Dope Fiend Politics continued
Less predictable, are the arguments with other abstinent addicts in recovery. No longer held hostage to brutalizing drug laws, many ex-users insist that a less punitive regulatory scheme would only undermine their recovery.
Myself, I didn't need the police to hit bottom in my ultimately suicidal pursuit of an opiated paradise. Nor do I need the cops to stay abstinent today, any more than do the legions of recovering drunks whose drug is legal. Sadly, this urge to shelter beneath the strong right arm of the law silences too many of those with the freedom and the experience to speak out most powerfully for drug policy reform.
Equally divisive is the bickering between 12-step recovering addicts and those on methadone maintenance. Hardly a “step Nazi,” I’ve no doubt that methadone is the best alternative to the streets for many sick and tired dopers. But I also understand why an abstinence-based fellowship simply cannot credit "clean time" to addicts taking a daily dose of an opiate agonist. Less understandable is the smug contempt with which too many 12-steppers regard former comrades now on methadone. The well of empathy is further poisoned by the bitterness methadoners so often feel for 12-steppers.
Recently, I wrote about this troubling quandary for Methadone Awareness newsletter. "Methadone, as an opioid agonist, is simply too similar to the drug of choice that brought so many of us into the rooms in the first place," I concluded. "At the same time, I bitterly regret the pain and resentment this necessary policy of exclusion causes those on maintenance."
Predictably perhaps, a reader in Alabama angrily responded: "Wouldn't it be a much nicer world,” he wrote, “if there weren't the [methadone] patients on this side of the collective recovery fence and the ‘you can't come to our place’ (well, you can come and share, but we won't recognize your accomplishments) N.A. folks on the other?" continue... Evenmore