Warren Ockrassa wrote:
2. Many times it seems to me that 12-step programs really substitute one addiction (to [substance]) for another (to the program).
This doesn't really solve the problem. It doesn't strike at the root, the source of the addiction. It simply replaces one behavior with another behavior, but offers no guarantees that backsliding won't happen.
To eliminate addiction, one must fundamentally alter oneself and one's responses to the world, not just to [substance], and I'm uncertain that any 12-step program provides the necessary tools to accomplish that fundamental transformation.
In the mid-80s, my mom was doing training to answer phones at a suicide prevention hotline. Part of the requirement for training was to attend an AA meeting (Narcotics Anonymous probably would have done, as well), for what reason I don't remember. Anyway, there was a limit for her tolerance for cigarette smoke, and so she wanted to go to a "smokeless" AA meeting. She could find only one during the week she was supposed to attend an AA meeting, while there were probably at least 3 meetings per day during that period in the area in which she was looking.
So these folks were sober, but some of them were chain-smoking through the meetings, which might support your point.
Unless things have changed recently, hospitals make one exception to the smoke-free policy for all patients, employees, and visitors: patients receiving in-patient mental-health care, because, as I have heard it explained, "many of them smoke and they have enough on their plates undergoing whatever treatment they are undergoing." Others have suggested that one reason people with mental problems of one sort or another are more likely than the average person to drink or use illegal drugs (I'm not sure about smoking, but istm that it might also be included) is that they are actually self-medicating for their illness, sometimes with whatever is available to them (frex if they are unemployed and do not have insurance or easy access to healthcare).
-- Ronn! :)
_______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
