Topic: abstinence

My longstanding rule is to design your program to treat your population, not some idealized group of subjects who did well in a research setting with a significantly different structure.

Experience tells us that almost all of the wide variety of treatment strategies and models are around because they work well for someone.

He can recite the Steps and thump the Big Book with the best of them, but somehow missed out on one of the truly important lessons of most people’s recovery — the need for a degree of personal serenity.

Please get back to us as soon as you’ve perfected this cure. We can promise you massive profits, guaranteed.

For many, because of compulsion, abstinence may turn out to be easier than re-establishing control.

Few of us are ever as dedicated to a goal as the addict is to seeking an alternative to abstinence.

Addiction has been described as a chronic problem that we’ve attempted to treat as an acute illness –a big reason for the revolving door of relapse.

Changing how we live isn’t easy to accomplish, even with step-by-step instructions.

Most communities provide both options for opioid patients, and lacking a methadone for alcohol or cocaine, use a more traditional abstinence-based approach for those addictions.

Our longstanding practice of branding anyone who drank again a ‘failure’ kept us from recognizing very real success right under our noses.