expert, Tian Dayton, PhD, who is the author of 15 books including Emotional Sobriety, will be presenting a 6 p.m. panel on the last night, Thurs., Nov. 8, which will include a few videos, followed by a conversation with the audience. Directly after that is Buschel’s talk at 7 p.m.

    “My panel, Recovery Is a Verb, will be a conversation about the state of addiction in America,” Buschel said. “Then we will close with a 21st anniversary screening called Gridlock’d. It’s a great film starring Tupac Shakur, Tim Roth and Thandie Newton, with Elizabeth Peña, Lucy Liu and John Sayles. It’s about two guys trying to get into a government detox program. Tupac plays Spoon and Tim Roth is Stretch. It was written and directed by Vondie Curtis-Hall.”

    “We get 150 submissions from filmmakers around the world,” said Bushel. “We watch every one of them. Our panel votes on which are the very best and it is never easy to narrow it down. [There are] so many great submissions.”

    Click here for your free ticket!

    More Festival Highlights

    Coach Jake (2017): At 70 years old, Martin “Coach Jake” Jacobson is the winningest high school coach in NYC history. But this year, both on and off the field, may be the most challenging yet. Directed by Ian Phillips. Special Appearance by Coach Jake and director Ian Phillips. 82 min.

    Peace, Love and Zoo (2018) This film explores the colorful world of artist and recovery guru, Zoo Cain, as he uses art to ease his journey into darkness through cancer and a difficult relationship. Directed by Reginald Groff. Special Appearance by Director Reginald Groff and star Zoo Cain. 68 min.

    When Love is Not Enough: The Lois Wilson Story (2010) Based on the true story of the enduring love story between Lois Wilson and Bill W. and the transformational social movements they founded. Directed by John Kent Harrison. Starring Winona Ryder. 92 min.

    That Way Madness Lies (2018) Filmmaker Sandra Luckow’s scary account of her brother’s dangerous and ever-escalating cycle of arrests, incarcerations and commitment to mental institutions, one of which included a stay in Oregon State Hospital (the setting of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest). Directed by Sandra Luckow. NY Premiere. Personal Appearance by director Sandra Luckow. 101 min.

    WONDER WOMEN WEDNESDAY
    Films made by women, starring women, about women.

    These films are not just for women. Everyone is encouraged to come and to join in the discussion after each film.

    Recovering (2017) In this hour-long pilot, Cally Claremont, the adult child of an alcoholic (and so naturally, a recovering perfectionist), must seek help from her estranged sister and a famously sober rock star in order to save her unique treatment center from closing its doors. Directed by Carly Keyes. 46 min.

    Cleaner Daze (2018) is a dark comedy series about addiction, written by a recovering drug addict. The story follows a newbie drug counselor while she struggles with a crew of misfit teenage drug addicts and her own secret addiction. Starring Abigail Reno. Directed by Tess Sweet. 55 min.

    Ciao Manhattan (1972) Essential viewing for anyone intrigued by 60’s pop culture, the New York art scene and the Summer of Love. Ciao is a thinly disguised biopic of the last days of “tragic muse” and Andy Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick, who died two weeks after the film was released. Directed by David Weisman and John Palmer. 84 min.

    Do No Harm: The Opioid Epidemic (2018) Today’s opioid epidemic is the worst man-made public health epidemic in American history. Every year we lose more people to opioid deaths than were killed in the entire Vietnam War. Narrated by Golden Globe winning actor Ed Harris. Directed by Harry Wiland. 90 min.

    I’m looking forward to RRFF and seeing Buschel again. This tireless innovator is now 24 years clean and sober. Man, I wish I had his energy.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Joan Jett's Bad Reputation

    Joan Jett's Bad Reputation

    “I’ve been hurt,” says Jett. “I’ve had my head split open by a beer bottle, a rib cracked by getting a battery thrown at me—this big metal rig thing….just because I was a girl, I’d get spit on.”

    Bad Reputation is a loving tribute to legendary musician and feminist icon Joan Jett. The trailblazer turned 60 on September 22 and keeps on rocking. At 13, Jett’s parents granted a wish by buying her an electric guitar and amp for Christmas. She had no idea how to play it. At her first lesson, the male teacher said, “Girls don’t play rock and roll.”

    Then the film explodes. Jett screams into a mic:

    I don’t give a damn about my reputation!
    You’re living in the past, it’s a new generation.
    A girl can do what she wants to do and that’s
    What I’m gonna do.

    Go Joan Jett!

    In an exclusive interview for The Fix, director Kevin Kerslake (As I AM: The Life and Times of DJ AM, Nirvana’s Come As You Are, Bob Marley Legend Remixed) told me, “This film is Joan laid bare. Viewers get to process it on that level. I don’t feel there was anything verboten, you know, forbidden to ask, so the dynamics of her life play out as you see them in the film.”

    Clearly, Kerslake is a fan. He sings her praises, particularly when it comes to Jett’s habit of championing others.

    “Joan’s soul is all about rock and roll,” he told me. “She’s an activist too—for animals and for people. She has produced a lot of albums for musicians she believes in. And, if she gets credit, she immediately ropes in other people to share it with. She’ll never take it solo.”

    Right before receiving that first guitar, Jett had read about a club in Hollywood called the Rodney Bingenheimer English Disco. They were the first to play music by Blondie, Iggy Pop, Bowie, and the Sex Pistols. Archival footage shows boys and girls in heavy makeup, fishnets, leather and sporting nutty hairdos, short skirts and platform shoes.

    “It was a disco for teens,” says Jett in the film. “If you were like 21, you were already too old….It was a club full of weirdos in a city that’s known to be full of weirdos.”

    She says the club played “raunchy music” and some of it she describes as “clean dirty,” meaning it used suggestive double-entendres. But some of it, she says, was just plain dirty.

    “That music hit you in a spot that you couldn’t really describe,” says Jett, “and it made you want to do it. There was [a feeling] down there,” she says, alluding to her vagina. “But as a kid, you can’t quite put your finger on it, yet.”

    Realizing the unintended pun, she grins.

    At 15, Jett was determined to prove that girls could play as well as boys. She formed the all-girl punk band, The Runaways. They became a tight group of friends with the electric energy of adolescents. It’s exciting to watch the ballsy young chicks owning the stage, with Cherie Currie singing their biggest song, “Cherry Bomb.”

    The band showed more promise and gained a bigger following, but the “boys club” of rock ’n roll hated it; apparently their egos were threatened. The Runaways were called “cute” and “sweet,” but as their popularity grew the words changed to “slut, whore, cunt.” Jett says Jimi Hendrix had predicted that women playing rock and roll would be perceived as aliens. That proved true for The Runaways.

    “I’ve been hurt,” says Jett. “I’ve had my head split open by a beer bottle, a rib cracked by getting a battery thrown at me—this big metal rig thing….just because I was a girl, I’d get spit on.”

    In 1977, Joan Jett and her band The Runaways played at CBGBs punk club where I spent many nights of debauchery. I was into concoctions of crystal meth, cocaine, and Bacardi rum, which led to delusions. My skewed thinking told me if I memorized a musician’s lyrics, we had a relationship. Joan Jett knew me as much as I knew her. She seemed invincible.

    When the band fell apart, so did Jett.

    Director Kerslake told me: “She was [self] medicating over losing her band. It was a very dramatic experience in her life—both spiritually and physically. And it almost killed her.”

    “How did I personally deal with the crumbling of The Runaways?” Joan asks in the film. “I drank a lot, starting at eight in the morning.”

    Convinced that LA was laughing at her, Jett imagined everyone thinking: “We told you it wouldn’t work. We said you couldn’t do it.” That’s when she could no longer tolerate living in Tinseltown and split. She moved into a home in the ’burbs that became a party house. Old photos show a crowd of drunk and stoned pals draped around her living room. Jett had sunk to a dark place. Finally, Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders pulled her aside and said, “Honey, you gotta pull it together.”

    Jett says, “I was angry. I didn’t know how to make sense of a world that gives girls shit for playing guitars. I thought, ‘Don’t you guys have more important things to be upset about?’”

    One night she became very sick, sweating profusely, and was rushed to the hospital. Kerslake said it was luck that Jett survived. The rocker was told she had a serious heart infection.

    “I considered that a perfect metaphor,” said Kerslake.

    After her diagnosis, Jett knew that her body could not take much more abuse.

    “I thought, I’m going to fucking kill myself.” She quickly clarifies for the viewers that she means accidentally, not by suicide.

    Throughout the film I felt tremendous compassion for Jett. I mean, I could see her strength; she comes across as someone who knows who she is. Despite all that she has accomplished, she also shows sincere humility and gratitude. (Side note: she looks fantastic and still exudes sex appeal.) But I wondered what happens internally to a pioneering performer like her who works for decades in what’s known as a tough industry—especially for women. She’d been just a kid when misogyny was unleashed on her simply because she was a girl who loved playing guitar.

    Then, something beautiful happened. Kenny Laguna came into the picture. He had been a successful hitmaker for bubblegum bands when he first met Jett. She was still drinking then and he describes the beginning of their collaboration:

    “She was hanging out with a bunch of people who all ended up dead.”

    It was true, she’d gotten herself in with a tough crowd that included Sex Pistols’ bass player, Sid Vicious, his girlfriend Nancy, and Stiv Bators, the lead singer of the Dead Boys. Jett refers to herself as “a mess” when she met Laguna. But the musicmaker and his wife Meryl believed in Jett’s talent and recognized her potential so they were willing to take a chance on her despite how beat-up she looked. With Laguna’s help, Jett became a successful solo artist and released the albums Bad Reputation and I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll. Together they started Blackheart Records in the early 80s.

    I was curious how she stopped drinking. That wasn’t disclosed in the film. My guess is that she flat-out wouldn’t talk about that publicly. The movie implies that she just said that’s it and quit. Her hardheaded black and white approach to life would support that method for sure. Still, I would’ve liked to have seen that in the movie. But for me, the most pressing question was about Jett’s love life. Did she have any long-term, significant, romantic relationships? That wasn’t discussed either and I was surprised about that missing chunk of her life. But then Jett herself answers that question at the end of this very engaging flick. (I watched it five times!)

    “Depending on what you think is a normal, regular life,” she says, “being in a band, you’re pretty much all-consumed with it. Is that healthy? I don’t know. I’m not a doctor. Probably not super, but, you know, it’s what I enjoy. I think it makes it difficult to have relationships. That would probably be, if you want to call it that, a sacrifice. To say music is my mate would be a pretty fair statement and I get a lot from it. But it’s not a person. And I think I know the difference.”

    Jett and the Lagunas have been together since 1979 and their affection for each other is evident in the film. They consider each other family. “Joan also has a very close group of friends who all participated in this movie,” Kerslake added.

    This woman smashed the glass ceiling she faced. During her expansive career she’s been racking up multiple platinum and gold records, Top 40 singles, and the blockbuster anthem, “I Love Rock ‘N’ Roll.” She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2015 and Bad Reputation includes a moving clip of her receiving a standing ovation from rock legends—her peers.

    Bad Reputation is now available on iTunes and Amazon Prime.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Best Indie Films of 2018: The Fix Picks

    Best Indie Films of 2018: The Fix Picks

    In early recovery I had moments where I was sure I could not stay sober for one more minute. That’s when my friends offered sound advice: Don’t think, and go to movies.

    In early recovery I found myself inundated with obsessive worries scurrying around in my head. It was repetitive dark noise that I ached to shush with alcohol. At times I was sure that I could not stay sober for one more minute. That’s when my friends offered sound advice: “Don’t think, and go to movies.”

    So, as we head into fall with the looming Nov. 6 midterms, a real-life nail biter, let’s talk about the great escape—indies!

    This first film is an uplifting true story about an exceptional human being. He is a creative philanthropist with an unexpected approach to helping people with addiction and ex-cons who are way down on their luck.

    Skid Row Marathon is about a superior court judge in Los Angeles. Craig Mitchell is a one-man crusade helping addicts and ex-cons who live in tents and cardboard boxes on LA’s Skid Row. The worst part of his day job is sending criminals to prison. The compassionate judge came up with a way to have a positive impact. He gets the homeless back on their feet with a running club.

    Wife-and-husband team, Gabi and Mark Hayes, heard about the judge who trains the homeless to run marathons.

    Mark told The Fix. “Many of the homeless are on drugs—crack, heroin, crystal meth, alcohol, you name it. Gabi and I wanted to do something [to help]. My wife is the real runner. Me? I go kicking and screaming.”

    When the couple first approached Judge Mitchell about doing a documentary, Mark said Mitchell’s response was, “’You can’t just show up with a camera and start filming people at the lowest point of their lives.’”

    “The judge was right,” said Mark. “At first, some threw bottles at us. But we hung in there and put in the time to get to know them until they felt safe enough to speak to us. We were there to help, not exploit them.”

    The response to their film has been high praise and enthusiastic reviews.

    “I think [the film] resonates with so many audiences because people know everybody deserves a second chance,” said Gabi. “The homeless situation is heartbreaking and it keeps getting worse. More and more tents keep popping up and there are people lying in the streets. They just took a wrong turn in life.”

    Runners find purpose when they show up to run with the judge and are treated with respect. Their self-image improves which helps them to get off and stay off the drugs. Skid Row Marathon has raked in 21 awards at film festivals across America—including Best Director, Best Editing, and multiple audience awards. To find out how to see it, visit the website.

    For this next winner, it doesn’t matter if you weren’t born yet or if you can’t remember a thing about the 60s and 70s because you were too damn high. Any age is the right audience for this one.

    Nico, 1988 is about the last year in the life of German model-singer-actress Nico (neé Christa Päffgen). Her glory had faded long ago, as did her exquisite beauty. She looked ravaged beyond her years due to her 15-year heroin addiction. In one scene, Nico (Trine Dyrholm) is sharing a cigarette with a friend.

    “Am I ugly?” She asks. He jokingly replies: “Yeah. Really.”

    “Good,” she says. “I wasn’t happy when I was beautiful.”

    In her teens she was a model for Vogue and Elle which led to acting in a number of films. But Nico is best known as Andy Warhol’s muse and as a singer for the Velvet Underground. Lou Reed wrote the band’s revolutionary lyrics about heroin, prostitution, and sadism.

    In 2003, that first album ranked number 13 in Rolling Stone magazine’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time.” If Nico had been alive to see that, she would not have been impressed.

    “I don’t need everybody to like me,” she says in the film. “I don’t care.”

    She says in the movie that Jim Morrison suggested that she form her own band. When asked if she’s disappointed that her band never had commercial success, she rasps “I hate the word commercial.”

    Smartly directed by Susanna Nicchiarelli, Nico, 1988 is a fiery and fascinating study of another rock and roll tragedy. Though there’s nothing glamorous about watching someone eaten away by drugs, it was a great reminder to stay sober. Don’t miss the explosive tour de force by Dryholm. It brings chills.

    After I gave up substances, I became aware of—and had to let go of—magical thinking. Ironically, my next pick is about two dreamers who built a fantastical world that sparkled like a disco ball:

    Studio 54

    In Manhattan, 254 West 54th Street was the place to be. Studio 54 opened in 1977 and it was a smash hit—a nightly revelry of drinking, drugging and disco dancing. We’re talking gobs of cocaine, mountains of Quaaludes, and A-listers. Everyone else had to wait outside hoping they would be allowed in.

    Owners Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, two Jewish guys from Brooklyn, became great friends at Syracuse University. Rubell’s charisma was always on but Schrager avoided attention—until now. The 71-year-old finally told details from 40 years ago that nobody has ever heard. Director Matt Tyrnauer got his hands on loads of never-before-seen footage.

    The owners were not prepared for the club’s instant success. It became a haven for celebrating sex and drugs. You’ll see Rubell zipping around, spoiling his guests, flashing open a long coat to reveal a drugstore in pockets—a smorgasbord of chemical delights.

    Rubell paid steeply for his 24/7 bacchanal. So, although the flick triggered my euphoric recall—wild nights hoovering cocaine, glugging Bacardi and dancing all night—I also remember what it cost me. I’m lucky—I did survive, hey, hey.

    The following film is about an unusual triangle between a girl and a “good” mother (the only mom she’d known) and an alcoholic stranger that kicks off a psychodrama.

    Daughter of Mine (Figlia mia) is a fictional story set on the coast of Sardinia, Italy. Two women, adoptive-mom Tina (Valeria Golino) and alcoholic biological-mom Angelica (Alba Rohrwacher), compete for the love and attention of 10-year-old Vittoria (Sara Casu).

    The shy, fair-skinned, redheaded girl had no idea that she was adopted. Heavy drinker Angelica has a life that is totally unmanageable. She’s being kicked off a farm for not paying her bills, but before slinking out of town, this “bad” mom begs adoptive mom Tina to let her spend time with Vittoria. Tina, who is compassionate but wary, finally agrees. She thinks What’s the harm? Angelica will be gone soon.

    Vittoria, however, is enchanted by her wild birth mother that looks so much like her. As they bond, Tina’s anxiety skyrockets. The story is at times predictable but that doesn’t take away from its emotionality or the power of the acting.

    Italian director Laura Bispuri described it as “three characters who are all placed in a conflict that…breaks their heart.”

    The thoughtful, slower pace of a European indie is refreshing. The backdrop of rural Sardinia, with its cliffs, expansive sky and turquoise water, adds to the film’s richness. After the U.S. debut at Tribeca, Strand Releasing purchased this touching award-winner, which is now available on Netflix and DVD.

    This next indie won the top award at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival for Best Narrative Feature. It also won Best Screenplay and Best Cinematography. All prizes are well-deserved.

    Diane stars Mary Kay Place as a sad, retired widow (badly in need of Al-Anon, if you ask me) who exhausts herself by putting the needs of others first. Her mess-of-a-son Brian (Jake Lacy) is a man-child who’s in and out of rehabs and opiate stupors. It’s maddening to see what she puts up with. Both actors give industrial-super-strength performances, as does the rest of the cast which includes Estelle Parsons and Glynnis O’Connor. Diane is the first narrative feature for documentarian Kent Jones (Hitchcock/Truffaut) who wrote and directed. Jones is also Director of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center. Martin Scorsese is executive producer.

    Diane spends her days schlepping long distances, performing good deeds. She feeds the homeless at soup kitchens, visits sick friends, and tends to her dying cousin and the rest of the extended family. She meets her klatch of old friends for lunch, where she has angry outbursts (Oh, Diane! Get thee to Al-Anon). The actress is a master at comedic nuances. Her self-blame is a mystery until the satisfying reveal and her character’s profound spiritual arc. IFC bought the film. Theater release date to be announced.

     

    Mary Kay Place in Diane

    Next is an award-winning narrative feature from the UK. It’s got the right ingredients: excellent writing, directing, acting, and cinematography—all in the first sequence. Clever, subtle hints show the audience what they need to know about the year (2011), the place (London), and the protagonist.

    Obey is explosive. Nineteen-year-old Leon (Marcus Rutherford) has been gone for four years. He came home to care for his alcoholic mother (T’Nia Miller). But there is one condition: she has to stop drinking. The good news is that his father is gone. Bad news? His mother replaced Leon’s abusive dad with a creepy, scary boyfriend who enables her addiction.

    Leon likes to hang out with his friends, box at the gym, and inhale nitrous oxide from balloons. Things intensify when he meets the movie’s female lead, Twiggy (Sophie Kennedy Clark). She’s a blonde with big blue eyes and luscious full lips. Leon is transfixed but femme fatale Twiggy has a boyfriend. Leon’s tension builds. It’s all too much and he is going to blow. Leon hates his mother’s boyfriend and her alcoholism, and outside is the chaos of the 2011 London Riots. Director James Jones uses actual news footage seamlessly. To find out how to see it, visit the website.

    Blowin’ Up is a documentary about sex workers who are caught in the legal system. Many who end up in “the life” have substance use disorders. Director Stephanie Wang-Breal presents their gripping stories without judgment as the film zeroes in on an experimental program in a Queens court. The compassion in the film is its biggest strength. The heroes are an empathic team of women, including a judge and DA, who work diligently to help the workers find a new start. Counseling is used to help them fight their way off of drugs and out of the life-sucking cycle of turning tricks, getting arrested and seeing their lives circle the drain. This solution-oriented program offers a chance at redemption. The new approach toward an age-old problem appears to be working. It is inspiring and brings hope for America’s failing justice system where recidivism is commonplace.

    [Allison: What do you think of these 2 quick mentions as blurbs with internal links as a Sidebar?]

    Pssst. Don’t miss these options:

    Roll Red Roll is a documentary directed by Nancy Schwartzman. It tells the horrifying story of a sexual assault case that took place in Steubenville, Ohio. Male high-schoolers, clearly intoxicated, were caught on cell phone videos, laughing about raping a teenage girl while she was in and out of consciousness. Much of the town mocked her on social media and sided with the local boys. She was ridiculed for being drunk. It’s a powerful film that shines the light on how vulnerable one is when intoxicated. Crime blogger Alexandria Goddard broke the case. The hacking group Anonymous became involved in order to fight for justice. If you ask me, not enough justice was served.

    Read more: Roll Red Roll

    Jellyfish is a fictional story about Sarah Taylor (Liv Hill), an overburdened teenage girl living in Margate, a dreary seaside town in England. Her mother, Karen (Sinéad Matthews), stays in bed all day while Sarah rushes her younger siblings, boy and girl twins (Henry Lile and Jemima Newman) to school. Sarah pedals madly on a bicycle with the youngsters seated in a makeshift wooden trailer that’s hooked to the back. It’s a sad rickety setup that instantly conveys how poverty stricken they are.

    Read more: Jellyfish Captures the Reality of Growing Up with a Mentally Ill Parent

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Alcohol, Drugs, and Rape

    Alcohol, Drugs, and Rape

    “We all know right from wrong. Yeah, maybe alcohol inhibits a person. But at the end of the evening, the little monster of shame, regret, or guilt is gonna be in your head saying ‘You really messed up, that was wrong.’”

    Alcohol and drugs are inextricably linked to a large part of rape culture. And that applies to both perpetrators and victims—before, during and after sexual assaults. Anyone who has battled alcohol or drugs knows that substances impair judgment and create an astounding lack of impulse control. Memories can be unreliable or absent entirely.

    For those of us who have limped our way out of blackouts and staggered in and out of recovery, we know the shame of finding out what we’ve done in a drunken stupor. Often, the only thing between me and a relapse are the all-too-vivid memories of wretched consequences. I’m no longer afraid to open my eyes in the mornings. When I don’t get high, I don’t awaken with a pounding headache and discover a stranger in my bed.

    Roll Red Roll is a documentary about a high school in the hard drinking, football-obsessed town of Steubenville, Ohio. The film premiered to sold-out audiences at Tribeca Film Festival 2018. It has hit numerous venues since then, including Michael Moore’s Traverse City fest. It will continue to make the rounds throughout August and into October.

    The doc is about “Jane Doe,” a 16-year-old from West Virginia. She’d attended a series of pre-season football Steubenville parties on the night of August 11, 2012. After downing too much liquor, she passed out. While unconscious, Doe was raped and carried around to more parties by several members of the football team. All evening the boys took photos and videos on their cell phones, then casually shared them on social media. Two of the youths—Trent Mays, 17, and Ma’Lik Richmond, 16—were found guilty. Mays was sentenced to two years and Richmond got only one. They did their time in a juvenile facility. Neither boy is on a sex registry due to their age. Both are now playing college football.

    After watching Roll Red Roll, I reached out to crime blogger Alexandria Goddard, who is the heroine of the Steubenville rape story. After only a brief mention of the rape in a local media outlet, Goddard found the horrifying tweets and videos that had been posted. She shared them on social media. When she posted the Instagram photo of Jane Doe being carried by the boys, it caught the attention of the local community and the social justice hacker group, Anonymous.

    In our exclusive interview for The Fix, Goddard began with a question: “Would the perpetrators have behaved that way if they weren’t drunk? No, probably not. But the alcohol in no way absolves what they did.”

    Goddard described Steubenville as “a sports town known for putting down women, talking about them like they’re meat. They show off for each other. Didn’t any of them have sisters? Mothers? The way they talked about her it was as if they forgot she was a human being. That was learned machismo.”

    Goddard added, “We all know right from wrong. Yeah, maybe alcohol inhibits a person. But at the end of the evening, the little monster of shame, regret, or guilt is gonna be in your head saying ‘You really messed up, that was wrong.’”

    Boys laughed on the video while talking about peeing on Jane Doe’s unconscious body. “But the girls in town were vicious, too,” Goddard said. “And the school staff. Coach Reno questioned whether it was even rape. You can see it in the film. He said, ‘Did they rape her? Or did they fuck her?’” (Warning: the linked video contains graphic content released by hacker group Anonymous)

    Another booze-saturated rape case, People vs Turner (aka The Stanford Rape Case), is back in the news this summer. The victim was a 22-year-old woman (referred to as “Emily Doe”). In January 2015 she attended a few parties, consumed too much liquor and passed out. The defendant was Stanford University swimmer and Olympic-hopeful, Brock Turner, 20. He too had spent the night drinking. Turner was caught humping Emily Doe’s naked body behind a dumpster.

    After he was convicted on three felonies of sexual assault with intent to rape, the not-so-Honorable Aaron Persky sentenced Turner to only six months. He was out in three. There was a public outcry that built over time. By June 2016, over one million people had signed the petition to remove Persky. In June of this year Persky was ousted from his judicial bench.

    And that’s not all…

    On July 26, The New York Times wrote about Brock Turner’s lawyer, Eric Multhaup, who had argued that Turner should never have been convicted of “intending to commit rape” because the Stanford swimmer had only sought to have outercourse with “Emily Doe.”

    I don’t know how Multhaup said that with a straight face. Twitter, of course, went wild over this outrageous claim. Thankfully, that appeal didn’t fly. The original decision still stands: Turner was guilty of assault with the intent to rape an unconscious woman. He was found guilty of using a foreign object to penetrate the victim. The definition of rape is: “The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” Rape with an object can be equally as traumatic as penile violation.

    Amber Tamblyn and Jodi Kantor

    Recently, I went to hear author-director-actress-activist Amber Tamblyn and reporter Jodi Kantor at Manhattan’s 92nd Street Y. The two discussed Time’s Up, a legal defense fund organization Tamblyn co-founded soon after the #MeToo movement showed the world how many women are sexually harassed on the job. On TimesUpNow.com, the tagline reads: “The clock has run out on sexual assault, harassment and inequality in the workplace. It’s time to do something about it.”

    Employers are changing work policies. Companies are doing away with holiday work parties because serving alcohol practically ensures that boundaries will be crossed. Unlike in old movies, we’ve learned that there’s nothing funny about a tipsy coworker patting a woman on the butt or grabbing her for a kiss.

    “Sorry I got so drunk last night” is no longer a viable excuse and companies want to avoid problems—especially lawsuits. Frequently workplace sexual harassment claims are linked to events where alcohol was available. In a recent article for The American Lawyer, reporter Meghan Tribe wrote that many big law firms are quashing boozy summer events. Behavioral health consultant Patrick Krill told Tribe, “In light of [the] #MeToo movement, an open bar at a summer associate event is potentially a tinderbox of liability.”

    Other companies are trading open bar parties with drink ticket systems. Employees are limited to two drinks to avoid the sloshed sexual harassment issues. I also find it encouraging to see so many changes in New York State laws for employers that go into effect this year, such as sexual harassment prevention policies including training for employees.

    My own #MeToo story predates my work life. At age 13, while I was high on liquor and pot, I was sexually assaulted by local kids in my hometown, Port Washington, Long Island. Consumed by shame, I spent the following 13 years on a drug and alcohol-soaked binge. At age 26, I came out of a cocaine and rum induced blackout locked in a detox ward with no memory of how I had gotten there.

    Currently, I’m working on a series about women who became addicted to drugs and alcohol after they were raped. One of the women I’ve interviewed—let’s call her “Navy Girl”—was not a drinker but, both times she was attacked, the men had been drinking. After the rapes, like so many of us, Navy Girl didn’t tell anyone. She developed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and chronic insomnia.

    After years of not sleeping, Navy Girl saw a doctor. He prescribed 5mg of Ambien, the lowest dose. Already in her 30s, she’d never been addicted to anything but, within six months, she was hooked. Doctor-shopping worked for years. Then, when prescriptions went digital, she couldn’t game the system anymore and her doctors began cutting her off. Desperate to stave off withdrawal symptoms, she resorted to buying it from dealers but could not get enough for her habit. After attempting to stop for years, she finally found help in a 30-day drug rehab and has been sober for three years now.

    Where will Jane and Emily Doe be 30 years from now? Will they be lost to addictions? I’d bet money that they will suffer for years with PTSD. Perhaps in the future perps will be held accountable and sentences will fit the violence of a rape crime. I pray pussy grabbers will no longer be eligible for political office and lawyers will be banned from asking survivors how much they drank. I look forward to the day when enablers won’t shrug and say, “Boys will be boys.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Dr. Drew and Dave Discuss Overdose Death of "Dopey Podcast" Host

    Dr. Drew and Dave Discuss Overdose Death of "Dopey Podcast" Host

    Chris from Dopey Podcast had been clean for almost five years before his fatal relapse.

    Dopey Podcast co-host, Chris, 33, passed away from an overdose on July 24. 

    The Fix spoke with Dave, his friend and Dopey co-host, about the sudden loss. The two met eight years ago at Chris’s 14th rehab. They stayed in touch and became close friends.

    Chris had a year and a half sober and Dave was three months sober when they started the Dopey Podcast.

    “I loved Chris and I will always miss him,” Dave told The Fix, his voice cracking with emotion. Dave is unsure of the exact date that Chris’s relapse began. 

    Board-certified internist and addiction specialist “Dr. Drew” Pinsky is a big fan of Dopey. Back in March, he sat down with the guys to discuss addiction, rehab and romance for their 124th episode.

    The Fix spoke with Dr. Drew about Dopey after his appearance on the show. “If you’re an addict,” he said, “and you listen to Dopey, you will find your people, and your story here. Listen to it and you’ll see what I mean.”

    During the episode, it was revealed that Pinsky had treated Chris years ago after one of his relapses. Dr. Drew joked with Chris about what a difficult case he’d been.

    After finding out about Chris’s death, Pinsky offered his condolences to Dave, “Chris’s death is such a huge loss. His was a great success story—especially after so many years of chronic relapses. This is a real tragedy.”

    “Chris loved being sober and he loved Dopey,” Dave said. “He drove to New York every week—10 to 12 hours roundtrip—just to record each episode of Dopey with me. But the last month he became really unreliable.”

    Annie Giron, Chris’s girlfriend, told The Fix that she was the one who found his body in the bedroom of their Boston apartment. Giron has extensive training in the medical field of addiction.

    “Chris had just finished his MA and was working towards a PhD in Clinical Psychology,” said Giron, fighting back tears. “I’m studying to be a psychiatrist. I know his death was not intentional. He was not suicidal at all. We were very much in love and excited about the future.”

    “I’ve never been an addict and there are no addicts in my family but I have always been passionate about the field of addiction,” she said. “Over the years, I have administered Narcan to so many patients in the ER. I treated one patient 17 times and Narcan saved his life. That’s why the minute I saw Chris, I knew that he was dead. I tried to revive him with Narcan anyway even though I knew it was too late.”

    Dave said, “Over the past month Chris had started acting really weird. I asked him what was going on. He blamed it on exhaustion. I believed him. He was really busy as a manager in a sober living facility and always studying.

    Chris had a long history of drug abuse but had been clean for almost five years before his final relapse. Dave, Annie and friends were concerned that Chris was close to relapsing. Annie said he wasn’t depressed but had been anxious and agitated. He’d spent a week helping a patient and he may have confiscated medication.

    “Chris tore a ligament in his leg that was extremely painful. He couldn’t sleep and I’d hear him moaning in agony. A doctor said it would take 4-6 months before Chris would feel any better. He needed to do physical therapy which the doctor warned would be painful. He hadn’t wanted to take painkillers but the injury was excruciating.”

    Dave said he’d talked with Dr. Drew and Annie about how far Chris had come in his life and how shocked and heartbroken they are at this unexpected loss.

    Dr. Drew’s next Dopey episode will go live on Saturday, August 11. He and Dave will discuss addiction, recovery, and the frightening reality of America’s spike in fatal relapses.

    View the original article at thefix.com