“America needs help right now, and Americans know it.” So said conservative columnist, Peggy Noonan, in her Wall Street Journal column in early May. “ It has been enduring for many years,” she said, “a continuing cultural catastrophe—illegitimacy, the decline of faith, two family formation, child abuse and neglect, drugs, inadequate public education and so on. All this exists along side an entertainment culture on which the poor and neglected are dependent and which is devoted to violence, … [Read more...]

The Ferry boat ride at dusk from Clayton N.Y across the St. Lawrence River to Gananoque, Ontario in the 1930's was a beautiful and calming excursion. It came at the end of a day long trip in our '37 Packard from Summit N.J. in the late 1930's. The boat ride was a moment that we treasured. Serenity as those in recovery from addictions know is a key. I think about that boat ride still as a source of the tranquility most of us seek.The ferry held about six cars and wound its way through … [Read more...]

                Mary Karr, author and recovering alcoholic,  grew up in a tough Texas town with a neglectful even homicidal alcoholic mother (who found many years of sobriety in her later years and reconciliation with her daughter) and a hardworking but disengaged father about whom she writes “Daddy floated through the house with an increasingly vacant stare, leaving a wake of Camel smoke.” Despite the handicaps of her rough … [Read more...]

      There are some who say that commercializing marijuana and increasing its availability will reduce the demand for potentially deadly opioids. It's not so, says Hazelden Betty Ford, an old and reliable drug treatment provider, in a recent “Emerging Drug Trends” report. It stated in part that “expanding legal access to marijuana (also known as Cannibis) is not the solution to America's opioid crisis.” The report concluded that “the strongest existing research … [Read more...]

In 1937, Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith counted members and realized with a sense of wonder that their idea, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), implemented two years earlier, worked and that much of the credit belonged to John D. Rockefeller, Jr. “When we were little known, still uncertain ourselves,” Wilson said to Rockefeller, “you stood before the world saying what you thought. To have done that for a few struggling people still bearing the stigma of alcoholism was an act of truest charity more … [Read more...]