Questions of family often appear in relation to addiction and drug issues.

As with all questions in these areas, discussion is misled by disease beliefs, which leave people muddled and mystified about how to proceed constructively.  Nonetheless, basic human values often assert themselves, allowing people— especially young people— to free themselves and to display bravery.

Examples in the news are the women in Russian protest group Pussy Riot, Masha Gessen (Russian-American radical journalist) whose son is lost in vicodin, the four granddaughters of Joe Biden, who allowed the president to free america from Trump, and the often absent addicted father Hunter, who almost cost his father the presidency.

Today I speak with the creator of the Life Process Program, Dr. Stanton Peele about these current events and how they tie into our work in the Life Process Program.

I hope you enjoy!

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On today's episode, Dr. Stanton Peele and Zach Rhoads (of the Life Process Program) discuss current events in addiction and harm reduction. The key note: Shia Labeouf's Love Addiction!

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Shia Labeouf has made the news for his movies and even for his recovery from alcohol and drugs. Unfortunately, despite years of "programming" for his addiction issues, Labeouf's behavior is still relatively unstable. 

Zach and Stanton, however, believe that drugs and alcohol are NOT the influence behind the celebrity's recent behavior (driving cars at hundreds of miles per hour with his partner in the from seat and threatening to crash). They believe that this is a result (at least in part) of Labeouf's over-reliance on the women in his life to satisfy his every need (I.e. LOVE ADDICTION)

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Stanton Peele answers questions from social media followers, listeners, and YouTube viewers. 

Today, Zach Rhoads reads Stanton a question from a Facebook follower: "Why do people call addiction a disease, and what is addiction REALLY?" 

Want to ask Stanton a question?? He will answer on video or on the podcast. You can reach us using any of the links below. 

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Today Zach Rhoads speaks with Michael Galipeau (AKA Mikey G) about his upbringing in a state-run institution, his years of homelessness, and his relationship (positive and negative) with illicit drug use. 

As is par for the course here at "Sundays With Stories", Mikey G's "recovery story is NOT your standard Hollywood-infused story. He describes a traumatic past (which he's not bogged down by), and he describes a relationship with drugs for which he is very thankful.

Once homeless and down on his luck, Mikey is now:

- Co-Producer New York Harvest Festival and Cannabis Freedom Rally Recovery Advocate Dutchess County Behavioral and Community Health Department

- CEO, MG Consulting

- MSW Intern, Urban Survivors Union

- Executive Consultant, Tennessee Recovery Alliance 

- New York State Lead, Recovery Advocacy Project

- Trainer and Co-author, Recovery Coaching A Harm Reduction Pathway

- Co-Founder and CEO, Heady Krew Productions.

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And check out Mikey's "Cannabis Recovery House Garden" Instagram profile: 

https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%...

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The actor, podcaster, and AA advocate Dax Shepard has decided to turn his sobriety count from 16 years all the way back to one day. This is the result of a recent decision to take narcotic pain killers off-script. 

Dr. Stanton Peele and Zach Rhoads discuss why Dax's own personal development is being stymied by 12-step ideology, and why he either cannot OR refuses to acknowledge that fact. 

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(Part I -- Current Events)

Dr. Peele and Zach Rhoads begin the show by reviewing some recent current events in addiction, harm reduction and psychology.

0:00 - 6:20

Zach discussed an article from Filter Magazine (written by Sessi Kuwabara Blanchard) regarding a new plan by the DEA to expand patient surveillance for drug takers. https://filtermag.org/dea-expand-patient-surveillance/

6:20 - 12:50

Stanton talks about a recent New York Times article about happiness, depression and suicide. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/opinion/happiness-depression-suicide-psychology.html

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(Part II -- The Dax Shepard Story) 

12:50 - End

Today's main story centers around the recent relapse admission of actor, podcaster, and 12-step advocate, Dax Shepard. 

After 16 years of total abstinence from alcohol and illicit substances, Dax decided to take prescription pain-killers, first as prescribed at first, but then off-script. 

Stanton and Zach believe that Dax's reasons for initially using prescription narcotics were perfectly logical-- he used them for pain and he used them to feel well!  The hosts also believe that Dax -- even though he eventually used the drugs in a less-than-healthful way--  could have prevented the downsides of his drug use if only he were able to be honest about it (i.e. not felt shame over having used them in the first place).

Unfortunately, due to the AA-inspired restrictions that Dax imposed on himself, and the promises that Dax had made to the world (to his fans, to his AA buddies, and to the people in his life), Dax was left needing to hide his drug-taking experience. 

He was afraid that telling anybody his thought process around taking drugs (to prevent pain and to feel well-- sheesh!) that he would be swiftly rejected an addict who had no control over himself.

In reality, Dax probably would have taken the drugs responsibly, and without fearing addiction, if only he had felt comfortable sharing his true thoughts and feelings about the drugs in the first place.  But because he's prioritized his allegiance to AA dogma (rather than common sense), Dax isolated himself and played into his assigned identity as a life-long addict.

Zach recounts the celebrity's relapse story, as told by Dax Shepard himself on his "Armchair Expert" podcast. 

Then Stanton and Zach tell a counter-factual version of the story-- a version in which Dax Shepard took an LPP-mindset of life-engagement,, connection, and personal responsibility,  instead of an AA-mindset of powerlessness, and victimhood. 

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Today's episode is a "Sundays With Stories" edition and our guest today is a man named Jason Terrell. 

Jason was kind (and brave) enough to spend time talking about his upbringing, his addiction history, his time in treatment (which actually bogged him down more than it helped), and how he ultimately overcame addiction by using his own best thinking! 

All of this and more on episode 43! 

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Follow Jason's Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/826135524802818

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On episode 9, Stanton and Zach talk about film director Peter Bogdanovich and his history of love addiction. In fact, the two argue that love is the worst addiction of all! 

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Zach and Stanton begin by discussing current events, including Oregon's recent push to decriminalize all drugs. The new policy is a welcome movement away from incarceration for drug possession. But the devil (as is always the case) is in the details. . . . . Will the drug reform bill end discrimination against drug users, or will it lead to a new flavor of stigma and drug exceptionalism?

Next, Stanton reflects on the new podcast series, "The Plot Thickens: I'm Still Peter Bogdanovich", hosted by interviewer Ben Mankiewicz, which  illuminates the rise and fall of Bogdanovich's personal relationships. 

Both Stanton and Zach argue that love is an addiction just like any other addiction (like addictions to drugs, drinking, gambling, sex, food), and Stanton takes that a step further; he claims that love is the WORST and most deadly addiction in history. 

(By the way, we never thought we'd see the day, but it finally happens in this episode. . . . . . . . STANTON SINGS!)

All of that and more on today's "Sundays With Stories" 

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We have a truly remarkable LPP “Sundays With Stories” — Aaron’s story. Put simply, Aaron’s life has been . . . well, it might be rejected by Netflix as unbelievable. And it has left him firmly in the LPP camp. Just up front, Aaron is an outreach manager for a national opioid treatment provider. He combines his position on MAT with his non-disease, non-trauma-fixated LPP coaching. (More about this later.)

The podcast covers Aaron and his 11 siblings singing in churches, restaurants and streets around the world with his cult-member parents, escaping from the cult in California and being homeless for years in his teens as a member of a San Francisco drug-using street family, narrowly missing being an accessory to a murder for which his would-be partners will never be released from prison, joining the military and training to become a Navy Seal but ultimately failing his medical clearance due to Hepatitis C infection. Returning to homelessness, despair and addiction in SF in his twenties, Aaron had to find a better way. . . Jumping forward. He’s okay! A valuable worker and family person (father of two children). 

Aaron was in 12-step groups and a TC — but those only made matters worse (he says 1% of his fellow TCers cleaned up). Aaron kindly attributes his life progress to thinking and living and reading Stanton’s antidisease work.

Aaron approaches bupe and methadone as tools that allow people to organize and to stabilize their lives, not as “proof” that they have a brain disease or inescapable lifetime trauma. Note his answer when Stanton asks him if he considers himself traumatized. But he is currently being “traumatized” by his participation in brain-disease trainings and trauma groups (as I say, if he lifted the cover off one corner of his life at one of these, other group members would run crying to the bathroom).

He is now a serious, helpful, “normal” human being. (A bit of an intellectual, for which I hope none of you will stigmatize him. When Stanton says that he, Zach and Stanton believe the same things despite coming from widely divergent backgrounds, so maybe there’s something there, Aaron identifies this as “independent corroboration.”)

The question may be whether Aaron, after leaving behind a street junkie identity, can escape the trauma of becoming an “influencer.”

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Not so long ago, I published a blog comparing and contrasting SMART Recovery with the Life Process Program. 

Shortly after doing so, The president of SMART Recovery wrote to me and offered reflections on the piece. That made me a little nervous.... but he liked the blog. (WHEW!)

But he did have a bone to pick with me.... I wrote that SMART Recovery is an abstinence-based program and, evidently, they are no longer focused on abstinence from drugs, alcohol or any other involvement.

I invited him on the LPP Podcast to explain. 

Enjoy this episode with Dr. Tom Horvath! 

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In today’s episode of Sundays With Stories, Stanton and Zach discuss current events.

This week a New York Times article bemoaned the failure of addiction specialists to adopt a proven tool for treating drug addiction, “contingency management.” That is, paying meth, cocaine et al. users for abstinence.

That’s right: experienced, one might say addicted, “speed” (“crank”) users will desist drug use if you give them money — and not colossal sums at that.  This has been Carl Hart’s research with meth, and the University of Vermont group’s under Warren Bickle with cocaine. The same benefits of providing alternative rewards have been shown in Bruce Alexander’s Rat Park and the Baltimore City Hospital group’s research with street drinkers.

What does this tell us? That drug and alcohol addiction is not a runaway train resistant to environmental factors and rewards. Which is useful to know.

However, Zach and Stanton question who is creating these rewards. There is a bit of science-gone-amok to the image of men in white coats divvying out money for drug and alcohol users, even those with the worst usage patterns, to be “good.” And what happens when the rewards, the gravy train, stops?

You tell us. But Harvard’s Global Anti-Tobacco Program offered a hint. While investigating the effectiveness of nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) for those who quit smoking, the program’s chief investigators found that, in the long run, those who quit on their own did as well as, or better than, those who rely on NRT. In fact, the most addicted smokers were the worst at keeping off the drug using NRT. This finding held true even though NRT was “proven effective in the laboratory.”

Zach and Stanton then speak of people managing their own contingencies. That is, their finding real-world reasons to quit or cut back their addictions. Most important of all (with a nod to Steve Slate et al.’s Freedom Model”) is people’s belief that they can control their own drug use and lives. This thinking belies NIDA Director Nora Volkow’s 2007 unwise piece “Addiction Is a Disease of Free Will” — which, per Stanton’s urging, Volkow seems to be abandoning.

What is she replacing this ill-conceived notion with? What Stanton and Zach practice in their Life Process Program: creating lives worth living and worlds people want to occupy.  This is a tough task. But, once again, including a review of America’s ill-fated (drug deaths are ramping out of control) enthusiasm for medicine-assisted treatment for opioid addiction, there is no long-term alternative.

Finally, Zach reviews SMART Recovery’s belated shift to “abstinence from addiction” in place of its former “desist all use” basis — as the user chooses. They agree in their admiration for Tom Horvath/SMART Recovery’s remarkable success at creating an alternative to AA. At the same time, they embrace SMART’s long-awaited and necessary shift to Harm Reduction.

Stanton and Zach end their podcast by wondering how decades of addiction research and both positive and negative experiences with drugs have left even our “advanced guard” (i.e., policy reformists like the Ethan Nadelmann-founded DPA) so shorn of an appreciation for the interchange between people’s lived experience (their actual lives) and addiction.

Come join Stanton and Zach as they reveal a little secret. That is, the best science, policy, and treatment involve common sense.

At the same time, they say, free yourself from decades-old failed thinking.

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