This week, as we have noted this time of year and in this space before, and has been customary across Canada during the third week in November since 1981, is National Addictions Awareness Week and all its variants such as National Aboriginal Addictions Awareness Week and Manitoba Addictions Awareness (MAAW) Week. The federal government in 1987 first proclaimed the week. Approximately 600,000 people take part in NAAW activities throughout the country.
Much of the early work was conceptualized and developed in St. Albert, Alberta at the Nechi Training, Research & Health Promotions Institute, which is housed with Poundmaker's Lodge, known as Canada's first addictions treatment centre specifically for aboriginal clients.
The theme here in Thompson this week, say the folks at the Eaglewood Addictions Centre, operated by the Addictions Foundation of Manitoba (AFM) on Princeton Drive, is "living the good life." Last year it was "balancing your life." Both are sensible and laudable aims that might well be applied to the population in general, not just AFM clientele, whose insight into their problems suggest they have been blessed with a self-awareness more of us would do well to emulate in our daily lives - "one day at a time," as the famous Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step programs slogan goes.
Damian Thompson, editor of Telegraph Blogs and a columnist for the Daily Telegraph in London, England, published an interesting book last May called, The Fix: How Addiction Is Invading our Lives and Taking Over Your World, in which he argues addictions to iPhones, painkillers, cupcakes, alcohol and Internet pornography - to name just a few - are taking over our lives. Our most casual daily habits can quickly become obsessions that move beyond our control, Thompson argues, suggesting that human desire is in the process of being reshaped.
"Already, the distinction between 'addicts' and ordinary people is far less clear than it was even 20 years ago, Thompson wrote in a May 28 piece for the paper headlined, "Addiction: the coming epidemic," with the "line between consumption, habit and addiction is becoming dangerously blurred The difference between old-fashioned porn and Internet porn is a bit like the difference between wine and spirits. After hundreds of years as a mild intoxicant, erotica has undergone a sudden distillation. Digital porn is the equivalent of cheap gin in Georgian England: a reliable if unhygienic hit that relieves misery and boredom. And, unlike the old 'dirty mags,' it is available in limitless quantities."
This week's Manitoba Addictions Awareness Week activities here include the fourth annual youth pipe ceremony and feast at 6 p.m. tonight at the Eaglewood Addictions Centre at AFM and youth motivational speaker Matt Bellace, from Princeton Junction, New Jersey, who will be at R.D. Parker Collegiate's Letkemann Theatre Nov. 16 from 9 a.m. to noon for Grades 8 to 12 and then at the Ma-Mow-We-Tak Friendship Centre on Nelson Road for community members to hear from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. Friday.
Bellace, who has a Ph.D. in clinical neuropsychology from Drexel University in Philadelphia, has been a youth motivational speaker and stand-up comedian since 1995, and is the author of the book, A Better High. His "How to Get High Naturally" program encourages over a 100,000 students a year to pursue natural highs and make healthy choices. He was a recurring comedian on truTV's The World's Dumbest. His stand up can be heard - and requested - on Sirius XM's comedy channels.
Addictions Awareness Week attempts every year to raise awareness about the use and misuse of various substances, including alcohol and other drugs, gambling behaviour, healthy choices, and community resources.
Whether addiction is a disease, in the true medical sense of the word (Thompson argues it is not), cognitive behavioural problem, or self-destructive habits borne out of poor choices, but choices nonetheless, is an ongoing debate, and while interesting, is of secondary importance. Whatever addiction is or isn't, few would argue that it doesn't affect entire families - and even communities - across all generational, ethnic, racial and class distinctions.
Addiction, be it to alcohol or other drugs, gambling, Internet pornography, etc., is an equal opportunity destroyer of lives. While the addict or the alcoholic may be the most obvious casualty, the collateral damage is all around them.
The entire 12-step movement, which now totals somewhere over 100 organizations, can be traced back to two men originally from Vermont, Bill Wilson, a failed New York City stockbroker, and Dr. Bob Smith, an Akron, Ohio physician.
The birth of Alcoholics Anonymous is dated from their meeting and Smith's last bottle of beer on June 10, 1935. They would be affectionately known ever after as Bill W. and Dr. Bob, the co-founders of AA.
Wilson had been influenced by Ebby Thacher - or Ebby T. in the anonymous parlance of 12-step programs - a friend from boarding school, who paid Wilson a visit in November 1934, while Thacher was a member of the Oxford Group, popular on college campuses in the 1920s, and founded by Frank Buchman, a Lutheran minister.
While it's impossible to overstate the influence of Alcoholics Anonymous and related 12-step programs on addictions treatment and recovery, it's not the only model in a reality where relapse is the norm.
Two steps forward, one step backwards and perhaps a step sideways is the reality of addiction.
Bill Wilson himself, as we've noted before, was a surprisingly freethinker on a lot of this, refusing often to get bogged down in the semantics. AA worked for him, so he worked his program with a live-and-let live attitude.
