Understanding oneself is incomplete when divorced from the history of one’s people. Those with lived experience of addiction and recovery share such a larger history. Over the course of centuries and across the globe, we have been: Abandoned  Arrested   Berated   Caned   Castigated   Coerced   Confronted   Condemned   Conned   Defamed  Defrocked   Divorced   Deported   Denied Probation   Denied Pardon   Denied Parenthood   Executed (……)

It is all that we are: history, memory. –Walter Mosely, from John Woman I have been thinking a good deal more than usual about the history of addiction recovery in the United States. Such ruminations are a reflection of my stage of life, but they have also been stirred by recent events, including the recent(……)

Critics have claimed that recovery advocacy, recovery management, recovery-oriented systems of care, and related ideas and initiatives are a “flavor of the month” fad and that the so-called “recovery revolution” is nothing more than new words for what the addictions field has been doing for decades. Such shallow criticism ignores fundamental changes that are unfolding(……)

Two of the most significant milestones in the history of recovery are the increased self-recognition of individuals in recovery as a distinct “people” and the tandem emergence of an ecumenical (beyond identification with a particular mutual aid group or treatment institution) culture of recovery. The former is being expressed through a grassroots recovery advocacy movement(……)

The affluent alcoholic has always had institutions that catered to his or her needs for periodic detoxification and physical and emotional renewal. When inebriate homes, inebriate asylums and addiction cure institutes collapsed in the opening decades of the 20th century, a new social institution quietly emerged on the American landscape. This new institution was the(……)

Efforts by professionals to “treat” alcoholism and other addictions have a long and colorful history. Alcoholics have been forced to drink their own urine and forced to drink wine in which an eel had been suffocated. They have been surreptitiously dosed with everything from mole blood to sparrow dung and subjected to the “Swedish treatment”(……)

If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.  ― Michael Crichton History is the ultimate elder, whether her truths are drawn from dusty tomes or passed on by our most revered storytellers. The early history of addiction in America has been(……)