Answer Addiction

Tag: oppression

  • Privilege Lurks at the Heart of Recovery Movements

    Privilege Lurks at the Heart of Recovery Movements

    Making blanket statements that “anyone can recover” whitewashes and overlooks the gross inequities that people of color and marginalized communities face.

    Recovery is possible for anyone, but it isn’t the reality for everyone. We may see an increasing number of people on social media proudly displaying their recovery as badges of honor — which in turn reduces stigma about addiction and a life in recovery — but it doesn’t accurately depict the true picture that recovery isn’t accessible to everyone, it heavily depends on your privilege.

    Recovering “out loud” has gained so much momentum that it’s now a social justice movement: we are now questioning advertisers who normalize the excessive use of alcohol, challenging the use of biased language, highlighting the inequity in authorities tackling opioids but overlooking alcohol as the leading cause of drug-related deaths, and advocating for policy changes that affect people with substance use disorders.

    While this recovery activism should be celebrated, we are still overlooking the inconvenient truth lurking beneath the surface: recovery is, unfortunately, still a privilege. Can we really be part of a social justice movement if we overlook the role privilege plays in the accessibility of recovery? 

    The Role of Privilege in Substance Use Disorders and Recovery

    Many people within the recovery movement believe that recovery is possible in spite of race, ethnicity, economic circumstances, nationality, sex, gender, access to health insurance, and a strong support system — in other words, privilege. This simply isn’t the reality. There are great disparities both in how addiction affects people and how much recovery capital is available to us based on privilege.

    Rates of addiction are higher in oppressed populations, especially among LGBTQ people and people of color. Black women over 45 are the fastest growing population with alcohol use disorder, and the risk of developing a substance use disorders is 20-30 percent higher for individuals who identify as LGBTQ+.

    We don’t hear about those statistics, though; we see an opioid epidemic that is largely affecting white people. When drugs have a detrimental impact on communities of color, the media is less interested in covering it. Advocate Shari Hampton explains “Nobody gave a damn when black lives were being ravaged by crack cocaine in the 80’s. Families were ripped apart; communities were literally destroyed. People were thrown in jail and some of them are still there.”

    She continues, “I’ve witnessed grandparents raise grandchildren right up to their grave while their grown children suffered from a crack addiction or a jail sentence that is so ridiculously long, it might as well be life. But now we have an opioid epidemic. It’s affecting a different demographic. And now, now it’s a treatment issue. This is disparaging and discouraging, especially to the black and brown folks that have never been treated with even a remote sense of compassion compared to what we see today.”

    This disparity continues in access to recovery. Recovery is vastly different for those who lack recovery capital — the resources that can be used to sustain recovery: financial security, education, health insurance, and a support system — which is heavily linked, again, to our privilege.

    Not all people who speak openly about their addiction and recovery are blind to the reality of the effects of privilege. In her recent book Strung Out, author Erin Khar unpacks the role of privilege in her own recovery: “Escaping addiction, and it truly does feel like an escape, requires protective layers of aftercare. I have been incredibly fortunate to have access to the support I’ve needed.”

    She continues, “We don’t have a system in place that makes it simple or easy for people to get help or support. There are financial, social, and racial barriers to getting help. If we are going to see a real downshift in the opiate crisis, support is what is needed — not just from peers and family members, but also the medical community and government.”

    Studies show that African American and Latinx individuals are far less likely than white people to complete outpatient and residential substance use disorder treatment.

    The inequity is also in access to medication. NPR highlighted a recent study by Dr. Pooja Lagisetty, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Michigan, who stated that “this epidemic over the last few years has been framed by many as a largely white epidemic, but we know now that’s not true.”

    Lagisetty found that as overdose deaths rose between 2012 and 2015, so did though the number of medical visits where buprenorphine was prescribed. However, researchers found no increase in prescriptions for African Americans and other minorities. In fact, the study found that white populations are almost 35 times more likely to have a buprenorphine visit than African Americans even though death rates among people of color were rising faster than white people. Researchers also observed that these visits were paid for by cash (40 percent), or private insurance (35 percent) rather than with Medicaid (25 percent), suggesting inequalities in healthcare. 

    “We shouldn’t see differences this large, given that people of color have similar rates of opioid use disorder,” says Lagisetty. “As the number of Americans with opioid use disorder grows, we need to increase access to treatment for black and low-income populations, and be thoughtful about how we reach all those who could benefit from this treatment.” 

    People of color have less access to treatment not only due to socio-economic circumstances. There is also a disparity in how drug use is viewed in communities of color. Despite similar rates of drug use and sales, people of color are more likely than white people to be arrested and receive harsher punishments for drug-related offenses. 

    Khar reflects on the criminalization based on race: “Some might say it’s a miracle that I never got pulled over, never got caught with that briefcase of drugs. But I see it less as a miracle and more because I was a young woman with passing-white privilege in a Jetta.”

    She continues, “I’ve thought about this often, that had my skin been darker, had I come from less privilege, I have no doubt that I would have been arrested early on. I’ve thought about how that would have changed the trajectory of my life, how early arrests may have kept me forever trapped in a cycle of incarceration. Our drug laws are undeniably skewed to keep people of color and people of less privilege imprisoned and enslaved. And I’ve always been aware of that.”

    The true picture of addiction and recovery inequity are often ignored on social media because our privilege blinds us to these realities. But if we really want to create a social justice movement, we have to change how we relay what substance use disorders and recovery looks like for all.

    Creating a More Impactful Social Justice Movement

    Let me be clear: this article is not intended to shame anyone for their privilege; instead, I’m suggesting that we can’t ignore the true picture in favor of a prettier, more palatable version. Making blanket statements that “anyone can recover” whitewashes and overlooks the gross inequities that people of color and marginalized communities face. 

    Advocate Shari Hampton explains this discomfort that underlies many recovery advocacy conferences. “I went to a conference earlier in the year and the white fragility in the room was nauseating. I literally didn’t understand why even talking about inequality caused so much discomfort. Simply discussing the topic had white folk with pursed lips and clenched fists. White folks can’t bear to examine a system that has entitled them to more, as being broken. It’s like admitting that Jesus was black. It’s not going to happen. To do so would disrupt all things.”

    When asked how we can make a difference, Hampton responds: “America’s history teaches that black people are inferior to white people — that we don’t deserve the same treatment or opportunities. The mindset must shift. Because until we are seen, truly seen as magnificent beings, equal and worthy of the same quality of life and opportunities afforded to whites, very little will change.”

    If we really want to create a more impactful social justice movement, we need to get uncomfortable. We need to be more mindful in our social media posts and consider if what we are portraying is an accurate representation of recovery, and question if our privilege played a role in our access to resources. We need to consider if we are amplifying the voices of those marginalized and oppressed. If not, why not? And in creating events to address addiction, or in going to Washington, DC seeking policy changes, we need to stop and ask ourselves if we have invited the people who are most affected by these policies. If not, we need to ask ourselves why we aren’t amplifying the voices of the people who most need to be heard?

    We cannot divorce recovery from true social justice. Writer and sobriety coach Holly Whitaker says: “For those people who don’t want to ‘dirty up’ or confuse recovery spaces with talk of racism, classism, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, classism, etc. — remember that recovery is about awareness, and that this path is about inclusion, love, and acknowledging wrongs and injustices. If we aren’t talking about the way the system works, and who gets crushed by the system, we aren’t actually talking about recovery. We’re still just talking about our comfort zones, and using our privilege to deny other experiences.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • "Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool" Connects Jim Crow Oppression to Davis' Heroin Addiction

    "Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool" Connects Jim Crow Oppression to Davis' Heroin Addiction

    Miles Davis’ heroin addiction and alcoholism are all well known and well documented. However, Nelson frames this period as resulting from Davis’ return to a reality in which he was not wanted but his music was.

    The documentary Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool opened up the world of one of the most innovative musicians in American history. In the film, Director Stanley Nelson laid bare all the details of the music man’s life, including the darkness and despair of Davis’s struggle with alcoholism and heroin addiction. It is during this piece of the film, which should have been the low and slow point, that the pieces Nelson offered began to connect. Davis’s heroin addiction was a direct result of the treatment he received as a black man living under Jim Crow laws in 1949.

    In the documentary, Nelson offers audiences the French tour where Miles Davis discovered love and existence without the restriction and oppression of Jim Crow America post-WWII. Davis went to France in 1949, touring with the Tadd Dameron group for quite some time. By all accounts—even those outside of Nelson’s documentary—the man became enamored with the country that embraced him for his talent without placing restrictions on him due to his skin color. Here he experienced life without the heavy hand of racism weighing him down.

    The freedom of living abroad was buoyed by a romance with a French singer named Juliette Gréco. The couple, despite their racial differences, was able to maintain a public relationship just like other couples in France and much of Europe. The oppressive, dangerously restrictive Jim Crow laws in the U.S. would have made their relationship illegal. American laws and policies in 1949 were enacted to maintain the belief that black people were inferior to their white countrymen.

    In Birth of the Cool, the narrator discusses how Davis became “disillusioned” by American racism after spending quite some time away in France. The weight of Jim Crow was enough to send the musician into a depression that he could not recover from. This was compounded by the lull in his musical career because of the waning popularity of bebop and the lack of a fresh new sound from Davis. He was also mulling the loss of the relationship that he would remember well into his later years. Davis told an interviewer that he never married Gréco because he loved her and wanted her to be happy. Their marriage could not exist in the U.S.

    The next part of the documentary was a slow plunge into the darkest parts of the musician’s life. Davis’s heroin addiction and alcohol abuse are all well known and well documented. However, Nelson frames this period as resulting from Davis’s return to a reality in which he was not wanted but his music was. Although Nelson never explicitly says so, the racism Davis experienced led to his depression, which sent him into the heroin addiction and alcoholism rabbit hole. Even in the documentary, Davis describes his depression as something that sprouted the moment he returned to the racist United States and followed him through the period of his life where he struggled with addiction.

    Studies like “Exploring the Link between Racial Discrimination and Substance Use: What Mediates? What Buffers?” from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology show that not only is there a relationship between racism and mental health issues as a whole, but the link also exists specifically between racism and addiction. The authors write, “Psychologists have known for some time about the pernicious effects that perceived racial discrimination can have on mental health.” The study goes on to dig into the research gathered from this link. They found that “[n]umerous correlational studies have documented relations between self-reports of discriminatory experiences and reports of distress, including anxiety and depression, as well as anger.” All of these elements were likely in place as Davis returned to the U.S. The weight of segregation, sundown laws, lynchings, and other trappings of Jim Crow laws was more than enough to anger and depress any black person at the time.

    Substance use promises an escape from pain and Davis needed a way to cope with all these feelings. According to the aforementioned study, “[T]he increased substance use we found was evidence of a coping style that includes use as a means of handling the stress of discrimination.” Davis probably became more angered and frustrated with the racist behavior (especially after returning home to the predominantly white St. Louis suburb his parents lived in). The documentary also described how his musical popularity waned and his personal life was disrupted from the breakup with Gréco. At the time, the musician’s life had all the elements in place to breed the raging heroin addiction that followed.

    Fortunately, Davis recovered from his addiction to opioids and alcohol, but it was a lifelong struggle. Nelson depicts as much in the documentary. In fact, racism and substance abuse become a very strong subplot to the documentary that works to educate viewers as much as entertain them. Between the scenes depicting the origins of the famous everchanging Miles Davis sound, Nelson buried important nuggets that should force us to redefine how we view and treat racism and addiction.

    Birth of the Cool essentially describes the environment from which Miles Davis’s addiction was created. There are other factors that also affected his addiction, but racism and depression were the primary and most powerful drivers that pushed him toward problematic substance use. Nelson thus lends one more voice to the chorus of stories that illustrate how racism and the oppression of white supremacy is an impetus to substance misuse and addiction. Acknowledging this can help with not only treating addiction in the black community, but also with understanding why racism should be considered a public health concern worthy of more serious attention.

    More info on Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool here.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Post-Kavanaugh, Women’s Self-Care Needs to Lose the Alcohol

    Post-Kavanaugh, Women’s Self-Care Needs to Lose the Alcohol

    Alcohol, when construed as the first or best line of self-care, actually renders us less effective in resisting an exploitive system that makes legal space for our bodies to be legislated, controlled, and raped.

    “Should we get some wine?” I asked him, pushing a bit of sweet potato around on my plate. I felt my cheeks flush and a weird half smile launch across my lips, the way it always does when I feel embarrassed or awkward or sad or anything really. Whenever I’m feeling anything too much. My partner looked startled.

    “What? Why?” he set his own fork and knife down, leaned back in his chair. “I mean, an IPA sounds really good right now. But I guess, just, what’s the motivation behind it?”

    It had been 62 days since either of us had had anything to drink, thanks to a self-imposed sobriety challenge after I’d watched my already heavy alcohol consumption creep up and up and eventually become overwhelming in the years since Trump’s election, post-Access Hollywood tape, post-everything. Two months was a long time, I reasoned now. A quality effort. And in all likelihood, an accused sexual predator would sit on the Supreme Court when we woke up the next morning. If there was ever a good reason to nurse a nice bottle of beer to ease some of the anxiety, fear, anger and hopelessness I was feeling, both as a woman and a victim of past sexual abuse, now was it.

    Wasn’t it?

    “I mean, would this be about escaping things?” he continued, gently, pushing, asking the question I had begged him, at the start of our not-drinking, to raise when I inevitably said I wanted back off the wagon. Because the answer was, is, will always be: Of course.

    Of course. I have made a lifestyle out of escaping things, of turning away from what’s hard and ugly and painful. Either that or confronting darkness only when I was a couple of drinks in or after I’d settled beneath the protective blanket of Klonopin or during the rush of false energy following a purge, all the food I’d consumed vomited up and flushed quietly away. In a very real way, I can trace my life as a ping-pong game of silences and rages, each assisted along by some substance or behavior I’ve begun to describe as “not me,” in that they’ve all been designed to take me out myself and, as a result, out of proper caring—for this world, its injustices, its humanness, its pain.

    There’s a lot of rhetoric around the usefulness of women’s rage right now, but what keeps getting left out is how, so often, we (middle-class, white women) use anger to stand in for or erase action. How, so often, anger becomes the justification for harm. And for me—and the rising number of American women turning to alcohol to deal with stress, trauma, and its aftereffects—that often takes the shape of self-sabotage in a bottle to numb out, ease anxiety, filter boredom, help us slip into apathy dressed up as protection and self-care. Let me be clear, and I speak from experience: Drowning your sorrows is the opposite of self-care.

    Wine will not heal your wounds, will not even tend to them, no matter what the patriarchal messaging around alcohol promises you. And I say patriarchal because it’s true: Our American culture of binge-drinking and heavy alcohol consumption is directly and implicitly tied to the capitalist, racist, structural misogyny upon which our country is founded—and through which marginalized groups are subjugated, oppressed, and continually, insistently Othered. We only have to look to history to see the ways in which alcohol was used to keep said groups under the heel of white men in power: White Europeans, for example, notorious for their “extreme drinking” on the frontier, encouraged both alcohol trade and excessive consumption among Native populations, later weaponizing the stereotype of the “drunk Indian” against them. Years later, slave masters on Southern plantations developed strategies to carefully control slaves’ access to alcohol during the week, only to encourage them to drink heavily on Saturday evenings and special holidays. Frederick Douglass later castigated the so-called controlled promotion of drunkenness as a means of keeping black men and women in “a state of perpetual stupidity” that reduced the risks of rebellion. More recently, increased experiences of racism have been explicitly, causally linked to riskier drinking among black women on college campuses. Meanwhile, growing wealth, educational, employment, housing and health disparities between minorities and white Americans have led to a much greater increase in alcohol consumption among those communities between 2002 and 2013, a study published in JAMA Psychiatry suggests (although it’s not much of a stretch to say that increase is significantly greater in our Post-Trump world of racist nationalism, its cruel policies, and resulting demoralization among the people affected the most).

    Alcohol, too, has become the primary coping mechanism for women in America, regardless of race or ethnicity: Overall, female alcohol use disorder in the United States has increased by 83.7 percent, according to that same study. High risk drinking among women, defined as more than seven drinks in a week or three drinks in a day, has increased by 58 percent. We only have to look at mommy or work wine culture to see the ways in which alcohol is used to keep women quiet, dulled, apathetic and convinced they need booze to survive motherhood or employment or both. So perhaps it is no surprise the contemporary rhetoric of white feminism is rife with messages that draw a supposedly intuitive connection from anger to self-care, which is inevitably linked to drinking. We get tired? We pop open a bottle. We get scared? We fill a glass. We get angry? We rage over shots or cocktails or champagne. None of this helps us. In fact, all of this renders us less effective in resisting an exploitive system that makes legal space for our bodies to be legislated, controlled, and raped.

    “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” Audre Lorde famously said in her 1984 call to and critique of the internalized patriarchy of white Western women. Alcohol, when construed as the first or best line of self-care, I’d argue, is one of the master’s tools. We indulge in the drinks that American culture (and American feminism) says we deserve, and we get raped while the men who were drinking alongside us get off and then get nominated to the Supreme Court. It’s a double bind—one that bears calling attention to, however hard it is to look at. We should be able to say that it’s absolutely, undeniably immoral for a man to abuse a woman’s body while she is drunk (or sober or somewhere in between). That rape or abuse is never a woman’s fault because of what she was drinking (or wearing or saying or where she walking or what time of night it was, etc., etc., forever, etc.). And we should also be able to challenge the messages that encourage a woman to relax or to rage or to start a revolution only after she has a glass of wine in her hand. 

    Alcohol is a depressant. It anesthetizes our pain and our power, our minds and our bodies, and we will need all of ourselves to fight what will come in the next weeks, months and years as those same bodies become the battleground upon which men’s petty force and overwhelming self-hatred wage war. Look, I’m barely nine weeks sober. I never hit the rock bottom people describe in AA or alcohol recovery programs. I don’t know if I plan on a lifetime of sobriety or if I’ll have a celebratory beer after I finish grading all of my students’ papers over fall break. What I do know? I spent years using alcohol to avoid the work I knew I should be doing. The healing I knew should be seeking. I know many women who don’t drink, who don’t turn to alcohol to deal with exhaustion and fear and heartbreak. I know many, many more who do. I’m not advocating for prohibition or teetotalism. But I am asking women—white women in particular—to take a hard look at what they mean when they say self-care, and what they’re hoping to accomplish by drinking their way through.

    We certainly don’t need #BeersforBrett, the hashtag that surfaced among white, wealthy men celebrating Kavanaugh’s confirmation Saturday. But we definitely don’t need feminist cocktails, either, as I saw recently championed on a Facebook group for women scholars and rhetoricians. Jessa Crispin has warned white women against misconstruing the philosophy of self-care that Audre Lorde conceived of as way for activist women of color to ease some of the burden of dismantling racism and misogyny while living at the very intersection of such oppression. “Now it’s applied to, I don’t know, getting a blowout,” Crispin writes. “And pedicures. Even if your pedicurist is basically a slave.” Especially if you’ve got a glass of champagne to assist you along in ignoring that reality. So, no. We don’t need rage if we’re going to use it as an excuse to drink, to sink into dispassion.

    We need real action. We need true healing. I didn’t need wine on Friday night, and the community of women I want to support through this troubling time didn’t need me buzzed or drunk or hollowly chill. We need the opposite of that. In our activism and in our downtime, we need a clear-eyed, hangover-free commitment to dismantling absolutely everything that violates us—whether through false comfort or force, apathy or abuse.

    View the original article at thefix.com