Hi Readers! Sorry for the slowdown in posts, I’ve been on vacation in sunny Puerto Vallarta. While I was down there I saw signs for Alcoholics Anonimos meetings all over the place, and in one little bohemian town I visited which is accessible only by boat, Yelapa, I saw signs for meetings of “Friends of Bill W.” So AA is alive internationally, and now that I’ve gotten back home and scoured the news I saw that it was a slow week for anything new in addiction news anyways. Generally, my writing process here is to google news on addiction, and put my own spin on what I find. Unfortunately, I just keep seeing the same tired articles with the same tired themes. But here’s a few great pieces that some other truth seekers wrote while I was away:
Maia Szalavitz had a great piece in TIME magazine called Perspective: Why Comparing Painkiller Addiction to Crack Worsens the Problem, and this speaks to one of the current themes in the news that just won’t quit. All we hear about lately is the prescription drug epidemic. The reason this storyline is so popular is because it has long been a message of the recovery complex that “anyone can become an addict”, and they love to portray addicts as unwilling victims. The idea that people are innocently following their doctors orders and then being sucked into addiction by cunning and baffling substances fits the disease message perfectly. And these stories about prescription drug addiction aren’t even a dime a dozen – they’re a penny a pound. Maia brings some sanity to the discussion, check it out.
Next up, we have a blog post from MA over at the Stinkin-Thinkin Blog titled Why AA Is Not A Valid Treatment Approach, And Why We Aren’t Obligated To Treat It As Such. The article addresses the many ways we’re snowed into believing that AA works, when in fact it doesn’t. It’s quite in depth, and there’s a lot to absorb, but it should definitely go down in ST’s hall of fame as one of their best posts. It’s very much worth your time to read this post – check it out.
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