[What if a team of people in recovery from drug addiction were
enlisted to teach the pharmaceutical executives what it really means
to take responsibility? ] [[link removed]]

A 12-STEP PROGRAM TO OPIOID JUSTICE FINDING PEACE AMID THE NEW OPIUM
WARS  
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Mattea Kramer
November 19, 2019
TomDispatch [[link removed]]

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_ What if a team of people in recovery from drug addiction were
enlisted to teach the pharmaceutical executives what it really means
to take responsibility? _

This August 15, 2017 file photo shows an arrangement of pills of the
opioid oxycodone-acetaminophen in New York. , Patrick Sison/AP Photo

 

It was evening and we were in a windowless room in a Massachusetts
jail. We had just finished a class -- on job interview skills -- and,
with only a few minutes remaining, the women began voicing their
shared fear. Upon their release, would someone really hire them?
Beneath that concern lurked another one: Would they be able to avoid
the seductively anesthetizing drugs that put them in jail in the first
place?

Their disquiet was reasonable. Everyone with me around that grey
plastic table, along with the vast majority of other prisoners in the
jail, was addicted to opioids. On the cinderblock wall, a laminated
sign read: “We take stock of all the suffering we have experienced
and caused as addicts.”

Thousands
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of lawsuits are making their way through the court system in an effort
to force some kind of repayment from the corporations that
manufactured, distributed, and dispensed billions
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of doses of prescription opioids. Those drugs, including OxyContin and
fentanyl, have killed
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hundreds of thousands of Americans, while entangling untold numbers of
others in addiction (and, often, in illegal activities like larceny to
pay for the drugs they then craved). The pharmaceutical companies
involved have, unsurprisingly, been eager to deny their culpability,
which has led to a vast blame game
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that’s routine in our republic of finger pointing.

When a surge of opioid addiction transformed my small New England
hometown, I began to write about what was happening and follow local
efforts to combat the scourge. This, in turn, led me to that jail,
first as a writer on assignment and eventually to the front of that
ad-hoc classroom. At the same time, over the course of two years, I
interviewed dozens of people in recovery. What I learned was that,
nestled within this crisis (if you knew where to look), people were
taking responsibility for what had happened to them and doing so in a
transformative way. They had discovered that blaming others -- even
the worst of those drug companies -- was a quick path to the bottom,
while taking responsibility turns out to be a race to the top.

THE “SCUM OF THE EARTH”

On a sunny fall morning, I pulled off Route 2 in central Massachusetts
and into the parking lot of what used to be the Wachusett Village Inn.
It still looks like a picturesque country hotel, but today it’s a
detox facility and recovery center. I’m here to meet the friend of a
friend. When she greets me at the front atrium, I notice that she has
a lanyard around her neck with an ID indicating that she’s on staff.
Years ago, though, Anna Du Puis could have been a patient here. Before
she got sober, she went through detox for opioid addiction so many
times she lost count.

“I’m a story of perseverance,” she assures me -- and, when she
says it, she seems to glow with energy.

It’s only recently that Anna has had this full-time job helping
others who are, as she once was, in early recovery. Before that she
sold insurance, telling no one she had been an addict and regularly
hearing coworkers and others dismiss addiction as a choice and
treatment as a waste of taxpayer dollars.

Thought about a certain way, the pharmaceutical companies that
produced those opioids pulled off the perfect crime. They peddled
addictive products that were prescribed by trusted physicians, while
those who became addicted gained scant sympathy. After all, once they
were hooked, they were, by definition, _drug addicts_. Richard
Sackler, former president of Purdue Pharma and mastermind
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behind the marketing campaign that launched OxyContin and remade
opioid prescribing practices in this country, is now infamous
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for referring to those who became addicted to his blockbuster drug as
the “scum of the earth
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For this we vilify Sackler -- what he did was deplorable -- but it’s
also true that every time any of us has accepted _drug addict_ as an
unsavory epithet, we’ve given an assist to him, to Purdue, and to
the rest of the pharmaceutical industry that profited not only from
addiction but from our prejudice toward it. By looking down on those
afflicted with this disease, we, the public, helped insulate corporate
perpetrators from responsibility.

In the process, we have also missed the chance to witness something
incredible.

“A SEARCHING AND FEARLESS MORAL INVENTORY”

On another night in the county jail, our little group strategized
together. These women would soon have to explain their criminal
records to prospective employers who increasingly run background
checks on applicants. So, quietly at first and then with more
confidence, they practiced reflecting on their pockmarked pasts,
affirming how much they had learned (a lot) and their efforts
(herculean) to regain control of their lives. All of them referenced
the importance of embarking on a 12-step program to recovery.

This is something I heard again and again from people in long-term
recovery. Beginning with an admission of powerlessness over addiction,
12-step programs are so often transformational in part because they
involve radical responsibility-taking. Even when something is someone
else’s fault, the steps encourage you to look inward and ask: What
was my own role? What responsibility do I have in all this? A pivotal
moment comes in step four, which calls for “a searching and fearless
moral inventory” of oneself. This is a breathtakingly tall order --
and one that pays commensurately large dividends for those with the
courage to undertake it.

“I accept myself wholly for who I am and every single thing that
I’ve done in my life,” says Raj Aggarwal, who became addicted to
OxyContin in the 1990s and subsequently switched to heroin. When he
made that switch, he told almost no one. Whereas Oxy, which was widely
prescribed by doctors, was socially acceptable, heroin was not. Like
so many others, the deeper Raj waded into addiction, the more isolated
he became.

Today, he has been sober for more than 15 years, and his enviable
self-acceptance has liberated him to be a force for good in the world.
Raj is the founder [[link removed]] and
president of Provoc, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that helps
businesses create positive social change. Provoc has designed
successful campaigns in areas ranging from expanding clean energy and
combatting racism to boosting voter participation
[[link removed]]. Over video chat he
told me that he used to think addiction was the worst thing ever to
happen to him. Now, he says, “My greatest challenge has turned into
a tremendous source of strength.”

The soul-searching that Raj and others engage in as part of their
recovery process is not only applicable to addiction. Let’s say
you’re angry about something devastating a family member said, or a
colleague’s poor behavior, or maybe you’re despondent -- who
isn’t? -- over our broken democracy. Consider the 12-step approach
to investigating your own role in the situation. This doesn’t mean
other people aren’t responsible, too. It just gives you a shot at
seeing your actions (or your lack of them) with greater clarity. In
other words, it allows us to own our shit -- and then, perhaps, to
take the next right step forward.

This is largely a foreign concept in our culture, at least to people
who aren’t in recovery, but its promise is bottomless. As one
example, it’s relevant to the problematic way
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the media have covered the current opioid crisis. When addiction is
rampant in communities of color, the subject tends to draw minimal
attention. But in recent years, as great numbers of white people have
been afflicted, the media have zoomed in with stories of blue-eyed
kids dying untimely deaths. And this is a place where I bear
responsibility. I took up the subject of addiction only after it
enveloped my overwhelmingly white hometown. In other words, I
initially focused on (and so privileged) the concerns of people white
like me. In retrospect, 12-step-style, I see what I did and that it
reinforced the white supremacy
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that drenches
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our American world.

Maybe you’ve heard this one from the visionary novelist James
Baldwin
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“Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be
changed until it is faced.” Here lies the key to overcoming the
opioid crisis: that people in recovery are teachers for how to face
the hardest things of all.

“AS LONG AS YOU’RE BREATHING, THERE’S HOPE”

When he filed his complaint against Purdue Pharma, Minnesota Attorney
General Keith Ellison said
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“The Sackler defendants were motivated not by human dignity or the
value of human life, but by unlimited greed above all else.”
Billionaire Richard Sackler unrelentingly pushed
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addictive drugs that destroyed lives and pulled at the threads of
unraveling communities. Why? To make yet more
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money, of course. It turns out that, in this story, there are many
kinds of addiction, and if money is your drug of choice, then (as the
recent responses [[link removed]]
of multi-billionaires to the possibility of a wealth tax suggest)
you’ll never have enough, no matter how much you’ve amassed.

And so, while we malign the Sackler family and other corporate
executives for what really does appear to be jaw-dropping greed, their
condition is instructive. At a more modest level, many of us are
skating along, feeding ongoing cravings for electronic devices or wine
or work or money or just fill in the blank yourself. Like minor
versions of those billionaires, we, too, are often chasing a high -- a
brief sense of euphoria to distract us from something underneath.

Anna Du Puis told me that her drug use was a search to fill an
“internal barren place of desolation.” Raj said OxyContin offered
him blissful relief from his difficult childhood as an immigrant in a
white neighborhood. In many thousands of cases, opioid addiction
resulted from people in chronic pain searching for an answer. Yet
there are many kinds of chronic pain, including despair, or a crushing
sense of emptiness. Maybe the Sacklers, nightmares of greed as they
have been, are in some deeper sense more like us than we’d care to
think.

There is now a growing call
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to put them and other pharmaceutical executives in jail. After all,
why should people who committed low-level crimes thanks to their
addiction to the very drugs the Sacklers peddled, like the women in my
class, get locked up, while they walk away with blood on their hands
and billions stuffed away in bank accounts? The answer
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mostly has to do with who has good lawyers. Just as in the financial
and foreclosure crises of 2007-2008, when corporations inflicted
widespread devastation, we are unlikely to see executives behind bars
for what their companies did.

And yet, as Sam Quinones, author of the remarkable book _Dreamland_
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about the roots of the opioid crisis, points out, the public has
already won important victories. Back in 2014 when he was finishing
his book, he says, Purdue was “untouchable.”

In the years since then, individuals and families have rejected
isolation and spoken out about drug addiction. Their outcry, in turn,
has transformed the problem from something taboo into a priority for
local governments -- and thousands of lawsuits have been the result.
Quinones acknowledged that pharmaceutical companies will likely never
pay anything close to the full cost of what they’ve done. And yet,
as he told me by phone, “We have probably seen the last of Purdue
Pharma the way it once looked, and that right there is stunning.”
He’s right: that is no small feat.

Still, there’s something else that future settlements could require,
something that Raj Aggarwal sees as a potentially just approach. What
if a team of people in recovery from drug addiction were enlisted to
teach the pharmaceutical executives what it really means to take
responsibility? It’s an idea that honors those whom they most
victimized, while giving the perpetrators a framework for grappling
with what they’ve done and beginning to make amends.

Imagine the Sacklers embarking on a searching 12-step moral inventory
of themselves. (I, at least, fantasize about this.) Cynicism tells us
that, even if this were to come to pass, a group of white-collar
criminals would never listen, but Anna Du Puis takes a more charitable
view. “As long as you’re breathing, there’s hope,” she told
me.

I learn so much from people in recovery that sometimes I think my head
will explode. Instead what happens is that my heart grows.

At the county jail, we finish our final class in that windowless room
and the women file back to their cells. They will soon be released.
Even though I know the odds are against them, I allow myself a tiny
serving of optimism. Maybe, eventually, they will be viewed as true
teachers among us.

_Mattea Kramer [[link removed]], a TomDispatch regular
[[link removed]],
is at work on a novel about a waitress’s love affair with a
prescription pill._

_Follow TomDispatch on Twitter [[link removed]] and
join us on Facebook [[link removed]]. Check out
the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the
second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands
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Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story
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and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War
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as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The
Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power
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and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since
World War II
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Copyright 2019 Mattea Kramer  Reprinted with permission.

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