“Recovery” – what’s in a name?

Some of you will have been bored by me banging on from various platforms, about the idiotic mud slinging that goes on between the ultra orthodox abstentionists, and the similarly entrenched harm reductionists. The slurs of danger and ineffectiveness have reached the public whose knee jerk take on all this, is that treatment of drug misuse simply doesn’t work.
In an attempt at some sort of mutually agreeable interpretation of the word “recovery”, Professor John Strang and various professionals and service users from ALL across the divided treatment spectrum got together in a smoke filled room for two days to thrash it out. Known as the UKDPC Consensus group, this is what they came up with:

Recovery is a process, characterised by voluntarily maintained control over substance use, leading towards health and well-being and participation in the rights, roles and responsibilities of society.

And I rather like it. It means that recovery, being a continuous process of accruing benefits, may begin well before abstinence (indeed abstinence may never occur in some cases, despite big recovery gains), and similarly, there may be further recovery to take place after abstinence has been achieved.

So that’s the end of the arguments then………..!