“I’m going to jail, man. I’m going to jail.” I stood there and stared at my shoes. I felt sick.
“Look, man. Nobody’s going to jail. We’re going to walk straight out of here, you’re going to throw a bunch of cash on the bar to settle up, and then we’re out the door and gone. Got it? You don’t talk to anyone on the way out and you don’t say anything to anyone. Understand?”
I was in no position to argue. The fight wasn’t in me anymore. “Let’s go,” I said. He opened the door and we walked straight ahead to the bar. Fast, but not too fast. I flipped a couple of hundreds on the bar and we were out the door and into the night.
So how did I get from a place like that, the destructive and out-of-control void, a place where I refused to take responsibility for my actions, to a place that, most of the time, resembles a state of calm? Treatment. But what was it about treatment that eventually worked for me? I still don’t know. It’s not like there’s one thing I can point at and say, “That! That’s the magical thing that fixed me and cured me and made everything right in my life and in the world.” It may work that way for some people, but I doubt it. The first big step for me came at Hazelden. When I was there they told me, “You can be sober.” That opened my eyes to the possibility, although I stumbled a lot of times on my journey to where I am now. Even though I had any number of relapses, I had the desire to be clean. I’d fall, but I’d get back up.
If I have one piece of advice to give, it’s this: If you really want to get sober, give up alcohol and drugs for twelve months. Stay away from them. Don’t touch them. Go to meetings, but use your strength and your will to not use or drink. There are people who will tell you that you have to put all your trust in God. Really? As soon as I said, “I don’t have control of this situation, God does,” I would have been right back in a world of hurt. Dogma is something that I’ve never found helpful. The support of a group can help, but use common sense too. Groups are just like anything else in life. There are cool people and there are not-cool people. You’ll have to figure out who’s who. And you’ll have to do that, like everything else in the process, by yourself. Nobody can save you but yourself.
If you stumble and relapse, don’t give up. If you really want to live your life without drugs or alcohol, you’ll hit those times when you give in and use. To fall into despair over it won’t help. Stop. Again. There is an astonishing failure rate when it comes to treatment. But failure’s an odd term to use with a disease like alcoholism and drug addiction. It’s like asking someone with type 1 diabetes, “Did your insulin cure you?” Of course not. Which brings up an interesting take on the success rates of treatment programs. Drew and I don’t trust the data that’s out there. We talk about it. I’ll see some stats and say, “We don’t seem to do a great job if these figures are accurate.”
“The data just depends upon how it’s measured, Bob. And it isn’t culled properly when addiction is studied. Addiction is viewed like pneumonia when it’s more like asthma. It’s a chronic illness and the end point is screwed up.”
He’s right. Drew also believes the studies are usually too short. Generally, they’re conducted over a period of months. You don’t really see studies that follow a single group of addicts over a ten-year period. Something like that might give you some insight. Another problem is that so many of the studies that are done these days involve what’s called “replacement therapy.” It’s a fancy term for giving addicts another drug to keep them off heroin. It used to be methadone. Now it’s Suboxone. It’s not really a cure for addiction.
Urine tests are unreliable too. In a clinical situation, most addicts know when they’ll be tested. They know how to manipulate that. They know how to beat the system. Urine tests are often done on the same day, week in and week out. An addict knows how long a drug stays
