Better Than Nothing! –

April 5, 2020 – The grace of being saved that night was too precious to squander — a gift I was determined to live up to although I was terrified of what my life would be like without alcohol. My therapist recommended AA, where I could begin my program with 90 days of abstention. I agreed without pause — it was local, free, and what the doctor ordered. I had no idea what to expect. I’d missed the cultural memo regarding AA entirely. I didn’t know about the praying, the coffee, or the basements. I just loved it — from the moment I sat on the floor of my first meeting, it felt like home.

When the coronavirus outbreak was officially classified as a pandemic, addiction treatment facilities and programs were immediately forced to operate without the key component of recovery: group meetings. In her award-winning book, The Recovering, Leslie Jamison interviewed Gary Kaplan, a professor of psychiatry and pharmacology and experimental therapeutics at Boston University, whose aspiration is to recondition the mechanism of dependence itself through medicine. While he believes strongly in the necessity of medication to combat addiction, Kaplan told Jamison, “You can give someone as much methadone as you want. But they will still need a social network.”

@GEN