Drug-dependent people don’t think much about the future, and it's a significant obstacle to recovery. Some studies show that heroin addicts think ahead an average of nine days, while the time horizon for the general population is four and a half to seven years. This is according to Dr. Warren Bickel who was doing research on addiction and treatment at Little Rock’s University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) when I interviewed him almost a decade ago. “If you … [Read more...]

                Early in my sobriety, one of the things that kept me coming back to AA meetings and  building relationships was a little Sunday morning get together at the Wolfe Street center called the Hour of Power. I learned a lot about gratitude at these meetings, a vital component of recovery which coincided nicely with  getting rid of my resentments, a tidy arrangement. Gene Walter conceived of the meeting with an assist … [Read more...]

                Near the end of his book, How to Raise a Drug-Free Kid: The Straight Dope for Parents (2009), Joseph A. Califano Jr. quotes a father who lost a son to a drug overdose. His account is heart-breakingly brief. “Like so many parents,” the father, Jim Bildner, said, “we didn’t heed the warning signs. We found an empty beer bottle in the backyard, we smelled pot on his clothes, we found an unidentifiable pill in the … [Read more...]

  As we contemplate the merciless killing of 17 innocent people, mainly children, at the hands of 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, my mind goes back many years to a Thanksgiving retreat at St. Simons Island off the Georgia coast for people in recovery from alcohol and other drug addictions. The retreat's theme was our addiction to being isolated and alone. A Catholic priest known only as Noel said in one of the opening monologues, “As … [Read more...]

                Pat Summerall and Mickey Mantle, both athletes of significant achievement, were also pals and drinking buddies. It went back to when they had adjoining lockers in Yankee stadium in the 1950’s. Both men were serious athletes in their prime, Mantle with the New York Yankees baseball team and Summerall with the Chicago Cardinals and the New York Giants football teams, and both men were serious drinkers. The affects … [Read more...]