Jabberwocky
Frumious Bandersnatch
- Joined
- Nov 3, 1999
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For the Last Time: “Sobriety” Does Not Mean “Abstinence”
Words matter. We'd be a lot better off if we stuck with the older definitions of this one.
I've been in recovery for the last five years. Does that mean I haven't touched a drug during that time? Hell no. Do it mean I've been committed to becoming a better person, improving the quality of my life and the quality of those around me? Hell yes. For instance, this morning I took 60mg of methadone along with 30mg of diazepam, shortly there after another 10mg. Just fifteen or thirty minutes ago I took another 65mg of diazepam. Tonight I will smoke a bowl or two of cannabis. I take methadone regularly, diazepam/temazepam/alprazolam much less frequently and cannabis whenever I come across a good deal on extremely high quality stuff. Does that mean I'm not sober or that I'm not clean - that abstinence is a prerequisite for being clean or sobriety is nothing more than dogma preached by AA, NA and their related fellowship. Bullshit.
In reality, to be "clean" or "sober", useless descriptions in the first place because they don't even being to deal with the reasons people use drugs, is almost always rational, calculated ways, is next to meaningless. It's a label, nothing more. For me, my behavior towards myself - self harm, unhealthy behaviors - and towards others - does what I do for myself or in the name of another help or hinder them, nurture or stunt their own personal growth, is the essence of what it means to be so called "clean and sober." The expression has nothing to do with anything but whether or not someone's using. And someone using has nothing, in and of itself, to do with hurting either one's self or another - except to the degree we organize our society to make using have such consequences.
To be in recovery required a desire to improve one's lot, to leave the world a better place than one found it. Nothing more, nothing less. Sure, some, if very few, people need to stop using all significantly mind and mood altering drugs to achieve such. But these are a rarity. What's so much more important than whether or not someone uses a drug is whether or not their drug use, no, the sum of their actions - those related to their drug use and those undertaken simply in the course of their day to day lives - as well as the context in which they choose to use drugs (or is chosen for them e.g. Prohibitionist United States), that's what's important. Relapse isn't so much about using. It's about the consequences, and I'm not talking about the consequences pharmacological, culturally or physiologicalluy and biologically as imposed on some foreign paternalistic or totalitarian outside force (Drug Law Enforcement, the criminal justice system, the AA complex, the Recovery Industrial Complex, etc. etc. even the vast majority of lay person and the US's very much still Puritanical and overly religious population culture).
Anywho, enjoi
EDIT:
Reminds me how the words and concept of "addiction" was once coopted by modern medicine, politicians, modern [pseudo]science and the progressive movement, not to mention AA, circa alcohol prohibition and even prior to that, beginning about 120 years ago.
LINGUISTICS and syntax sure are fun :D A great way to understand our history is to understand how words have been lost, been created and have had their common meanings changed - just like the words "sober" and "addict."
Words matter. We'd be a lot better off if we stuck with the older definitions of this one.
http://www.substance.com/for-the-last-time-sobriety-does-not-mean-abstinence/17717/S. Peele | 12/17/14 said:“He who commands vocabulary commands the battlefield.”—Napoleon
I confess: I made that quote up. But the sentiment is an indubitable truth.
“My boyfriend of five years has been sober since before we met. He abused alcohol and was a heroin addict. Two nights ago he told me he wanted to stop being sober.”
That one’s a real quote (with my emphasis), as relayed by Substance.com‘s Samantha Felix in her insightful response to an advice column this week: “Slate’s ‘Dear Prudence’ Column Gives Bad Advice About Addiction.”
Did the boyfriend really say he wanted to “stop being sober”? It’s entirely likely, because of what I have termed elsewhere: “The Hijacking of Sobriety by the Recovery Movement.”
I was moved to write that piece for Reason after The New York Times declared that octogenarian Elaine Stritch was no longer sober. As a “recovering alcoholic,” Stritch had decided to have a single cocktail a day while she was being filmed for a movie about her last nightclub act, Shoot Me. (The film was released in 2014, shortly before she died.)
The subtitle of my Reason piece was: “Sobriety isn’t an abstinence fixation; it’s about having purpose.” Let’s consider that “sober” has meant two things for centuries, before Recovery captured the term.
First, sobriety meant not being intoxicated. So you could drink and be sober—you know, like when you pass a field sobriety test because you had just a couple of drinks over an evening while eating.
A second, more subtle meaning for sobriety is that a person has a serious approach to life. Being “sober as a judge” doesn’t mean just not being intoxicated—it means going about your business in a steady, mindful manner.
And these definitions of sobriety carry great value when we speak about addiction.
The boyfriend in the advice column presumably has developed reasons, purposes for not being addicted to drugs in the intervening years, including finding his girlfriend. Does Prudence really think this man incapable of developing such meaning in his life?
I very much appreciated Felix’s analysis:
“There are some important things to find out here, such as, when he says he doesn’t want to be sober anymore, does he mean he wants to start doing heroin again, or that he just wants to have a beer at the holiday party?”
Exactly. And why isn’t the vast gulf between “I want to seek out my old heroin dealer” and “I’d like to have a beer while I watch the Super Bowl” open for discussion? Because of that word, that concept, “sobriety.”
Sobriety as Americans commonly use it imbeds the entire Temperance elimination of moderation as a possibility. “Temperance” itself means moderation, and yet it came to stand for prohibition. And the elimination of the possibility of moderation eliminates policy discussions not only about legalizing drugs, but about how we can encourage sensible drug use now that marijuana is being legalized.
This Hobbesian choice, cutting out middle positions, eliminates treatment alternatives like moderating drinking for problem drinkers or substituting marijuana for alcohol or heroin as a superior alternative for some people addicted to those substances.
But, most important of all, the idea that moderation is impossible prevents people facing addictions from considering their possibilities in optimal ways.
Instead, it sentences them to think of themselves as addicts, people who can never be allowed—never allow themselves—to have any psychoactive substance again.
Here’s one last real quote, from a woman on Facebook responding from the UK to the Dear Prudence article:
Anna Millington: It’s the reason Britain can’t ever have an evidence based insightful conversation about addiction. The ideology is so ingrained it is nigh on impossible to move beyond NA/AA thinking that we are forever trapped, forever one step away from jails, institutions or death.
We must defeat this black-and-white, all-or-nothing disease addiction thinking in order to move forward on drug use, drug treatment and drug policy.
I've been in recovery for the last five years. Does that mean I haven't touched a drug during that time? Hell no. Do it mean I've been committed to becoming a better person, improving the quality of my life and the quality of those around me? Hell yes. For instance, this morning I took 60mg of methadone along with 30mg of diazepam, shortly there after another 10mg. Just fifteen or thirty minutes ago I took another 65mg of diazepam. Tonight I will smoke a bowl or two of cannabis. I take methadone regularly, diazepam/temazepam/alprazolam much less frequently and cannabis whenever I come across a good deal on extremely high quality stuff. Does that mean I'm not sober or that I'm not clean - that abstinence is a prerequisite for being clean or sobriety is nothing more than dogma preached by AA, NA and their related fellowship. Bullshit.
In reality, to be "clean" or "sober", useless descriptions in the first place because they don't even being to deal with the reasons people use drugs, is almost always rational, calculated ways, is next to meaningless. It's a label, nothing more. For me, my behavior towards myself - self harm, unhealthy behaviors - and towards others - does what I do for myself or in the name of another help or hinder them, nurture or stunt their own personal growth, is the essence of what it means to be so called "clean and sober." The expression has nothing to do with anything but whether or not someone's using. And someone using has nothing, in and of itself, to do with hurting either one's self or another - except to the degree we organize our society to make using have such consequences.
To be in recovery required a desire to improve one's lot, to leave the world a better place than one found it. Nothing more, nothing less. Sure, some, if very few, people need to stop using all significantly mind and mood altering drugs to achieve such. But these are a rarity. What's so much more important than whether or not someone uses a drug is whether or not their drug use, no, the sum of their actions - those related to their drug use and those undertaken simply in the course of their day to day lives - as well as the context in which they choose to use drugs (or is chosen for them e.g. Prohibitionist United States), that's what's important. Relapse isn't so much about using. It's about the consequences, and I'm not talking about the consequences pharmacological, culturally or physiologicalluy and biologically as imposed on some foreign paternalistic or totalitarian outside force (Drug Law Enforcement, the criminal justice system, the AA complex, the Recovery Industrial Complex, etc. etc. even the vast majority of lay person and the US's very much still Puritanical and overly religious population culture).
Anywho, enjoi
EDIT:
http://reason.com/archives/2014/03/22/alcoholics-recovery-and-sobriety-meaningS. Peele | 4/22/14 said:This degrading babble traces back to the appropriation of the term sobriety by Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), which has grown into a large and powerful recovery movement that dominates American thinking about addiction. Before AA hijacked the term, "sober" simply meant not being currently intoxicated. Now, sober is a state of being—one you can only achieve through total, lifelong abstinence if you ever drank alcoholically.
Reminds me how the words and concept of "addiction" was once coopted by modern medicine, politicians, modern [pseudo]science and the progressive movement, not to mention AA, circa alcohol prohibition and even prior to that, beginning about 120 years ago.
LINGUISTICS and syntax sure are fun :D A great way to understand our history is to understand how words have been lost, been created and have had their common meanings changed - just like the words "sober" and "addict."
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