NEVER SAY DIE - UPDATING MY ATTEMPT TO PUBLISH MY MEMOIR ON TREATING DRUG ADDICTS

                                    HERE WE GO AGAIN

 Much has happened between my last update and now. Perhaps the most important thing is a significant shift in my priorities. Dreams of glory have moved from high up on the ladder of importance to about #67. In its place has been first and foremost trying my best to figure out the secret of breaking into the charmed circle of securing a book contract from a traditional publishing house. To this end I have done the following:

•·         Learning to carefully listen to my instincts and take them seriously. Instincts - not impulses - are a convergence of steams of information including my thoughts, feelings, intuitions and bodily sensations.

•·         Listening more carefully to my instincts has enabled me to experience and process the fact that I was too uncomfortable with my agent/editor to continue without making some significant changes. In this case the change was to part ways.

•·         I mourned the loss, slowly got back on the horse, culled about twenty agents that looked like we might be in synch, followed their individual instructions to the letter, worked and reworked what I hope will be an effective proposal, and just a few moments ago sent queries to 8 prospective literary agents.

•·         Additionally I came up with a more effective working title:

                                  A HEAD of CHANGE:

My Odyssey of the Turbulent Beginnings of Treating Drug Addicts in the Sixties

                                              A Memoir

•·         I worked and reworked what I believe to be a comprehensive and engaging preface that does justice to the complex material I am tackling in this book. See what you think.

                          PREFACE

         I am a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City for the past forty years. I got my professional start in 1967 at Odyssey House, a pioneering therapeutic community treating heroin addicts. This book is an inside view of the best and worst of treatment I both observed and personally experienced at Odyssey in the late sixties when I was a troubled but eager to learn budding psychologist searching for my personal and professional identity.

       The Odyssey House I knew was an experimental treatment center aspiring to be a bridge from aimlessness to purposefulness for a self selected group of physically, psychologically and spiritually burned out souls, including me. Odyssey's mission was to provide a pathway to enlightenment and wholeness for the "misunderstood and the not understood heroin addict thought of as a lost wanderer on his own personal odyssey frustrated in his search for meaningful connectedness."

        Odyssey House was both a tangible place and a confluence of innovative ideas about rehabilitating drug addicts which were formalized and expressed through the Odyssey Concept. The Odyssey concept was based on the principle that one's final authority is the self but if that self is either hidden or missing, it must be rediscovered (reborn) or constructed (born). To accomplish this objective, the new inductee must choose to systematically work on his self, in a live-in program organized and focused to provide the optimum conditions for maximizing the probability of success. In this light, Odyssey was (and still is) both an example of a concrete institution providing a structure for accomplishing this goal; and, on a more general level, is also a microcosm of the best and the worst of drug abuse treatment in therapeutic communities.

       I entered Odyssey consciously aware I lacked a professional identity, but I was surprised to discover I lacked a personal identity as well.  For the first six months I had the ideal job experiencing Odyssey House as the fulfillment of my fantasy of a perfect ‘Garden of Eden.' But my gradual awareness of serious abuses of authority in the seventh month stirred troubling doubts. My idealized dream come true turned into a mind blowing nightmare. Perfection initially experienced as at-one-ment, gradually shifted into a confusing whirl of kaleidoscopic positive/negative, good/bad ambivalent experiences. Thus my seventeen month time at Odyssey became progressively more complex, multilayered, and frightfully entangled.

         Gradually I shifted from being a detached professional observing the social scene to that of an emotionally enmeshed quasi resident receiving treatment. An initial experience of idealization turned to disturbing doubts which in turn led to a personal and professional crisis of trust in myself, the program, and especially the executive director.

             With my sense of reality in doubt, I couldn't trust my judgment leaving me feeling profoundly insecure. Because of this, I obsessively attempted to make sense of my roller coaster like perceptions. I gradually became aware that present time was confused with my past as I was unwittingly reliving the worst of my adolescent days - experiences I mistakenly thought had been locked away forever.

         At Odyssey my adolescent quest to acquire absolute knowledge about the nature of reality resurfaced with a vengeance becoming the central preoccupation (obsession) of my life. Reality, which I had perceived as black and white, I now viewed as complex, multi-leveled, and multi-dimensional, perhaps best described as a messy profusion of colors on an artist's palette.

        In my sixth month, obsessed with attempts to clarify a deepening sense of external and internal confusion, I appointed myself the official scribe of Odyssey House. Thus the material for this memoir is largely derived from the journal entries I made over the course of the seventeen months I worked there in the late sixties. Although I didn't realize it at the time, besides working in the role of my official title as a psychologist, I was also playing the role of an investigative reporter.                                   

        I quit my job at Odyssey House in April, 1969. While my experiences reverberated their significance as a major transforming event was largely unconscious and would remain so for the next nine years.

        Multiple sparks, separated by years, have triggered the writing of this memoir. The first one occurred ten years later on November 19^th, 1978 in reaction to my reading a large, bold headline on the front page of the New York Times. The headline read:  NINE HUNDRED SUICIDES NOW ESTIMATED IN A REVISED BODY COUNT FROM GUYANA. This article detailed the gruesome account of what came to be known as "The People's Temple Massacre" in Jonestown wherein martyred cult members poisoned themselves, shocking the sensibilities of the entire world. Mine as well.

        Avidly I read press accounts of the tragedy, particularly the in-depth reports that attempted to answer the complex questions posed by this horrendous event. What were the essential variables that motivated this mass suicide? What was the nature of the leader's personality that was able to attract and to keep such a large group of people under his control, even to the point of their certain death? What kinds of personalities are attracted to these kinds of cults? What makes people stay even when they doubt the sanity of the leader?

       Besides Jonestown, other cult-like groups - including Synanon, the Moonies, and Scientology-were making notorious headlines of their own, as many ex-members alluded to their leaders' abusive use of brain washing techniques, supposedly in the service of mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being.

      Editorial writers drew parallels between these groups. Chief among them was that each group had a charismatic leader promising salvation to potential followers who, disillusioned with conventional society, were searching for some deeper meaning.  

      Once over my initial shock at the contents of these reports, my subsequent reaction was uncharacteristically matter-of-fact, devoid of emotion. Completing my reading on the subject, I uncharacteristically concluded there was nothing new here for me.                                                                                                                                                                   

      Thus I was surprised when, the next day, I felt an irrepressible urge to write a poem I called "The Death of an Illusion" about the Jonestown phenomenon. Words flowed naturally, as if I had been an intimate member of that particular cult, which of course, I had not been.

      Upon finishing the last sentence, I said to myself: Here we go again. Hearing what I had said, I suddenly realized why it had been so easy to write about the "Death of an Illusion" with such authority and intensity as the news stories about these cults had revived my own parallel life defining experience I had lived through nine years ago at Odyssey House.

      I knew the experience at Odyssey had been profound, but for many years after I left I felt too close to it to be able to appreciate all that it really meant. Deciding to let it be, I  had a fantasy that when I had given myself sufficient time and space to adequately digest all that had happened, so as to be able to objectify this life defining turning point, then one day I would write the story of my odyssey at Odyssey House.

     With undertones and overtones of Jonestown resonating and reverberating in the depths of my soul, I knew that the time to begin my inner odyssey was that very day. Resurrecting my journal entries I wrote the first draft of my memoir in a few hours. That was twenty eight years ago.

      After leaving Odyssey House I worked in a number of drug abuse programs, as well as furthering my education. I got a Ph.D. in 1974. After that I was trained as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and started a private practice in 1978. As many of my patients were substance abusers I continued to conduct research in this area keeping me attuned to progress in the field of substance abuse. 

      Various attempts to publish my memoir failed. Many of the rejection notes were encouraging saying things like "your work is compelling but we just don't know how to market it", and it doesn't appear to be relevant."

      Discouraged I let years pass, alternating between letting my manuscript collect dust versus making numerous reedits. The issue of relevance presented the most difficult problem for me to solve. It is true that few readers are likely to be interested in reading about the rehabilitation of heroin addicts forty years ago. However, I have never doubted that if the lessons I learned from my Odyssey experience were applied to present drug policy notable progress on the War on Drugs would have noteworthy results. But to stimulate interest I would have to demonstrate some compelling need for the reader now to motivate them to read about something that happened then.

      I understand that it is not relevant enough to simply state that that I and my co workers were on the cutting edge of successfully treating drug addicts participating in an innovative treatment method referred to as a Therapeutic Community. This is so despite the fact that there currently exists an expanding worldwide Therapeutic Community movement that unfortunately is largely unknown to the general public having been given relatively short shrift by the various forms of government. An example of this is contained in the most recent annual report of NIDA (National Institute of Drug Abuse - 2008) wherein therapeutic communities are not even mentioned on a list of suggested treatment alternatives.

      So what does establish relevance?  This brings me to the most current spark motivating me to pursue publishing my memoir. For years I have been reading repetitive indictments concerning an admitted failure on the war on drugs. Estimated statistics of heroin users in the United States are approximately the same now as they were forty years ago, ranging from 500,00 to 1.2 million. Additionally there is a continuing demand for treatment programs greatly outstripping the available supply. It is bewildering and disconcerting that since I left Odyssey House, despite much positive rhetoric, so little progress has been accomplished in winning the war on drugs.

      In this connection, although the events in my memoir occurred in the late sixties it concerns issues which are as timely, relevant, and universal now as they were then.  Among the important questions guiding my book are: (1) Why, despite billions of dollars, reams of research, numerous conferences, and policy revisions over the course of forty years - has "the war on drugs" remained an admitted failure? (2) What constitutes effective versus ineffective treatment of drug addicts? (3) What are the implications for a cost effective and treatment effective wide spread drug addiction policy? My memoir explores these questions in depth and breadth providing concrete solutions in effectively coping with this seemingly unsolvable problem.                                                                                                       

      This book then may be simultaneously read on multiple dimensions. These dimensions include: The story of Odyssey House during a crucial phase in its early development (December 1967-through April 1969); a scientific dimension diagnosing the central problem of drug addiction as the lack of a solid identity, characterized by a lack of trust both of others and of oneself; a political dimension describing and exploring key conflicts that arose between various factions at Odyssey and their effects on the treatment process; a psychological dimension recounting the personal odyssey of the author's identity quest; and a spiritual dimension exploring the crucial importance of the presence or absence of faith, trust, hope, love and  persistence.    

      In summary, I consider myself a subject of one who freely subjected himself to the Odyssey experiment whose main effect was to stir me to my core. The critical events that led to this stirring up,  the lessons I learned, and their implications for effective prevention and treatment on a grand scale, as experienced by both the drug addicts I treated, as well as for me personally and professionally, is what this book is about.