Our family’s private battle with addiction became very public when “Saving Carrick,” a “Dateline NBC” documentary about our daughter’s recovery from heroin dependency, first aired in July 2005. We participated in that story, even filming embarrassing scenes of confrontation and dysfunction ourselves, because my wife Deirdre and I wanted to help to break the hush-hush silence that surrounds this disease. Indeed, addiction to alcohol and other drugs is the “Elephant on Main Street” — the name of the Web site and blog we’ve set up to discuss a growing problem in our communities that many people pretend they don’t see.

Deirdre and I have both been sober since the mid-1980s. In 2002, we started talking openly about our own struggle with alcoholism and drugs when we were young adults because we felt that some members of our community were dismissing their children’s experimentation with mind-altering substances as a “rite of passage” to be treated with a wink — or even a nod.

We are by no means alone in turning our experience into advocacy. There is a long history in the recovery movement of what William L. White, author of “Slaying the Dragon: The History of Addiction Treatment and Recovery in America,” calls “wounded healers” — men and women who overcome their afflictions and then feel compelled to help others. Many of today’s prominent support groups, treatment facilities and philanthropies have been born from the experience of recovery alcoholics and addicts or those affected by them, including Alcoholics Anonymous, the National Council of Alcohol and Drug Dependence, the Christopher D. Smithers Foundation, the Lowe Family Foundation, and the Betty Ford Center.

Within days of the death of his 25-year-old son from a fatal dose of alcohol and Ecstasy last year, prominent attorney Robert Shapiro launched the Brent Shapiro Foundation for Drug Awareness to raise awareness, support research and engender discussion about chemical dependency.

On a grassroots level, thousands of ad hoc groups around the country — many of them also formed after personal heartbreak — are addressing the needs not only of addicts, but also of family members, including the siblings who often are innocent victims of the disease.

“A vanguard of recovering people and their families are standing together to offer themselves as living proof of the existence and transformative power of successful long-term recovery,” White says.  “They are educating local communities, reaching out to those still suffering, organizing new recovery support services and advocating pro-recovery social policies.”

Libba Phillips started Outpost for Hope when her younger sister, who suffers from mental illness and crack cocaine and alcohol addictions, disappeared in 1999 and her family discovered that law enforcement and social services organizations were unwilling or unable to help. Based in Citrus Heights, Calif., the group helps other families looking for missing loved ones, many of whom with co-occurring addiction and mental disorders, navigate what Philips calls “the lost highway.”

“It has given me a purpose,” she says. “There’s a real power in numbers, to know that you’re not the only person who’s going through this.”

The Peers Influence Peers Partnership, which carries a prevention and recovery message to young adults across the country, was founded in 1993 after the cousin of a student in Frank Reale’s video production club in the Putnam Valley, N.Y., school system died in a drunk driving accident. Since then, more than 250 high school and college students have created and produced a dozen hour-long videos and public service announcements broadcast via satellite each year to a thousand locations across the country.

“Having it come from kids rather than adults, it’s less of a lecture and more trying to really help someone,” says Peter Ries, 16, a junior at Putnam Valley High School.

Pat Nichols, a travel agent in Edmond, Okla., formed Parents Helping Parents in 2000 to help other families avoid the pain he was experiencing watching his son deal with addictions to both alcohol and drugs. He has counseled more than 1,200 families since then, providing “emergency triage” in the form of referrals and coaching. He’s set up a Web site listing local resources, and established two additional chapters in Norman and Stillwater, Okla. — and, as of this writing, his son had just celebrated 90 days of sobriety.

Two years ago, after Joanne Peterson discovered that her 19-year-old son was a heroin addict, she “went through grief, shock and horror before realizing that I was isolating myself.”

Following a panel discussion about the opiate epidemic sweeping the area where she lives south of Boston — 29 young people died from overdoses in Bristol and Plymouth counties alone in 2005 — Peterson told a newspaper reporter that she’d like to start a parents group. She received nearly 100 emails after the story appeared in the Patroit Ledger, in Quincy, Mass. Learn To Cope now conducts weekly meetings for 280 members, and maintains an active Web site and online discussion group. Peterson’s son just celebrated a year of recovery.

Collectively, these mutual aid groups transcend the comfort and support they offer their participants, according to historian White.

“The future of addiction treatment and recovery in America,” he says, “hinges on the success or failure of this new recovery advocacy movement."

(Thom Forbes is an author, blogger on addiction and recovery and former reporter for the New York Daily News.)
 

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