Given that we here in Thompson spend almost every week, if not every day, of the year talking about the social issues resulting as a fallout of addiction, mainly to alcohol, but also to other drugs, it behooves us as much as any community in Canada to pay attention the third week of November every year when Manitoba Addictions Awareness (MAAW) Week rolls around, which this year is Nov. 18-22.
It has been customary across Canada during the third week in November since 1981 to mark 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.
Marilyn Linklater, a community addictions worker at the Eaglewood Addictions Centre, operated by the Addictions Foundation of Manitoba (AFM) at 90 Princeton Dr., is co-ordinating activities for this year's local Manitoba Addictions Awareness (MAAW) Week. Among the events on the itinerary are a "relationship circle" at Eaglewood Addictions Centre from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. next Monday (Nov. 18), a "youth pipe ceremony and feast" at the same location the following evening (Nov. 19), also from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m., and an R.D. Parker Collegiate Youth Aboriginal Council (YAC) Volleyball tournament in the RDPC gym from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Nov. 19.
Manitoba Addictions Awareness Week, like other such weeks across the country, 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. How that's done in Thompson varies from year to year. Last year, youth motivational speaker Matt Bellace, from Princeton Junction, New Jersey, who has a Ph.D. in clinical neuropsychology from Drexel University in Philadelphia, and has been a youth motivational speaker and stand-up comedian since 1995, and is the author of the book, A Better High, visited the Hub of the North.
In 2010, Nuwan Foneska, from the Northern Family Program at AFM, who is originally from Sri Lanka and did his PhD at the University of Toronto, specializing in therapeutic methods, and a post-doctoral residency in family mental health, specializing in family therapy, offered a session in the centre's meditation room. In 2008, there was "The Best of Me Community Feast" at Wapanohk Community School, hosted by the Lighthouse Program and featuring Ft. Nikki Dumas Girls Drum Group. In 2007, it was "the Family Fear Factor Feast" and a number of 12-step programs - Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), Narcotics Anonymous (NA) and Gamblers Anonymous (GA) and Al-Anon - all having speakers at the University College of the North.
Whether addiction is a disease, in the true medical sense of the word, 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. You can hear a rare, albeit scratchy, audio clip of Ebby T. speaking at an AA meeting in Memphis on Sept. 14, 1958 here: http://www.xa-speakers.org/speakers/aa/single-speakers/ebby-t/ebby-t-memphis1958.mp3
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.
