I want to recommend a great & sweet movie, Get Low, starring the inestimable Robert Duvall. Movies that deal well with the topic of grief touch my heart like no other. It was clear to me, early in recovery that I had grief to deal with. Feel, Deal and Heal is the saying. The work I did, ably supported by knowledgeable practitioners and teachers,

The Basic Text of Alcoholics Anonymous calls alcoholism an “illness”. The medical community calls addiction a disease. Some hard core 12 Step members will argue there’s a difference but to me it’s just semantics. Regardless, addiction is a health issue and should be treated as such. It’s not a lack of morals or a lack of willpower. To people who think the latter I

by Scott Thomas Anderson Silence can be the most comforting way for a community’s future to disintegrate. As city newspapers continue to shrink, there’s a shocking amount of pressure on smaller, community papers to engage in less investigative journalism rather than more of it: Some of this pressure comes from “the usual suspects” — political figures, developers and Real Estate interests, your local Chamber of Commerce.

From the 80s to the naughties, there are some characters that everybody can agree scared the crap out of them when they were kids. The 80s had Freddy Krueger, 90s kids shuttered at the sight of Scream, and the 2000s brought us the twisted smile of Jigsaw. But the same can also be said about the frightening characters that inhabited many anti-drug PSAs we

PUBLISHED APRIL 2, 2016 by KIP SHUBERT “I unplugged the very power source that was saving me” Everywhere people are unplugging themselves from the very power source of life and purpose. It is not just the insanity of addiction but the insanity of life. Before I ever took my first drink I began to despise church and doubt God. I would see people who

Hey there! My name is Lauren, and I’m a grateful, recovering alcoholic/addict. Learning from your own experiences is one thing, but having the opportunity to be able to learn from others should definately be taken advantage of if you have that chance. You don’t have to go back out there and continue that vicious cycle, the insanity of the lie that someday it wil

By Douglas Capraro People may remember the story of Jessica Grubb after her parents met with President Barack Obama to talk about their daughter’s struggle with heroin addiction. Ever since they sat down to speak, Jessica’s story became a key talking point for Obama whenever he discussed the heroin and opioid epidemic with lawmakers. However, only a week after the Huffington Post published a

Last week HBO showed a new documentary entitled Heroin: Cape Cod, USA. With much anticipation I viewed this documentary with expectations of a win for the recovery community. In my eyes, HBO generally does a great job with documentaries and I was excited to see that addiction was in the limelight. Social media was abound with people talking about the doc before it aired.

Today is a shitty day. I had a shitty day of surgeries at work so I left early to take a walk, get some air, and try to feel better. Just as I thought I was able to breathe again I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize. I ignored it and they called again. Somewhere deep down I knew something was

In my humble opinion humor is essential to recovery. If one can’t have fun in recovery then what’s the point of staying clean and sober? When I decided to give up the high cost of low living, I had no idea what recovery would entail. I figured that Alcoholics Anonymous was just a place where a bunch of people sat around a table and

It’s April 2, 2011 at the time I write this entry. I stand wobbling with blurred vision, trying to orientate to my surroundings. I’m so cold. Within a few seconds of discomfort, I realize I’m in the “dress”. The dress is an ugly green dress-like suit that wears as loose as a potato sack. It has no buttons or ties, no arms or legs,

After decades of suffering from depression, which sometimes made me so catatonic that all I could do was stare at walls in silence, I have now fully recovered from it. For many years I wanted to kill myself, getting very close on one occasion. Thank God I did not take that irrevocable step, as I am now happier than I have ever been with

People are dying. We are in the midst of the third drug epidemic in the last 50 years and the second one involving opioids. And although its victims have at least garnered enough attention to push lawmakers towards many radical approaches to drug policy reform, the reaction to the contemporary drug epidemic is very different from the way these epidemics were treated in the

For 24 hours, Gordon barely moved a muscle. With decades of alcohol abuse and a string of failed relationships and treatment attempts behind him, he wound up a broken man living in a Catholic monastery. But now, blindfolded and reclining comfortably under the careful supervision of a registered nurse, he was ready to try one more lease on life. The drug was now taking

by Jason Smith Part I: The Come Up It’s not every day a drug kingpin makes Forbes magazine’s “Most Powerful People” list. But thanks to power generated by total domination of illegal narcotic sales, that’s exactly where Joaquín “Chapo” Guzman found himself in 2013, when Forbes ranked him the 67th most powerful man on a planet of 7.1 billion people. Under Guzman’s direction, the

That’s what ‘we’ say. Our drug/alcohol addictions lead to three places: Jails, Institutions and DEATH… That is what I’m here to write about today on behalf of my beloved big brother, Steven David. My brother was once a vibrant little boy, like the little boy here, his sweet son… Then something happened; the world got to him. Steve had a heart so sensitive, kind,