Don’t Never Give Up
I was 19-years-old when someone first told me that I was an alcoholic and a drug addict. She was a psychiatrist who worked on the Upper East Side. After I spent an hour telling her about my daily alcohol intake, my marijuana habit, and my sexual history, the doctor concluded our session by urging me to immediately enter an inpatient drug rehabilitation program. She also added that, by her estimation, I was probably gay and needed to get comfortable with coming out of the closet. The truth can be scary. Although the psychiatrist was right on both accounts, she effectively scared the shit out of me.
That psychiatric consultation was the beginning of a miserable four year period for myself and the people who loved me. When one member of a family is slowly killing themselves by abusing drugs and alcohol, the whole family tends to suffer alongside the addict. It’s hard for families to carry contradictory ideas about their substance abusing loved ones. On the one hand, the addict is suffering and needs support. While on the other hand, addicts tend to do horrible things to both themselves and the people they love. Sometimes, the addict can exhibit seemingly unforgivable behavior. I surely did.
Ultimately, I was lucky that my family refused to give up on me, no matter how off-putting and disgusting my alcoholic behavior became. No matter how many lies I told, or how many times they found empty bottles of tequila tucked under my mattress, they refused to give up on their son, brother, nephew and grandchild.
Most teenage addicts are not as lucky. Teenage addicts are particularly vulnerable in their dependence on others to pay for, and facilitate their treatment. Without the support of my parents, I would not be three years removed from my last drink, and I surely would not have a college degree, nor would I be enrolled in graduate school. I was spoiled by love and I’m eternally grateful.
My name is Max Adler and I once exhibited severely alcoholic behavior. But, now I can proudly proclaim that I’m an engagement journalist serving teenage addicts and their families. Through my own experiences, I’ve become particularly interested in humanizing the experiences of other addicts, in a way that would make it hard for their respective families to lose hope and patience. Those who are suffering, desperately need the support of others. I desperately needed my family’s support. Without it, I would likely be dead or in jail.
By engaging the addict community, along with their family units, I hope to inspire those in the grips of substance abuse cycles, and their family’s, to stay the course. No matter how hopeless the situation may seem, there’s light at the end of the tunnel.
I also hope to provide people with information about methods of treatment that might not be given a voice in most AA rooms and substance abuse treatment programs. My “success story” is not one that you would hear in an AA room or a traditional 12-step program. This is because I first was able to achieve sobriety by taking Antabuse.
Antabuse achieves a similar result for addicts, that a “lap-band” surgery can have for people struggling with obesity. It’s an alcoholism medication that can treat problem-drinking by creating an unpleasant reaction to alcohol. It’s rarely used in recovery programs because of the AA community’s hesitation to embrace medicinal treatments in the recovery process.
Addicts have become particularly vulnerable in the six months since Covid-19 took its first American casualty. More than 40 states have recorded increases in opioid and drug related deaths since the pandemic began, according to the American Medical Association. The pandemic has made it nearly impossible for most struggling Americans to find access to inpatient addiction care.
Since access to inpatient and outpatient substance abuse programs has decreased as a result of a variety of social distancing policies, it has become increasingly important that people have to access to information about medications that can be used to suppress drug/alcohol cravings, while curbing symptoms that plague people experiencing withdrawal.
The treatment community as a whole must work to find more welcoming ways of reaching the suffering addict.
My goal is to share a wide array of stories that humanize the irrational and illogical behavior often exhibited by addicts. By doing so, it will make it harder for suffering addicts to be proverbially “left out to pasture.”
It is my goal that no one suffering feels as if their road to recovery amounts to an insurmountable journey.
Addiction is a disease of disconnection. I’m here to persuade those entangled in the messy life of an addict, to not further distance themselves from the person suffering. For, by further disconnecting the addict from society, we are exacerbating the problem.
