"National Addiction Treatment Week is a time for all of us to celebrate what for many is life saving and transformative care. Addiction damages the individual and their family. It molds children into adults with living wounds, many of whom go on to replicating the trauma with themselves and their family. But treatment works. Like many other complex illnesses, it may take time and diligence. But staying the course works, it does save lives.

Take this week to tell everyone you meet that addiction is a disease, evidence-based treatments are available, and recovery is possible. In the time of COVID, this message is even more important than ever. Click here to find and to consider participating in one of our four events."

Paul Earley, MD, DFASAM
President, ASAM 

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My mother, who was Australian, found Americans intriguing yet illogical, and strangely misdirected in their sentimentality. She explored this experience by marrying my father in the middle of a world war, so you could not accuse her of lacking a spirit of adventure or of inability to tolerate ambiguity.  But she never could quite come to grips with one consequence of American commercialism. “Why,” she would ask, “is there a Mother’s Day in this country. Yet, a national pickle month?”  Much of the time I would fall back on my role as callow adolescent, or cynical young adult, and shrug my shoulders, or encourage her to worry about something more important, such as whether Nixon was going to be elected.  The seeming lack of honor accorded mothers by yielding an entire month to bottled vegetables was never quite resolved in her lifetime. Despite this, she went ahead and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1970.  I thought I finally had the answer for her, when, in 2001, the status of pickles appeared to have been downgraded to a National Pickle Day (November 14, in case you are interested: https://nationaltoday.com/national-pickle-day/ ).  I was wrong. She was no slouch at research, and I was reminded that she had been a secretary in the Ministry of Defense when my father, on leave from New Guinea, first won her attention.  She pointed out to me that the pickle had yielded nothing in this virtual combat for primacy, as there is still a national pickle month as well as, now, a day.

It has always left me a bit suspicious of commemorative intervals or days, this exchange with my mother. Nonetheless, I would encourage everyone today to go to this link, in large part supported and certainly founded by the American Society of Addiction Medicine, National Addiction Treatment Week (19-25 October 2020):  http://treataddictionsavelives.org/   The sub-link, Tools & Training, provides a menu of short, free courses and discussions.  It also includes the standing link for the buprenorphine waiver training.   It is full of good, fresh material.

National Addiction Treatment Week:  better than pickles.

 Editor-in-Chief: Dr. William Haning, MD, DFAPA, DFASAM