A musical/psychological distraction from the ongoing horror

I fixed dinner tonight and had the GF over (a joy to be around, nicest woman in the world), with several blues CDs in the background (Robert Cray, Willie Edwards, Junior Parker, et al.) as we ate and drank.

Eventually, the talk turned to singing. After decades playing in bar bands, where I let my “fingers do the walking,” (and if you recognize that reference, you’re dating yourself), last winter I decided to try my hand at vocals after our new band’s vocalist ghosted when we had three-and-a-half sets of material down and I was ready to start booking us. (No obvious problems musically or with anybody in the band, no warning — he just disappeared. I’m still slightly pissed at the lack of courtesy, but mostly disappointed and mystified, as we sounded good and were almost ready to go.)

So, we were high and dry. To keep things from crashing, I decided to try my hand at singing, and I sucked. Bad. I’m not quite as bad now, but still not good. I do a decent job on about 10 songs (embarrassingly badly on maybe another 20), but am obviously in the “Our guitar player will sing one for you now” category when we have a better vocalist. (Any good, local (Tucson), left-of-center vocalists reading this, please leave a comment.)

Anyway, the GF has a great sense of rhythm (good dancer) and seems to have an instinctive understanding of the blues (she’s lived a hard enough life for it–which, frankly, is important if you’re gonna get it right), but when I suggested that I haul out the acoustic in a “judgment-free zone” and play a few tunes with her doing vocals, she recoiled in horror, and said she “can’t” even try it — which meant “won’t.”

I’ve run into this over and over, including with myself. I’ve been playing in bands for decades, but it’s only over the last half-year or so that I’ve even tried singing. With the blues band (great players one and all), none of them would even do shouting (no singing, no being on pitch necessary) in call-and-response tunes. I’d go, “C’mon! you don’t even need to sing! Just bounce off me!” And they wouldn’t do it. No way, no how. They were petrified. They’ve all spent thousands of hours playing their instruments, and are all great players, but vocals? No way, no how. The horror! The horror!

This caused me to look at my own previous reluctance to even try singing, and to remember what I was telling my self-sabotaging self when I chickened out:

• “I sound like shit! I’ll be humiliated!”
• “I can’t stand it if that’d happen!”
• “It’d be awful! Absolutely awful!”
• “I’m such a good player, I shouldn’t need to sing!”

I still sound like shit (mostly–pretty decent on a few tunes), and am still embarrassed by my vocals, but here’s what I tell myself to keep the anxiety under control:

• If I sound like shit, it ain’t the end of the world;
• What’s the worst thing that could happen?
• Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan both thought they sounded awful–were they? (In other words my self-criticality isn’t necessarily accurate.)
• Again, if I make a fool of yourself vocally, what’s the worst that can happen? Will I die? Go bankrupt? Will my honey walk away from me in disgust because of bad vocals? (No)
• Would I be better off if I sing, even badly? (Yes)
• Most people are so self-absorbed they’ll barely register whether I’m good, bad, or indifferent. So, why not?
• The critical jerks are mostly a bunch of insecure, incompetent assholes, too — so why not?
• What real harm can nasty comments do to me?

And that’s the key: what you tell yourself.

With singing, get over the initial embarrassment and you might have a hell of a lot of fun. Maybe not, but why not try? You have nothing to lose except your embarrassment.

 

A few simple things AA could do (but probably won’t) to make AA more of a help to alcohol abusers

by Chaz Bufe, author of Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure?

Over the years, I’ve written a lot about AA, mostly about the negative things that are lost in the avalanche of pro-AA testimonials.

Let’s take as a given that AA’s own statistics (AA’s 1989 triennial survey) are correct: 5% of those who walk through the door are still there (and probably sober) a year later. That’s about the rate of spontaneous remission.

My very strong suspicion is that if you’d take away the million-plus people coerced into AA attendance every year in the U.S. (mostly via DUI sentencing and employee assistance programs), the percentage who recover with the help of AA would be a lot higher — that is, if you’d only count those who voluntarily come to AA for help, the recovery rate would probably be twice, maybe three times the rate indicated in AA’s summary report on the 1989 AA triennial survey. (I have to stress here that this is only my own entirely scientifically unsupported estimate, though I suspect that my friends and family who have been in AA for decades would tend to agree.)

Why would this be? Two reasons come to mind: 1) once someone has decided to change, almost any helping hand will increase their chances of recovery; 2) there’s evidence that AA works especially well for religious people, for whom AA’s religiosity isn’t a problem, and is likely an aid.

This brings up the first way that AA could be of more help to alcohol abusers and the alcohol dependent: AA should stop aiding and abetting the coercion of alcohol abusers into AA attendance. This could be easily done by having meeting secretaries stop signing attendance slips. AA’s annual general service conference could easily declare such a policy.

The second way AA could be of more help is if it (okay, the true believers at most AA meetings) would admit that there are other routes to recovery. There’s good evidence that cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) approaches are the most effective treatment option, and CBT self-help is the foundation of the second-most common alcohol self-help group, SMART Recovery.

That leads to the third way AA could be of more help: AA has an official “take it or leave it” approach (not that this reflects real-world AA), which means that AA could help more people by referring them to SMART Recovery, Lifering, Moderation Management (and other harm-reduction groups), Secular Organizations for Sobriety, Women for Sobriety, and other non-religious recovery groups. These groups can and will help many of those repelled by the rigidity and religiosity of AA.

A fourth way AA (again, the true believers at AA meetings) could be of real help is if AA would stop repeating unscientific, destructive dogma.

Go to almost any AA meeting and you’ll hear that without AA “alcoholics” will inevitably descend into the hell of “jails, institutions, or death.” Abundant scientific research indicates that this simply is not so: most alcohol-dependent persons (not just alcohol abusers) either improve significantly or quit entirely without participation in AA or any other type of treatment program.

So, if AA (the hardcore members) would simply stop repeating the “jails, institutions, or death” mantra, it would help huge numbers of people to take the first step to taking responsibility for their own behavior and recovery (or at least improvement). AA should admit that it is possible to recover independently or simply reduce self-harm, and that doing so is possible and important.

A fifth and very significant way AA could help alcohol abusers is if it (again, the hardcore fanatics at almost every meeting) would stop insisting that “alcoholics” inevitably lose control after a single drink (“one drink, one drunk”). There’s good scientific evidence that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and that those having no exposure to AA are significantly less likely to binge than those exposed to AA.

Of course, when those with alcohol problems drink it’s at least to some extent Russian roulette. So, it makes sense not to drink. But pretending that even a single drink inevitably leads to a bender is a horrible, destructive, self-fulfilling prophecy.

If AA (oookay, once again the hardcore believers) would stop insisting on all this pernicious nonsense and would instead present AA honestly as a religiously based recovery program that works for some people, AA would be a real help to people with alcohol problems.

As is, AA does more harm than good. I hope AA changes so that it helps more people, but I’m not optimistic.

 

 

The Opioid “Epidemic” — what no one is talking about

by Chaz Bufe, author of Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure?

Chris Hedges’ series on RT, “On Contact with Chris Hedges,” has a new episode titled “The Fatal Addiction.” In it, Hedges does a fine job of presenting the human cost — the heartache, the deaths (50,000 last year in the U.S.) — caused by opioid addiction and overdoses.

While he succeeds at that, he doesn’t deal with the causes of addiction, nor with the failed, dominant approaches to curbing drug addiction, nor with better approaches. (Of course, it’s too much to expect any of this in a half-hour documentary, and one hope Hedges will deal with these matters in future episodes.)

Since “The Fatal Addiction” doesn’t tackle these issues, we will here. Please consider the following:

• The dominant view of addiction in the U.S. is that it’s both a result of moral failings and is a “disease” or “illness.” (See AA’s “Big Book.”) This is  wrong on both counts, which can be easily seen when you look at historical addiction and overdose rates. They’re not steady, but vary dramatically over time.

Opioid overdose deaths have multiplied tenfold over the last two decades in the U.S.; reported rates of alcoholism have also fluctuated considerably over the years; the rate of tobacco addiction has plummeted in recent decades; and 95% of American soldiers who were addicted to heroin in Vietnam kicked it without treatment after they came home.

If addiction was caused by moral “shortcomings” (see AA’s 12 steps), one might ask whether former tobacco addicts became more moral over the years, whether morality skyrocketed among heroin-addicted Vietnam vets after they returned home, and whether the spiking opioid addiction rate has been caused by a mass outbreak of individual depravity.

If addiction is a “disease,” not a behavior, as we’re constantly told by 12-step treatment professionals, 12-stepping celebrities, and reporters who accept that absurd assertion at face value and who haven’t done their jobs (investigating, analyzing, raising awkward questions), one might ask the following: Why would the rates of addiction to different substances vary so radically from one substance to another in the same time periods, why would the rates of addiction to single substances vary so radically over time, and what does disease “theory” predict about rates of addiction in the years ahead?

Disease “theory” advocates have no answers to these questions, because disease “theory” is a “theory” only in the popular sense of the term (a conjecture or wild guess). In a word, it’s an assertion. It is in no way a scientific theory, and hence cannot provide answers; its adherents cannot use it to generate testable (falsifiable) predictions.

The dominant 12-step view of addiction (that it results from moral shortcomings and is a “disease”) is very, very wrong.

(As for the actual roots of addiction, one can look to psychological factors — stress and hopelessness, to oversimplify — and the environmental factors contributing to stress and hopelessness. I dealt with this in a separate post, “AA, the War on Drugs, and Disastrous Misconceptions,” so I’ll leave the matter here.)

• As for AA and the treatment approaches derived from AA with its incorrect assertions about “moral” failings and “disease,” they’re every bit as ineffective as you’d expect.

Twelve-step groups such as AA and its clones (NA, CA, etc.) produce results no better than the rate of spontaneous remission, as shown by the best available studies: studies with control groups and random assignment of subjects, mass-participation longitudinal studies, and AA’s own triennial surveys. I summarized this evidence in “Alcoholics Anonymous Is Not Effective,” so again I’ll leave the matter here.

The formal (“professional”) 12-step treatment programs derived from AA are just as ineffective as AA itself. (I haven’t put up anything about this on the blog, but deal with the matter at length in Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure?)

One telling segment in Chris Hedges’ documentary is with an interviewee who mentions an addict who’s been in and out of rehab 17 times, which the interviewee says is typical. (The numerous 12-step references in the documentary [“meetings,” “sponsors,” “recovering addicts”] are equally typical.)

Clearly, the dominant American approaches to addiction aren’t working. Why, beyond faulty “moral failings” / “disease” premises?

• For one thing, we’ve been stuck with the authoritarian, worse-than-useless “war on drugs” and the criminalization of addicts and recreational drug users for decades. This has resulted in untold suffering and incredible waste of tax money (easily $1 trillion over the years, and currently a good $50 to $70 billion per year).  Criminalization has ruined countless lives to no good effect, and it’s been utterly ineffective at reducing drug use and addiction. If you doubt this, consider the number of opioid overdose deaths over the years, that hard drugs are freely available to almost anyone who wants them (see Hedges’ “The Fatal Addiction“), and have become both cheaper and more powerful as the “war on drugs” has ground on.

So, what does work? What will reduce drug use, addiction rates, and deaths from overdoses?

• On the purely personal level, the only treatment approaches with good evidence of efficacy are cognitive behavioral therapy approaches. (I deal with this in the final paragraphs of “Alcoholics Anonymous Is Not Effective.”)

I should note that methadone “treatment” merely substitutes a legal synthetic narcotic for illegal narcotics; this is substitution, not treatment — it keeps users dependent on an addictive substance.

• On the societal level, it’s obvious that the “war on drugs” and criminalization of drug users and addicts must be abandoned.

Not only has criminalization of drug users and addicts failed to reduce the rates of drug use and drug addiction, it has taken an incredible human and economic toll. It’s done nothing to reduce the availability nor the price of drugs. And it’s a major component of “big government” intrusion into the lives of individuals.

Criminalization of drugs and drug users has been an utter disaster.

(Those who profit from the enslavement of “war on drugs” prisoners might disagree.)

Criminalization of drugs and their users is in large part directly responsible for the tens of thousands of overdose deaths every year in the U.S. Why? There is no quality control with illegal drugs. Those who buy them (especially opioids) are quite literally gambling with their lives, and multitudes lose that gamble every year.

So, is legalization (or at least decriminalization) a better approach?

Yes.

In Portugal, where drug use was decriminalized in 2001, the rate of death from overdoses has plummeted, as shown in a recent Washington Post article, “Why hardly anyone dies from a drug overdose in Portugal.” The rate of opioid addiction has fallen in half. Portuguese taxpayers aren’t paying ungodly amounts of money annually to lock up drug users and drug addicts. And Big Brother isn’t intruding (or at least intruding less) into one aspect of the lives of individuals.

• Finally, here’s a question that almost no one asks, and even fewer try to answer: Why do millions of Americans feel so stressed, so hopeless that they drink themselves to death or play Russian Roulette with hard drugs?

The answer to that question has been available for decades.