April 27, 2021 • 35 mins
When we think about a public health crisis, we often think about a contagious disease – like COVID-19. But right now substance use disorders and addiction are an epidemic in our country. That’s why this week, Chelsea is sitting down with two people with unique perspectives on this issue: Mayor Muriel Bowser is addressing challenges around substance use disorders and addiction in D.C., while managing the many other crises of this last year. And Dax Shepard, whose candor about his own addiction and recovery makes him a role model for so many and tackles the issue of stigma head on.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Chelsea Clinton, and this is in fact a
podcast about why public health matters even when we're not
in a pandemic. Today, we're talking about substance abuse, disorders,
and addiction. When we think about a public health crisis,
(00:21):
we often think about a contagious disease like COVID nineteen.
But substance use disorders and addiction are another epidemic, yes,
an epidemic in our country right now. This epidemic is
fueled in part by the over prescription of opioids, and
it's made worse by the stigma that has too often
kept us from talking about and treating. This is what
(00:41):
it is, a health issue like any other. The good
news is, over the last few years, the conversation around
addiction in America has started to change. More and more
people are speaking out about their own experiences, including celebrities,
and elected leaders are taking on the issue in new
ways rooted in public health. All of this is particularly
(01:02):
urgent right now. Overdoses and overdose deaths have risen during
the pandemic. According to the Center for Disease Control, thirteen
percent of Americans say they've started or increased substance use,
including alcohol in order to cope with the stress of
COVID nineteen, and for people in recovery from substant use disorders,
isolation has made it harder to get the support they need. Today,
(01:24):
I'm talking with two people with unique perspectives on these issues.
We'll hear from Dak Shepherd, an actor who is incredibly
candid and pointing about his own addiction and recovery, including
on his own podcast, Armchair Expert. But first I'm talking
with Washington, d C Mayor Muriel Bowser. D C was
once a place that I called home, and it's so
(01:46):
much more than our nation's capital. Nearly a million people
live in the metropolitan area, and it's one of the
most diverse cities in the United States. And let me
just say, it's long pastime for d C statehood. That's
a topic deserving its own podcast, but it's also one
that matters for public health. To just give one example
particularly relevant to today's topic, because DC isn't in its
(02:07):
own state. Years ago, Republicans and Congress were able to
block d C from using its own non federal funding
for needle exchange programs. Thankfully that ban was reversed, but
it shouldn't have been possible, and it wouldn't have been
had DC been a state. Leading the city today is
Mayor Muriel Bowser, who has stayed focused on the very
(02:28):
real challenges posed by substance abuse disorders and addiction, even
while managing many other crises of this last year. She's
committed to improving access to mental health services like Oxford Houses,
community based and run sober living environments, and to Narcan,
a life saving antidote to opioid overdoses. And as you're
about to hear, that's just the beginning. I was so
(02:49):
happy to have Mayor Bowser on the podcast and I
started our conversation by asking her what it's been like
to address substance use disorders in DC, also navigating the
COVID nineteen pandemic. What does the opioid epidemic look like
in d C. Well, it doesn't look like the national
picture that we have of the opioid epidemic. In fact,
(03:11):
people who are suffering and dying from opioid addiction in
DC are usually African American men in their fifties, were older,
and there are folks that have been living with substance
addiction for sometimes decades. And what we see is these
very potent street mixtures of drugs that are causing overdose
(03:36):
and death in our city. Were you aware of the
extent of the crisis when you became mayor or was
this an issue you really had to confront more head
on once you took office. Absolutely, it was an issue
that we had to confront when we saw these very
potent fentel mixes that emerged seemed to me almost overnight
(04:02):
on the streets, and we had been seeing the kind
of over prescribing of aipiens in how that also has
mixed with the street trade and the spencinal mixtures that
are killing people in our city. In last year, during
the pandemic, we had a pretty significant number of people
(04:22):
who succumbed to these overdoses. For so long, we've treated
addiction as a matter for the criminal justice system, and
yet we really know the addiction is a public and
a patient health crisis. How do you help shift the
public's understanding of what addiction is and also how they
can hopefully be part of helping support people who might
(04:45):
be struggling in their community. I do think we've seen
some shifts in the way that we are thinking about
drug treatment and the criminal justice system. Certainly in d C.
We have been on a multi year strategy of decriminalizing marijuana,
for example, and making sure that at the same time
(05:08):
though we're educating young people about the dangers related to
overusing marijuana. We also seen more help and support for
people to get on medically assisted drug treatment, which is
changing the conversation for people who have dependence of opiates
(05:31):
and they've been in this kind of circle for decades
and decades that have separated them from jobs and family
when there is a medical treatment available to them. Because
I do think that as we see that type of
treatment go up, then people can better manage and they
won't go to the use of street drugs, which is
(05:51):
very dangerous. But with quarantine and isolation, the risk of
death with the use of some of these drugs goes
up for people who are used to being among a
group of people and now they're on their own. And
I'm very focused on what the use of telemedicine in
this COVID period is going to do for us. How
can we use technology and put it in the hands
(06:14):
of people or put it in more public spaces so
that people can connect with providers. I'm really excited about
the kind of continuum of public health supports that can
be provided in that way. Mona, Mary, you spoke a
little bit ago about your hope to build a facility
(06:35):
where people could detox and hopefully could be well positioned
to be on a path to recovery. And yet often
facilities and clinics that do that work receive some pushback
from neighbors saying like, we don't want those people here,
We don't want that in our backyard. Have you confronted that, NDC,
and how do you respond to that? Oh, no, not
(06:57):
inting that would never happen. Yes, I have confronted that,
and I've had the opportunity, you know, d C Chelsea.
So you know, before I was mayor, I was a
Ward Council member and this issue has come up many times.
We for example, and I'm sure you're familiar with Oxford Houses,
when people come together in a residential environment, independent living
(07:19):
and they're all everybody's in recovery. It's a kind of
hands off government approach to people getting back on their feet.
And I love the model and it actually has worked
very well here. But you're right, if people know about it,
they're concerned about just other people who made too many
mistakes living close to them and maybe being a danger
to them. And the thing that always gets me when
(07:43):
I'm in a community, I can always say, who do
you think these people are? They're your neighbors, they are brothers, cousins, nephews, friends.
We all have somebody that we know who needs help
getting back on their feet, and they have to have
a place to live us like you, and you know,
I've developed over the years all kinds of ways to
(08:04):
help homes like that integrate into d C. It's not easy.
I've had too many neighborhood fights about it, but it's
so worthwhile when people just recognize that there are all
kinds of people in the world, and sometimes people are
going to need a second chance, and it maybe you,
it may be a cousin and nephew, your son, daughter,
(08:26):
And we live in a community that values supporting each other.
So it takes a little bit of extra leadership and
work on the part of elected officials, but it is
worth it, clearly I agree, And certainly over the last
few years there has been a real push from the
public health community and from clinicians and others who are
(08:48):
on the front lines of treating and working with people
who have substance use disorders and addiction to really try
to move to an approach of harm reduction. You know,
while you certainly hope people can be on a path
of recovery and sobriety, you want to reduce the harm
that they are doing to themselves while that happens. And
clearly nar Can is a major example of harm reduction.
(09:11):
Can you just talk a little bit more about your
citywide commitment to narcan now? Absolutely, I don't think that
we've done enough to talk about harm reduction because we
still live in a world where addiction is seen as weakness,
not as an illness. So that's why I do think
that leads to some of the persistent stigma related to
(09:35):
substance abuse disorders, and so really educating people and constantly
having those conversations I think will reduce the stigma, will
help people get help and manage their illness and stay alive,
and all of those things are important. I've been Mayor
six years and over that time we've been working on
(09:55):
nar Can distribution. Very recently in our drug stores. Now
someone can go in who is a family member, friend,
potential bystander, and get the nasal spray, which were is
going to help us save lives and also lead to
some productive conversations about substance abuse disorders and harm reduction.
(10:18):
That we're trying to keep people safe and keep people
alive and not come to some judgment about their illness.
We'll be right back stay with us, so Mayor Bowser,
(10:42):
as we hopefully are moving out of the pandemic over
the course of this year. How do you think about
your job to help people move forward from this collective
trauma that we've been through, especially for young people who
have been so dislocated and so isolated from going to school,
from playing sports, from going to church, from seeing their
(11:05):
friends in the park, from seeing their grandparents at holidays.
Because this has been a collective trauma too, and one
that's fallen the hardest on our most vulnerable. I think
I struggle with that, to be honest with you, Chelsea,
because my experience has just been so different, because I've
been in person at work every day of this pandemic,
(11:26):
and so when I'm talking to friends. I have a
god daughter who's a tween, and I just see in
them what this has done to their social interactions, to
their love of school, their love of sports, just as
you said, and people have to ease back into that.
I noticed that when we reopen our schools, people have
(11:47):
given teachers are hard time for this, that and the other.
And I did too, except they were at home. Had
to pivot to teaching lessons at home. Some teachers hadn't
been in their buildings for eight or nine months. And
so what I have seen, just and because we're just
trying it putting one foot in front of the other,
(12:07):
is that as people come back to those environments, they
have to kind of softly come back. So maybe you
don't say everybody starts work on Monday at nine am.
Maybe you invite one group in to have just a
small staff meeting, or you invite you know, a sit down,
little coffee for six, or you do a tour so
everybody can see how the plexiglass has been put up
(12:31):
and their social distancing reminders. So I think people have
to be eased back into their normal lives and we
have to give each other the grace to do that.
While at the same time all of us are leaders
in our communities, we have to recognize that we've lost
some things not being together and having a real plan
(12:52):
to get back to those things. It's just really important
to our mental health, physical health, or academic health. Our
relationships are jobs and productivities in our downtowns. I'm sitting
in downtown Washington right now, and sometimes early on in
the pandemic, it would make me cry just to see
how empty the streets were and how a restaurant clothes
(13:15):
meant thirty people who weren't working and didn't know how
they were going to feed their families. And they have
these beautiful museums where Americans aren't visiting right now. So
I think that we all have to ease back in,
but we have to have a plan to get back.
To learn more about Mayor Bowser's work on addiction treatment
(13:37):
and harm reduction and everything else she's doing, please go
to Mayor dot DC dot gov. Dak Shepherd wears a
lot of hats. He's a hilarious and informative podcast Armchair Expert,
which he co hosts with Monica Padman. He's a talented
actor who has appeared in too many movies and TV
(13:59):
shows to list. He's husband to actor Kristen Bell. He's
a dad, and he's an advocate for approaching issues of
addiction with openness and honesty. It's inspiring to have the
chance to talk with someone who has worked so hard
to shatter stigma around substance used disorders and addiction, particularly
including by speaking openly about his own experiences. One of
(14:22):
the reasons I'm so grateful to talk with you today
is I think we need people who just refused to
be shamed and are honest because I hope that helps
other people. Then refused to be shamed privately or publicly. Yeah,
I think maybe it would be helpful for me to
say how I delineate between shame and guilt. I think
(14:44):
guilt is a tremendously wonderful emotion. I think it is
often the motivation for change, It's the motivation for apologies.
It's great guilt is I did something bad, or I
did something I wish I hadn't. Shame is I am bad,
I am a piece of ship, I am not worthy
(15:05):
of love. There's nothing very constructive that can come out
of that, but guilt. I'm all about embracing guilt, and
I have it all the time. When I've been very
public about my stuff. I don't feel shame because I apologize.
I make amend I make an attempt to write the
things I've done, and once I've done that, I don't
have any shame about it, and I'm not carrying around
(15:26):
fifteen years of shame from when I was a raging addict.
I felt guilty about a lot of those things, but
I I'm not embarrassed by them. I agree. I mean
guilt hopefully helps us take responsibility, and certainly as parents,
I want my when like you're throwing a magnetile down
the toilet and we had to call the plumber, Like,
I'm glad that they felt guilty about that. I'm also
(15:47):
like even more glad they took responsibility and apologized for
anyone who's listening to us tax who may not be
familiar with your story, would you just share a little
bit of your history with addiction? For sure, but briefly
to want to say yeah. The proudest and I am
of my children ever is when they admit something and
say sorry. That to me is the single most impressive
(16:08):
thing a little person can do, because it's the bravest
thing to own your shortcomings. It's so hard to do.
It really is hard to do. So when they do
that to me is like way better than a's way
better than cartwheels and all this other stuff they do. Okay,
so my story in a nutshell is if people know
what the ACE score is, you know you can take
(16:29):
this childhood trauma test. There's I want to say, eight
or ten questions and I'm getting get all these numbers wrong,
but you'll get the message if you had a parent
that was mentally ill, if you grew up with food deprivation,
if you had an addict in the house, if you
were subjected to sexual abuse, if you're subjected to physical abuse,
all these things. I took that test because we had
(16:49):
a guest on explaining it to us, Nadine Burke, and
I was like aid to the ten or something, and
I was like, okay, that explains a lot of things.
You know, an addiction being one of those. I come
by it through generations of addicts before me, and then
I had a good deal those childhood traumas. And if
you had asked me at eighteen, I would have just
(17:11):
said I liked drinking. It's fun. I like having fun.
It was tremendous amount of fun for eight years. It
worked great. And uh I also did a copious amount
of cocaine. That was probably my favorite thing to do,
and then it became untenable and it didn't work anymore.
I would be on all the things that kept me
(17:32):
from feeling the feelings I didn't want to feel, and
I was still feeling them. It just wasn't an escape anymore.
And I tried to get sober. Many times I would
get two months, i'd get three months. This went on
for a couple of years, and then I had this
very unique experience where I was about to start a movie.
I decided to take a vacation. I went down to
(17:53):
Hawaii with a friend. I specifically went there because I knew,
or I believe, they didn't have cocaine there. I found
Chris Math instead, just a week of just terrible over consumption.
By the time I flew home, I was so sick
that I could barely get on the plane and I
had to layover in San Francisco, and to get on
(18:14):
the next plane I had I had to go to
the bar and have four or five jack and cokes
just to do it to get through the next flight.
And I was in the corner of this bar because
I had been in a a at that point, so
I was just paranoid someone from A A was going
to see me in this airport. And I was also
starting a movie where I was going to make the
(18:35):
most amount of money I've ever made in my life,
an amount of money that I was positive would make
me feel happy. And people had recognized me the whole
time I was in Hawaii, and that was something else
I had believed would make me feel happy. And on paper,
I had everything I had set out to get when
(18:55):
I moved to l A. And I was like just
so miserable and suicidal that I thought, oh boy, you
have all the things now, and you're the most miserable
you've ever been, so something much bigger is broken. I
consider that a huge, huge gift that I was so
lucky and spoiled that I had those things, because I
(19:17):
honestly don't know if I could have figured that out
without those things, because for so many years I was
telling myself it was those things that were missing in
my life and that if I had those I would
have real self esteem and like myself and and be joyful.
And I just feel like it's such a blessing that
I could get those things and feel suicidal, because it
(19:38):
really made me confront that something much much bigger was
going on. That was my last drink. That was sixteen
and a half years ago. And then I was sober
for sixteen years, and I raced motorcycles, I raced cars.
I do a lot of stupid things to get malapproval,
and I get hurt often, and I have surgeries often,
(20:00):
And during quarantine I had two in a row. Um
there was an off roading accident and there was a
motorcycle accident. And through the course of being on opiates
for I don't know, maybe you know, a solid month
and a half out of a three month window. The
second time when it when it was over, I was
like this, No, this is not over. I'm going to
(20:21):
keep going. So then I started obtaining them illegally. I
came to this idea that I knew what unmanageability was.
It was that trip to Hawaii where I'm in a
car accident on day two of the trip. There's police involved.
That to me represented powerlessness in unmanageability. The obiit thing
was very misleading because I still was doing everything I'm
(20:44):
supposed to do. I was still interviewing people and they
were going it was going well. I was still playing
with my kids on stop and putting them to bed
and waking them up and doing all the dad stuff,
and I just generally was cruising through life without any
unmanageability other than the terrible aspect of opiates is that
your tolerance just is going up daily. So my intakes
(21:06):
going up daily just to stay at this level that
I don't have to think about any emotions I have.
And then it got to a level where it occurred
to me, oh, you're extremely physically addicted to these and
you're going to have a detox. And everything was secret
still at that point, and I'm getting kind of visibly
DETOXI to my loved ones, and I'm at that point
(21:30):
line and saying, because I do I have, Sorry Edkarth right,
So I'm saying, oh, I have. I'm having a really
bad flare up and that's why I'm so And this
goes on for a couple of days. And the one
thing I got out of those sixteen years of being
sobers I hadn't gasol at anyone. And I used to
be able to do that like crazy when I was
(21:52):
an addict. Before I could look at everyone and like
to them and it was just um, I couldn't. I
couldn't do it. I was make keen. People who loved
me feel crazy because they knew something was going on
and I was lying. And then I just eventually came
clean to my wife and to Monica, my co host
and best friend. Yeah, and then I had to go
(22:14):
to my fucking meeting I've been going to for sixteen
years and say, yeah, I took a cake last week
and I was high, and it was terrible. Weirdly, it
was terrible leading up to it because I had built
this whole identity in my head around having sixteen years.
I loved having sixteen years. I love talking about in
the podcast. I love that people would message me and
(22:34):
say a month three. I love being inspirational to people
for sobriety. And it became I was I was holding
on to that so much. I was deriving so much
of my self esteem from that that I was really
scared of not having that, and so I avoided losing
that for a while for a couple of months, and
then eventually I just the I couldn't do it and
(22:57):
I and I had to telling myself, and then I
felt very obligated for the people that have been inspired
listening to me get sober that I got to share
the fact that yes, sometimes man, sometimes it doesn't work out,
and you know, the solution is just being honest and
coming back. And how do you feel now today? Oh?
My god, so good. One of the most basic tenants
(23:22):
in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous is that addicts
cannot afford to have resentments. We can't carry resentments. You know.
I had to ask myself, how did that happen? Okay,
I have clearly I have resentments, and I have things
I need to confront and work out. And so this
has been like a second chance to confront all those
things that have been building up. And I have to
(23:44):
say today, at least I feel better with six months
than I had felt at fifteen years. How do you
talk to your kids about addiction? Oh, I just like
I'm talking to you. Yeah. They know that dad goes
to an A A meeting every Tuesday and Thursday. They
know I'm leaving. Where are you going? One of the
cuter moments was I want to say, my oldest daughter
(24:05):
was three, Macma, and my daughters really wanted to be
with me twenty four hours a day, and she said,
where are you going, and I said, I'm going to Hey,
why do you Why do you have to go? I
go because I'm an alcoholic and if I don't go there,
then I'll drink and then I'll be a terrible dad.
And she said, can I go? And I said, well, no,
you got to be an alcoholic. And she goes, I'm
(24:26):
going to be an alcoholic and I said, you know,
you might become one. It's the odds are not in
your favor, but but you're not there yet. And they knew.
They knew, Like when they relapsed. We explained, well, Daddie
was on these pills for surgery, and then Daddy was
a bad boy and he started getting his own pills,
(24:47):
and yeah, we tell them the whole thing. We're taking
a quick break. Stay with us. We were talking about
(25:08):
trauma earlier, and increasingly a number of doctors who study
trauma or trying to raise awareness that we all have
had a collective trauma during the pandemic and that we
need to be cognizant of the way that trauma will
haunt us, and that if we don't recognize it, name it,
confront it, it will haunt us, possibly for the rest
(25:30):
of our lives. And I think we have to be
able to talk about that and to help others talk
about that in the same way. I'm sure for all
the people who have reached out to you to share
their stories of sobriety, I'm sure you've also had a
lot of people reach out to you to share that
your candor has helped them be candid with their loved
ones and ask for help. The tipping point that got
(25:52):
me to be public about it was a really good
friend of mine who happened to have the same sobriety
date as myself and where the exact same age, and
we do the exact same thing, so we're very very similar.
And I told him, of course immediately and and I said,
I don't really want to do it on the podcast,
and here's why. And he said, he goes, Look, if
(26:13):
you're getting self esteem from the number, that's silly. If
you're getting self esteem because you think it's helpful to people,
that's great. But if your goal then is actually to
help people, it's so much more helpful that you relapsed.
Then it is you being sixteen years sober and married
to Kristen Bell. That's not incredibly relatable to some dude
(26:35):
who's struggling but lying to the people you love just
last month, that's pretty relatable. And are there other people
who's honesty about their addiction journey has inspired you? Oh? God, ya.
There's this guy I hadn't known really. He was a
professional skateboarder and very famous for that, and then he
(26:59):
he had a really popular radio show on Sirius, Jason Allis,
and he fights mm A now. As someone that grew
up without a dad who was desperate for all male approval,
I did all those things. I skateboarded, then I wrote motorcycles,
and I jumped things. Then I raced things. Anything that
would check the you're a man box I pursued, and
(27:20):
I was most impressed by guys who could do backflips
on motorcycles and stuff. So I'm never going to be
able to impress you. Basically, No, No, I have a
whole another category for females. Don't worry. So I was.
This was probably six years ago. Jason Ellis was a
guest on Howard Stern and I was listening to the
interview and Jason told the story of having been molested
(27:41):
by his father all growing up and how complicated that
was because he loves his dad so much still his
dad had since passed away, but the openness and the
willingness to share that story in the way that he did.
(28:03):
I was listening to it and I had chills. I thought, well,
this is the bravest thing I've witnessed in my life. This,
This so exceeds doing backflips on a motorcycle or jumping
through fire. This, like, what he's doing right here is
everyone's greatest fear. Like, Look, how damaged I've become. That's
(28:26):
the kind of heroic bravery I I am striving for
to have to be able to do that. That's as
badass as you can get. For me. We talk about
in our family how important is to be brave and kind.
I say to my kids, if you're brave and you're kind,
you're going to be good. It's gonna work out, and
I will feel like I've done my job. Yeah. And
(28:48):
I can say from experience, I've gotten physical altercations in
my wife's defense. And if I was plotting that, the
amount of bravery that took for me, that was a four.
And me telling her that I'm afraid she likes her
career more than she likes me was a nine for me,
(29:11):
that's so much harder for me to do than to
fight a guy in her defense. Thinking again about addiction
and the ways in which I think too often we
cloak addiction in shame and in moralizing instead of in
the real language of public health and harm reduction and
treatment and solidarity. What do you think or what would
(29:33):
you like to see change and how we talk about addiction,
how we talk to kids about addiction, and how we
treat addiction in our country. Well, first and foremost, just
that no one is ashamed to say they're diabetic, no
one's ashamed to say they've got a broken arm and
(29:53):
a cast. In fact, it's awesome when you have a cast.
In elementary school. I'll give my own example. I ink
I grew up thinking people that were addicts didn't have
will power, and I think I demonstrated great will power.
I went to the groundlings while also going to U
c l A, while also supporting myself, while also juggling
(30:15):
a full blown addiction, Like I think I have tremendous
will power and I'm tremendously responsible until you add one
thing into my body alcohol and then it's anyone's guests
where I'll end up in four days, like I don't
feel shame about that. This is clearly the graph demonstrates
(30:39):
who I am. And then this thing alcohol and drugs
is this extreme. I don't want to call it a weakness,
just an ability. I think the more people take it
out of the realm of yeah, moral weakness or lack
of will power, or shortsightedness or a headen any of
(30:59):
those things, I just don't think that's realistic. One of
my clearest memories as a little kid was when my
my father told me that his brother had been arrested
for selling cocaine to undercover cop and he went to prison.
He had struggled with addiction throughout his life. And yet
(31:22):
what I remember even more clearly it was my grandmother,
whom I called Grandma Ginger, being inconsolable, sure, just being
devastated of course that her younger son was going to prison,
but even more so that he had been in so
much pain and that she had been unable to help him.
(31:43):
And even in the mid eighties in Arkansas, you know,
my Grandma Ginger, who had been a nurse and nurse
and nasticist, knew that prison wasn't going to help him
overcome or recover from, or move forward from his addiction.
So just the devastation that she felt of her failure
as a mom, and also our social failure and the
(32:05):
way that those had collided into her son's life. Of course,
couldn't have articulated all that at five, but I just
felt like, oh, this isn't right, this is wrong. There's
just so much that's wrong. And now thirty five years later,
we're still incarcerating people for low level drug use, whether
(32:28):
kind of marijuana or cocaine or other substances, when we
know that if we really wanted to help our country
have less addiction, fewer people been prisoned to their addiction,
we would be investing in treatment and prevention and support
and not prisons and the continued criminalization of substance abuse. Yeah,
(32:50):
and and and you know, you also just cannot avoid
the reality that it is also so disproportionately brought to
bear on black folks than it is white folks, Black
and Hispanics. It's so lopsided. Not only is it not
helpful to the addicts, it's also uniquely punishing to people
(33:12):
of color. Well, thank you for sharing your reactions and
more decks, very very grateful. Thank you so much. Yeah,
it's a pleasure. You can hear more from Dax on
his podcast Armchair Expert. This is a really challenging time
for people struggling with substance use and addiction. Even while
(33:35):
we're seeing signs of hope and treatment, public health departments
are stretched to their breaking point, and loneliness, isolation, and
anxiety are very much a constant for so many people,
and as we were reminded in today's conversation, finding the help,
support and community necessary for recovery can be daunting even
in the best of times. One of the reasons I
(33:56):
wanted to talk about addiction for the podcast is because
this is an issue you that has touched so many
of our lives, and yet it is something we still
too often feel uncomfortable talking about. We all have a
stake in changing the way we talk about and treat
substance abuse and addiction and making it easier for people, families,
and communities to heal. If you or someone you care
(34:17):
about is struggling with addiction, please know that you are
not alone. For help, please call the Substance Abuse and
Mental Health Services Administration's free confidential hotline at one eight
hundred six six to help. That's one eight hundred six
six to four three five seven. Thanks for listening. In
(34:39):
Fact is brought to you by I Heart Radio. We're
produced by Erica Goodmanson, Lauren Peterson, Cathy Russo, Julie Subrian,
and Justin Wright, with help from the Hidden Light team
of Barry Lurry, Sarah Horowitz, Nikki Huggett, Emily Young and Humanity,
with additional support from Lindsay Hoffman. Original music is by
Justin Wright. If you liked this episode of In Fact,
(35:01):
please make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode,
and tell your family and friends to do the same.
If you really want to help us out, leave us
a review on Apple Podcasts. Thanks again for listening, and
see you next week.
Hi, I'm Chelsea Clinton, and this is in fact a
podcast about why public health matters even when we're not
in a pandemic. Today, we're talking about substance abuse, disorders,
and addiction. When we think about a public health crisis,
(00:21):
we often think about a contagious disease like COVID nineteen.
But substance use disorders and addiction are another epidemic, yes,
an epidemic in our country right now. This epidemic is
fueled in part by the over prescription of opioids, and
it's made worse by the stigma that has too often
kept us from talking about and treating. This is what
(00:41):
it is, a health issue like any other. The good
news is, over the last few years, the conversation around
addiction in America has started to change. More and more
people are speaking out about their own experiences, including celebrities,
and elected leaders are taking on the issue in new
ways rooted in public health. All of this is particularly
(01:02):
urgent right now. Overdoses and overdose deaths have risen during
the pandemic. According to the Center for Disease Control, thirteen
percent of Americans say they've started or increased substance use,
including alcohol in order to cope with the stress of
COVID nineteen, and for people in recovery from substant use disorders,
isolation has made it harder to get the support they need. Today,
(01:24):
I'm talking with two people with unique perspectives on these issues.
We'll hear from Dak Shepherd, an actor who is incredibly
candid and pointing about his own addiction and recovery, including
on his own podcast, Armchair Expert. But first I'm talking
with Washington, d C Mayor Muriel Bowser. D C was
once a place that I called home, and it's so
(01:46):
much more than our nation's capital. Nearly a million people
live in the metropolitan area, and it's one of the
most diverse cities in the United States. And let me
just say, it's long pastime for d C statehood. That's
a topic deserving its own podcast, but it's also one
that matters for public health. To just give one example
particularly relevant to today's topic, because DC isn't in its
(02:07):
own state. Years ago, Republicans and Congress were able to
block d C from using its own non federal funding
for needle exchange programs. Thankfully that ban was reversed, but
it shouldn't have been possible, and it wouldn't have been
had DC been a state. Leading the city today is
Mayor Muriel Bowser, who has stayed focused on the very
(02:28):
real challenges posed by substance abuse disorders and addiction, even
while managing many other crises of this last year. She's
committed to improving access to mental health services like Oxford Houses,
community based and run sober living environments, and to Narcan,
a life saving antidote to opioid overdoses. And as you're
about to hear, that's just the beginning. I was so
(02:49):
happy to have Mayor Bowser on the podcast and I
started our conversation by asking her what it's been like
to address substance use disorders in DC, also navigating the
COVID nineteen pandemic. What does the opioid epidemic look like
in d C. Well, it doesn't look like the national
picture that we have of the opioid epidemic. In fact,
(03:11):
people who are suffering and dying from opioid addiction in
DC are usually African American men in their fifties, were older,
and there are folks that have been living with substance
addiction for sometimes decades. And what we see is these
very potent street mixtures of drugs that are causing overdose
(03:36):
and death in our city. Were you aware of the
extent of the crisis when you became mayor or was
this an issue you really had to confront more head
on once you took office. Absolutely, it was an issue
that we had to confront when we saw these very
potent fentel mixes that emerged seemed to me almost overnight
(04:02):
on the streets, and we had been seeing the kind
of over prescribing of aipiens in how that also has
mixed with the street trade and the spencinal mixtures that
are killing people in our city. In last year, during
the pandemic, we had a pretty significant number of people
(04:22):
who succumbed to these overdoses. For so long, we've treated
addiction as a matter for the criminal justice system, and
yet we really know the addiction is a public and
a patient health crisis. How do you help shift the
public's understanding of what addiction is and also how they
can hopefully be part of helping support people who might
(04:45):
be struggling in their community. I do think we've seen
some shifts in the way that we are thinking about
drug treatment and the criminal justice system. Certainly in d C.
We have been on a multi year strategy of decriminalizing marijuana,
for example, and making sure that at the same time
(05:08):
though we're educating young people about the dangers related to
overusing marijuana. We also seen more help and support for
people to get on medically assisted drug treatment, which is
changing the conversation for people who have dependence of opiates
(05:31):
and they've been in this kind of circle for decades
and decades that have separated them from jobs and family
when there is a medical treatment available to them. Because
I do think that as we see that type of
treatment go up, then people can better manage and they
won't go to the use of street drugs, which is
(05:51):
very dangerous. But with quarantine and isolation, the risk of
death with the use of some of these drugs goes
up for people who are used to being among a
group of people and now they're on their own. And
I'm very focused on what the use of telemedicine in
this COVID period is going to do for us. How
can we use technology and put it in the hands
(06:14):
of people or put it in more public spaces so
that people can connect with providers. I'm really excited about
the kind of continuum of public health supports that can
be provided in that way. Mona, Mary, you spoke a
little bit ago about your hope to build a facility
(06:35):
where people could detox and hopefully could be well positioned
to be on a path to recovery. And yet often
facilities and clinics that do that work receive some pushback
from neighbors saying like, we don't want those people here,
We don't want that in our backyard. Have you confronted that, NDC,
and how do you respond to that? Oh, no, not
(06:57):
inting that would never happen. Yes, I have confronted that,
and I've had the opportunity, you know, d C Chelsea.
So you know, before I was mayor, I was a
Ward Council member and this issue has come up many times.
We for example, and I'm sure you're familiar with Oxford Houses,
when people come together in a residential environment, independent living
(07:19):
and they're all everybody's in recovery. It's a kind of
hands off government approach to people getting back on their feet.
And I love the model and it actually has worked
very well here. But you're right, if people know about it,
they're concerned about just other people who made too many
mistakes living close to them and maybe being a danger
to them. And the thing that always gets me when
(07:43):
I'm in a community, I can always say, who do
you think these people are? They're your neighbors, they are brothers, cousins, nephews, friends.
We all have somebody that we know who needs help
getting back on their feet, and they have to have
a place to live us like you, and you know,
I've developed over the years all kinds of ways to
(08:04):
help homes like that integrate into d C. It's not easy.
I've had too many neighborhood fights about it, but it's
so worthwhile when people just recognize that there are all
kinds of people in the world, and sometimes people are
going to need a second chance, and it maybe you,
it may be a cousin and nephew, your son, daughter,
(08:26):
And we live in a community that values supporting each other.
So it takes a little bit of extra leadership and
work on the part of elected officials, but it is
worth it, clearly I agree, And certainly over the last
few years there has been a real push from the
public health community and from clinicians and others who are
(08:48):
on the front lines of treating and working with people
who have substance use disorders and addiction to really try
to move to an approach of harm reduction. You know,
while you certainly hope people can be on a path
of recovery and sobriety, you want to reduce the harm
that they are doing to themselves while that happens. And
clearly nar Can is a major example of harm reduction.
(09:11):
Can you just talk a little bit more about your
citywide commitment to narcan now? Absolutely, I don't think that
we've done enough to talk about harm reduction because we
still live in a world where addiction is seen as weakness,
not as an illness. So that's why I do think
that leads to some of the persistent stigma related to
(09:35):
substance abuse disorders, and so really educating people and constantly
having those conversations I think will reduce the stigma, will
help people get help and manage their illness and stay alive,
and all of those things are important. I've been Mayor
six years and over that time we've been working on
(09:55):
nar Can distribution. Very recently in our drug stores. Now
someone can go in who is a family member, friend,
potential bystander, and get the nasal spray, which were is
going to help us save lives and also lead to
some productive conversations about substance abuse disorders and harm reduction.
(10:18):
That we're trying to keep people safe and keep people
alive and not come to some judgment about their illness.
We'll be right back stay with us, so Mayor Bowser,
(10:42):
as we hopefully are moving out of the pandemic over
the course of this year. How do you think about
your job to help people move forward from this collective
trauma that we've been through, especially for young people who
have been so dislocated and so isolated from going to school,
from playing sports, from going to church, from seeing their
(11:05):
friends in the park, from seeing their grandparents at holidays.
Because this has been a collective trauma too, and one
that's fallen the hardest on our most vulnerable. I think
I struggle with that, to be honest with you, Chelsea,
because my experience has just been so different, because I've
been in person at work every day of this pandemic,
(11:26):
and so when I'm talking to friends. I have a
god daughter who's a tween, and I just see in
them what this has done to their social interactions, to
their love of school, their love of sports, just as
you said, and people have to ease back into that.
I noticed that when we reopen our schools, people have
(11:47):
given teachers are hard time for this, that and the other.
And I did too, except they were at home. Had
to pivot to teaching lessons at home. Some teachers hadn't
been in their buildings for eight or nine months. And
so what I have seen, just and because we're just
trying it putting one foot in front of the other,
(12:07):
is that as people come back to those environments, they
have to kind of softly come back. So maybe you
don't say everybody starts work on Monday at nine am.
Maybe you invite one group in to have just a
small staff meeting, or you invite you know, a sit down,
little coffee for six, or you do a tour so
everybody can see how the plexiglass has been put up
(12:31):
and their social distancing reminders. So I think people have
to be eased back into their normal lives and we
have to give each other the grace to do that.
While at the same time all of us are leaders
in our communities, we have to recognize that we've lost
some things not being together and having a real plan
(12:52):
to get back to those things. It's just really important
to our mental health, physical health, or academic health. Our
relationships are jobs and productivities in our downtowns. I'm sitting
in downtown Washington right now, and sometimes early on in
the pandemic, it would make me cry just to see
how empty the streets were and how a restaurant clothes
(13:15):
meant thirty people who weren't working and didn't know how
they were going to feed their families. And they have
these beautiful museums where Americans aren't visiting right now. So
I think that we all have to ease back in,
but we have to have a plan to get back.
To learn more about Mayor Bowser's work on addiction treatment
(13:37):
and harm reduction and everything else she's doing, please go
to Mayor dot DC dot gov. Dak Shepherd wears a
lot of hats. He's a hilarious and informative podcast Armchair Expert,
which he co hosts with Monica Padman. He's a talented
actor who has appeared in too many movies and TV
(13:59):
shows to list. He's husband to actor Kristen Bell. He's
a dad, and he's an advocate for approaching issues of
addiction with openness and honesty. It's inspiring to have the
chance to talk with someone who has worked so hard
to shatter stigma around substance used disorders and addiction, particularly
including by speaking openly about his own experiences. One of
(14:22):
the reasons I'm so grateful to talk with you today
is I think we need people who just refused to
be shamed and are honest because I hope that helps
other people. Then refused to be shamed privately or publicly. Yeah,
I think maybe it would be helpful for me to
say how I delineate between shame and guilt. I think
(14:44):
guilt is a tremendously wonderful emotion. I think it is
often the motivation for change, It's the motivation for apologies.
It's great guilt is I did something bad, or I
did something I wish I hadn't. Shame is I am bad,
I am a piece of ship, I am not worthy
(15:05):
of love. There's nothing very constructive that can come out
of that, but guilt. I'm all about embracing guilt, and
I have it all the time. When I've been very
public about my stuff. I don't feel shame because I apologize.
I make amend I make an attempt to write the
things I've done, and once I've done that, I don't
have any shame about it, and I'm not carrying around
(15:26):
fifteen years of shame from when I was a raging addict.
I felt guilty about a lot of those things, but
I I'm not embarrassed by them. I agree. I mean
guilt hopefully helps us take responsibility, and certainly as parents,
I want my when like you're throwing a magnetile down
the toilet and we had to call the plumber, Like,
I'm glad that they felt guilty about that. I'm also
(15:47):
like even more glad they took responsibility and apologized for
anyone who's listening to us tax who may not be
familiar with your story, would you just share a little
bit of your history with addiction? For sure, but briefly
to want to say yeah. The proudest and I am
of my children ever is when they admit something and
say sorry. That to me is the single most impressive
(16:08):
thing a little person can do, because it's the bravest
thing to own your shortcomings. It's so hard to do.
It really is hard to do. So when they do
that to me is like way better than a's way
better than cartwheels and all this other stuff they do. Okay,
so my story in a nutshell is if people know
what the ACE score is, you know you can take
(16:29):
this childhood trauma test. There's I want to say, eight
or ten questions and I'm getting get all these numbers wrong,
but you'll get the message if you had a parent
that was mentally ill, if you grew up with food deprivation,
if you had an addict in the house, if you
were subjected to sexual abuse, if you're subjected to physical abuse,
all these things. I took that test because we had
(16:49):
a guest on explaining it to us, Nadine Burke, and
I was like aid to the ten or something, and
I was like, okay, that explains a lot of things.
You know, an addiction being one of those. I come
by it through generations of addicts before me, and then
I had a good deal those childhood traumas. And if
you had asked me at eighteen, I would have just
(17:11):
said I liked drinking. It's fun. I like having fun.
It was tremendous amount of fun for eight years. It
worked great. And uh I also did a copious amount
of cocaine. That was probably my favorite thing to do,
and then it became untenable and it didn't work anymore.
I would be on all the things that kept me
(17:32):
from feeling the feelings I didn't want to feel, and
I was still feeling them. It just wasn't an escape anymore.
And I tried to get sober. Many times I would
get two months, i'd get three months. This went on
for a couple of years, and then I had this
very unique experience where I was about to start a movie.
I decided to take a vacation. I went down to
(17:53):
Hawaii with a friend. I specifically went there because I knew,
or I believe, they didn't have cocaine there. I found
Chris Math instead, just a week of just terrible over consumption.
By the time I flew home, I was so sick
that I could barely get on the plane and I
had to layover in San Francisco, and to get on
(18:14):
the next plane I had I had to go to
the bar and have four or five jack and cokes
just to do it to get through the next flight.
And I was in the corner of this bar because
I had been in a a at that point, so
I was just paranoid someone from A A was going
to see me in this airport. And I was also
starting a movie where I was going to make the
(18:35):
most amount of money I've ever made in my life,
an amount of money that I was positive would make
me feel happy. And people had recognized me the whole
time I was in Hawaii, and that was something else
I had believed would make me feel happy. And on paper,
I had everything I had set out to get when
(18:55):
I moved to l A. And I was like just
so miserable and suicidal that I thought, oh boy, you
have all the things now, and you're the most miserable
you've ever been, so something much bigger is broken. I
consider that a huge, huge gift that I was so
lucky and spoiled that I had those things, because I
(19:17):
honestly don't know if I could have figured that out
without those things, because for so many years I was
telling myself it was those things that were missing in
my life and that if I had those I would
have real self esteem and like myself and and be joyful.
And I just feel like it's such a blessing that
I could get those things and feel suicidal, because it
(19:38):
really made me confront that something much much bigger was
going on. That was my last drink. That was sixteen
and a half years ago. And then I was sober
for sixteen years, and I raced motorcycles, I raced cars.
I do a lot of stupid things to get malapproval,
and I get hurt often, and I have surgeries often,
(20:00):
And during quarantine I had two in a row. Um
there was an off roading accident and there was a
motorcycle accident. And through the course of being on opiates
for I don't know, maybe you know, a solid month
and a half out of a three month window. The
second time when it when it was over, I was
like this, No, this is not over. I'm going to
(20:21):
keep going. So then I started obtaining them illegally. I
came to this idea that I knew what unmanageability was.
It was that trip to Hawaii where I'm in a
car accident on day two of the trip. There's police involved.
That to me represented powerlessness in unmanageability. The obiit thing
was very misleading because I still was doing everything I'm
(20:44):
supposed to do. I was still interviewing people and they
were going it was going well. I was still playing
with my kids on stop and putting them to bed
and waking them up and doing all the dad stuff,
and I just generally was cruising through life without any
unmanageability other than the terrible aspect of opiates is that
your tolerance just is going up daily. So my intakes
(21:06):
going up daily just to stay at this level that
I don't have to think about any emotions I have.
And then it got to a level where it occurred
to me, oh, you're extremely physically addicted to these and
you're going to have a detox. And everything was secret
still at that point, and I'm getting kind of visibly
DETOXI to my loved ones, and I'm at that point
(21:30):
line and saying, because I do I have, Sorry Edkarth right,
So I'm saying, oh, I have. I'm having a really
bad flare up and that's why I'm so And this
goes on for a couple of days. And the one
thing I got out of those sixteen years of being
sobers I hadn't gasol at anyone. And I used to
be able to do that like crazy when I was
(21:52):
an addict. Before I could look at everyone and like
to them and it was just um, I couldn't. I
couldn't do it. I was make keen. People who loved
me feel crazy because they knew something was going on
and I was lying. And then I just eventually came
clean to my wife and to Monica, my co host
and best friend. Yeah, and then I had to go
(22:14):
to my fucking meeting I've been going to for sixteen
years and say, yeah, I took a cake last week
and I was high, and it was terrible. Weirdly, it
was terrible leading up to it because I had built
this whole identity in my head around having sixteen years.
I loved having sixteen years. I love talking about in
the podcast. I love that people would message me and
(22:34):
say a month three. I love being inspirational to people
for sobriety. And it became I was I was holding
on to that so much. I was deriving so much
of my self esteem from that that I was really
scared of not having that, and so I avoided losing
that for a while for a couple of months, and
then eventually I just the I couldn't do it and
(22:57):
I and I had to telling myself, and then I
felt very obligated for the people that have been inspired
listening to me get sober that I got to share
the fact that yes, sometimes man, sometimes it doesn't work out,
and you know, the solution is just being honest and
coming back. And how do you feel now today? Oh?
My god, so good. One of the most basic tenants
(23:22):
in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous is that addicts
cannot afford to have resentments. We can't carry resentments. You know.
I had to ask myself, how did that happen? Okay,
I have clearly I have resentments, and I have things
I need to confront and work out. And so this
has been like a second chance to confront all those
things that have been building up. And I have to
(23:44):
say today, at least I feel better with six months
than I had felt at fifteen years. How do you
talk to your kids about addiction? Oh, I just like
I'm talking to you. Yeah. They know that dad goes
to an A A meeting every Tuesday and Thursday. They
know I'm leaving. Where are you going? One of the
cuter moments was I want to say, my oldest daughter
(24:05):
was three, Macma, and my daughters really wanted to be
with me twenty four hours a day, and she said,
where are you going, and I said, I'm going to Hey,
why do you Why do you have to go? I
go because I'm an alcoholic and if I don't go there,
then I'll drink and then I'll be a terrible dad.
And she said, can I go? And I said, well, no,
you got to be an alcoholic. And she goes, I'm
(24:26):
going to be an alcoholic and I said, you know,
you might become one. It's the odds are not in
your favor, but but you're not there yet. And they knew.
They knew, Like when they relapsed. We explained, well, Daddie
was on these pills for surgery, and then Daddy was
a bad boy and he started getting his own pills,
(24:47):
and yeah, we tell them the whole thing. We're taking
a quick break. Stay with us. We were talking about
(25:08):
trauma earlier, and increasingly a number of doctors who study
trauma or trying to raise awareness that we all have
had a collective trauma during the pandemic and that we
need to be cognizant of the way that trauma will
haunt us, and that if we don't recognize it, name it,
confront it, it will haunt us, possibly for the rest
(25:30):
of our lives. And I think we have to be
able to talk about that and to help others talk
about that in the same way. I'm sure for all
the people who have reached out to you to share
their stories of sobriety, I'm sure you've also had a
lot of people reach out to you to share that
your candor has helped them be candid with their loved
ones and ask for help. The tipping point that got
(25:52):
me to be public about it was a really good
friend of mine who happened to have the same sobriety
date as myself and where the exact same age, and
we do the exact same thing, so we're very very similar.
And I told him, of course immediately and and I said,
I don't really want to do it on the podcast,
and here's why. And he said, he goes, Look, if
(26:13):
you're getting self esteem from the number, that's silly. If
you're getting self esteem because you think it's helpful to people,
that's great. But if your goal then is actually to
help people, it's so much more helpful that you relapsed.
Then it is you being sixteen years sober and married
to Kristen Bell. That's not incredibly relatable to some dude
(26:35):
who's struggling but lying to the people you love just
last month, that's pretty relatable. And are there other people
who's honesty about their addiction journey has inspired you? Oh? God, ya.
There's this guy I hadn't known really. He was a
professional skateboarder and very famous for that, and then he
(26:59):
he had a really popular radio show on Sirius, Jason Allis,
and he fights mm A now. As someone that grew
up without a dad who was desperate for all male approval,
I did all those things. I skateboarded, then I wrote motorcycles,
and I jumped things. Then I raced things. Anything that
would check the you're a man box I pursued, and
(27:20):
I was most impressed by guys who could do backflips
on motorcycles and stuff. So I'm never going to be
able to impress you. Basically, No, No, I have a
whole another category for females. Don't worry. So I was.
This was probably six years ago. Jason Ellis was a
guest on Howard Stern and I was listening to the
interview and Jason told the story of having been molested
(27:41):
by his father all growing up and how complicated that
was because he loves his dad so much still his
dad had since passed away, but the openness and the
willingness to share that story in the way that he did.
(28:03):
I was listening to it and I had chills. I thought, well,
this is the bravest thing I've witnessed in my life. This,
This so exceeds doing backflips on a motorcycle or jumping
through fire. This, like, what he's doing right here is
everyone's greatest fear. Like, Look, how damaged I've become. That's
(28:26):
the kind of heroic bravery I I am striving for
to have to be able to do that. That's as
badass as you can get. For me. We talk about
in our family how important is to be brave and kind.
I say to my kids, if you're brave and you're kind,
you're going to be good. It's gonna work out, and
I will feel like I've done my job. Yeah. And
(28:48):
I can say from experience, I've gotten physical altercations in
my wife's defense. And if I was plotting that, the
amount of bravery that took for me, that was a four.
And me telling her that I'm afraid she likes her
career more than she likes me was a nine for me,
(29:11):
that's so much harder for me to do than to
fight a guy in her defense. Thinking again about addiction
and the ways in which I think too often we
cloak addiction in shame and in moralizing instead of in
the real language of public health and harm reduction and
treatment and solidarity. What do you think or what would
(29:33):
you like to see change and how we talk about addiction,
how we talk to kids about addiction, and how we
treat addiction in our country. Well, first and foremost, just
that no one is ashamed to say they're diabetic, no
one's ashamed to say they've got a broken arm and
(29:53):
a cast. In fact, it's awesome when you have a cast.
In elementary school. I'll give my own example. I ink
I grew up thinking people that were addicts didn't have
will power, and I think I demonstrated great will power.
I went to the groundlings while also going to U
c l A, while also supporting myself, while also juggling
(30:15):
a full blown addiction, Like I think I have tremendous
will power and I'm tremendously responsible until you add one
thing into my body alcohol and then it's anyone's guests
where I'll end up in four days, like I don't
feel shame about that. This is clearly the graph demonstrates
(30:39):
who I am. And then this thing alcohol and drugs
is this extreme. I don't want to call it a weakness,
just an ability. I think the more people take it
out of the realm of yeah, moral weakness or lack
of will power, or shortsightedness or a headen any of
(30:59):
those things, I just don't think that's realistic. One of
my clearest memories as a little kid was when my
my father told me that his brother had been arrested
for selling cocaine to undercover cop and he went to prison.
He had struggled with addiction throughout his life. And yet
(31:22):
what I remember even more clearly it was my grandmother,
whom I called Grandma Ginger, being inconsolable, sure, just being
devastated of course that her younger son was going to prison,
but even more so that he had been in so
much pain and that she had been unable to help him.
(31:43):
And even in the mid eighties in Arkansas, you know,
my Grandma Ginger, who had been a nurse and nurse
and nasticist, knew that prison wasn't going to help him
overcome or recover from, or move forward from his addiction.
So just the devastation that she felt of her failure
as a mom, and also our social failure and the
(32:05):
way that those had collided into her son's life. Of course,
couldn't have articulated all that at five, but I just
felt like, oh, this isn't right, this is wrong. There's
just so much that's wrong. And now thirty five years later,
we're still incarcerating people for low level drug use, whether
(32:28):
kind of marijuana or cocaine or other substances, when we
know that if we really wanted to help our country
have less addiction, fewer people been prisoned to their addiction,
we would be investing in treatment and prevention and support
and not prisons and the continued criminalization of substance abuse. Yeah,
(32:50):
and and and you know, you also just cannot avoid
the reality that it is also so disproportionately brought to
bear on black folks than it is white folks, Black
and Hispanics. It's so lopsided. Not only is it not
helpful to the addicts, it's also uniquely punishing to people
(33:12):
of color. Well, thank you for sharing your reactions and
more decks, very very grateful. Thank you so much. Yeah,
it's a pleasure. You can hear more from Dax on
his podcast Armchair Expert. This is a really challenging time
for people struggling with substance use and addiction. Even while
(33:35):
we're seeing signs of hope and treatment, public health departments
are stretched to their breaking point, and loneliness, isolation, and
anxiety are very much a constant for so many people,
and as we were reminded in today's conversation, finding the help,
support and community necessary for recovery can be daunting even
in the best of times. One of the reasons I
(33:56):
wanted to talk about addiction for the podcast is because
this is an issue you that has touched so many
of our lives, and yet it is something we still
too often feel uncomfortable talking about. We all have a
stake in changing the way we talk about and treat
substance abuse and addiction and making it easier for people, families,
and communities to heal. If you or someone you care
(34:17):
about is struggling with addiction, please know that you are
not alone. For help, please call the Substance Abuse and
Mental Health Services Administration's free confidential hotline at one eight
hundred six six to help. That's one eight hundred six
six to four three five seven. Thanks for listening. In
(34:39):
Fact is brought to you by I Heart Radio. We're
produced by Erica Goodmanson, Lauren Peterson, Cathy Russo, Julie Subrian,
and Justin Wright, with help from the Hidden Light team
of Barry Lurry, Sarah Horowitz, Nikki Huggett, Emily Young and Humanity,
with additional support from Lindsay Hoffman. Original music is by
Justin Wright. If you liked this episode of In Fact,
(35:01):
please make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode,
and tell your family and friends to do the same.
If you really want to help us out, leave us
a review on Apple Podcasts. Thanks again for listening, and
see you next week.
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