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The Tudor Dixon Podcast: Recovery is Possible: Stories of Hope and Healing

Published Jun 26, 2024, 8:00 AM

In this episode, Tudor discusses addiction with Pat Roos, who lost her son to a drug overdose, and Christina Dent, a foster mom of a baby with a drug-addicted mother. They emphasize that addiction can happen to anyone, regardless of their background or values. They advocate for a shift in the approach to addiction, focusing on harm reduction and medication-assisted treatment. They also highlight the need for better access to treatment programs and resources, as well as the importance of supporting families affected by addiction. Recovery is possible, and it requires a compassionate and comprehensive approach. The Tudor Dixon Podcast is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network. For more visit TudorDixonPodcast.com

Welcome to the Tutor Dix Podcast.

Today, we're going to talk about a tough subject that I think probably almost every family in the United States has touched or been touched by in some way, and.

That is addiction.

Addiction comes in many different forms, and there's many different things that people can be addicted to, but ultimately, too often addiction ends in some sort of a tragedy or jail time, and that's something we want to go through today.

We're going to talk to a few different people. Pat Russ is with us.

She is a liberal university professor, and interestingly, we have Christina Dent and she is a conservative, evangelical Christian, which just goes to show that people who maybe have differences when it comes to the political spectrum can come together when it cause it when there's a problem that needs to be solved. And both of these moms are working to understand and solve addiction and overdose and I think it's just great that they're willing to come together and chat about this. First, I just want to remind you, guys before we get into this about my partners at IFCJ. Remember, since the terror attacks on October seventh, anti Semitism has been on the rise, not just in Israel, but sadly here at home as well and around the world. And that's why I've partnered with the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. And today I'm coming to you, my audience, to ask that you stand with us and IFCJ to raise your voice just as Oscar Schindler and Carrie ten Boom did. I'm sorry, Corey ten Boom. This pledge is asking Christians to stand with their Jewish brothers and sisters, to never be silent, to show the Jewish people they are not alone, that they have God and Christians on their side. So for the month of June, we're asking Christians to sign this pledge, which will be delivered to the President of Israel, to show that Christians in America are not only standing in solidaria solidarity, but they're also speaking up to So let's take a stand with the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews to let the Jewish people know they're not alone. If you want to sign the pledge, please go to support IFCJ dot org. Again that support IFCJ dot org to take a stand today. Now I want to bring in pat Rus because your story I was reading about your story, and it is so impactful and it reminds me of some things that have happened in my own family. We talked a little bit about before we started recording, but you lost your son to a drug overdose. I think the most fascinating part about your story was how young you realize that he was suffering with anxiety. If you can just kind of introduce that.

Sure, Alex was just the most wonderful son that you could imagine, and he was just one of those kids who laughed all the time and you just loved being around, and we had so many friends. But when he was twelve years old, he was diagnosed with anorexia, and it came out of the blue. We had no inkling that he was suffering from anything of the sort. And then when he was twelve years old, he basically stopped eating. And I think it's which is something that could be a precursor or was, in Alex's case, a precursor to addiction that he developed later on. But just it was the sort of most normal thing. We were the most you know, we were basically a good family, a normal family, and all of a sudden we had a son who stopped eating, and we you know, as I was looking back on it, I saw that he just stopped smiling. You know, lots of pictures in our scrap books, like everybody has scrap books, lots of pictures just to show him laughing and sitting on his dad's lap, and he had a wicked sense of humor. And then as I looked back, he just stopped smiling. And we took him to a eating disorder unit when he was twelve. He spent months there, both inpatient and then out of patient, and he got better. Behavioral therapy worked, and he came back and we were a good family once more until he started drinking and taking drugs later. And you can sort of have a direct line from the kinds of insecurities and anxiety that was overtaking him when he was twelve and thirteen, and then later developed again once he was in high school and in college, and then ended up having the addiction issues that he had once he got out of college.

I think it's interesting that you talk about the fact that he learned about anorexia and bulimia at school and came home and asked you about it, and then this kind of sort of manifested in his own life, and it was sort of when you see people that have anxiety, they look for a way to have something they can control, and we know that's kind of how anarexia and bulimia work.

We had a similar situation at school with my daughter. She went to school and they started talking about germs.

This is before COVID, but just regular stuff that you talk about in kindergarten, first grade, and they started talking about germs, and she came home and she was asking us how bad are germs? Like how much do I need to worry about this? And I didn't think anything of it, and then she started obsessively washing her hands to the point where her hands were just like alligator skined and it took We went to the doctor. We tried to talk to her about it. You don't have to be this concerned about it. But she definitely is my anxious kid. So when I read that, I could kind of, as a parent compare it in my own life and I just kind of think, well, okay, but if I see this, then what do I do to make sure I'm watching I don't know how to because, like I noticed, you said, probably five times we were a good family.

And that's the thing. It doesn't discriminate.

Doesn't discriminate at all. We have heard so many good families, so many of us are good families, and it just happens to anyone. I always say that if it happened to my family, it can happen to any family, across the political spectrum, across the socioeconomic spectrum. I mean, to hear you talk about your daughter, this is exactly how it started with Alex. He was worried about mad cow disease and my husband studied studies worst cases, and that was one of the things he studied, and he started worrying about it, West Nile virus. These are the things that he started worrying about at a very young age. So you know, we knew then that he was anxious and he was subject to those kinds of issues. But you never know whether or not it will develop into something more serious. But I think the one thing that I really want your listeners to know is that it could happen to any family. And so just I think, you know, as a sociologist, I tell people think about those larger systemic issues, psychological issues, socioeconomic issues, and determine whether or not these are issues that could be affecting your family and be aware of them, because it really could happen to any family.

And you talk about how inexpensive is to get heroin and fentanyl, and that also shocks me.

Christina.

I want to bring you in because I think that your perspective was interesting before you knew, because you were a foster mom of a baby who had a drug addicted mother, and I just the way you describe it as she ran up to the baby for the first meeting and kissed the baby all over, and you thought, this is not what I thought drug addiction was. I thought drug addiction was kind of like a selfish thing. You went off on your own. You didn't have love, you didn't go after your young people around you and care. It was just like that wasn't the person that becomes drug addicted. And you found out what we were just saying, It can happen to anyone, and you kind of came together on this journey and you found that this is a beautiful woman that had a vice that had controlled her for many, many years. Tell us a little bit about that journey from the perspective of someone who.

Was like, oh, this is all I think.

You said, people do drugs, and a pregnant mother who does drugs must be the worst, and you really got a lesson that that's not the case, right.

Yes, I did, Yes, I did. Yeah.

You know, I grew up. I've been a lifelong Mississippian and grew up in a conservative Christian home. Continued that trajectory in my adult life as well, and those values, and so I just grew up with that way of thinking. You just make good decisions and don't get involved with drugs, and then bad things won't happen to you. It's not that I couldn't see some nuances in other parts of life, but I did not see them in this area, and so I really did kind of carry on that bad people use drugs, you know, worst people become addicted to them. When we became foster parents.

I couldn't.

I was a mom myself at that point, and I could not understand how a mom who loved their child could be using drugs while they were pregnant. I had no category for that. And part of that case from the way that we've handled drug use primarily has been through the criminal justice system. It has been if someone's using drugs, they should be arrested and put in jail.

That's what they need.

They need that sort of adult version of a hard spanking. This is a behavior issue. This is a choice. You know, they're making bad choices, and if we just make life painful for them, they'll stop making those bad choices and kind of shape up and act right. And So when we became foster parents and we got the call that we were going to be fostering this baby whose mom had been struggling with an addiction while she was pregnant, I didn't have any other way of understanding that other than she falls into that category. And yet, like you said, when I met her, she showed me this overwhelming love for her child. It wasn't just a one time experience.

You know.

After that day when when she met him for the first time since he had been removed from her custody, which was straight from the hospital, he never went home with her after the hospital. He came straight to our house. She went to in patient drug treatment. She had been using for about twenty years at this point, and she would call me and she'd ask me about him. She got one phone call a day. She could call me, and she'd asked me to put her on speaker phone and she would sing to him over the phone. I can be standing in my kitchen listening to her singing Jesus Loves Me to her son, and that wrestling in me between what I've always thought about people like her and what I'm actually seeing lived out because she allowed me to see that. She allowed me to see this struggle in her own life of simultaneously deeply loving her son and wanting to be there for him and struggling with this addiction that she had struggled with for many years. And that was the beginning for me of separating those things in my mind to say, can this can exist in the same person. This isn't an.

Addiction.

Isn't the result of this sort of moral corruption in a person. They just don't care, They just want to be bad. They just don't care about hurting the people around them. This is much different because she desperately wanted to be there for him. She had wanted to be a mother her whole life, thought she would never be able to be a mom, and when she had a baby, even though she desperately wanted him, she still could not be that addiction at the time, and so that started me on a learning journey. Pat's learning journey took her kind of in a from a very different starting point, and we've ended up at the same kind of solutions point, even though we come from, like you said, very different backgrounds and ways of thinking about the world and all of those things. And yet when we started to dig in and look at what works and what doesn't work, we've both become convinced. And she writes about it in her book Surviving Alex about this is the reason these solutions haven't worked for us is because we have miscategorized this issue of drug use and addiction. We have seen it as this moral issue that needed discipline rather than a very complex health issue, maybe spiritual issue. There might be all kinds of things wrapped up into that mental health issue that will not be solved by increasing the amount of pain and disconnection and trauma in a person's life through and arrest and all of the things that tend to follow that.

It's so interesting because in all the stories that I've heard about people that have gone through addiction and drug addiction, there's never been a lack of love. There's been actually an abundance of love from not only the person who's addicted, who feels this tremendous gait, guilt and pain, but also the family around them who is desperate to save them and bring them back.

So, Pat just going.

To you with this question, what do you think if it's not that we put folks in jail, which I believe that has not helped in it. As one of you mentioned in one of your stories, is that the drugs are available in the prison too, what do you think the solution is going forward?

I think it's so important to recognize that our conventional approaches are really wrong. And you know, I think about it. The way most people think about drug addiction is that it's a choice. And I think Christina and I believe so deeply to our soul that this is not the correct way to think about it. And people think about it as well as a brain disease. You know, the idea that it's compulsion that we once we take that one hit, you know that it's people are gone. You know, they might as well just give up. And it's not that it's not the case at all. It's really about of all those people who take drugs, only ten percent get addicted. So that's such a small one in ten people get addicted, And so I really think about it as being the context in which we make our decision. Right. I never say, I would never say that that individual choice is not important, But I do believe, and I'm trained to believe, that those decisions get made within a particular context. And that context really takes into account systemic issues that sometimes are out of our control, psychological issues, socioeconomic issues like unemployment and racism, and those kinds of factors that really are around us when we are making those kinds of decisions. So I think it's really really important to take into account those systemic factors that affect the decisions that we made, that we make on a daily basis.

Let's take a quick commercial break. We'll continue next on the Tutor Dixon podcast. Do you think that, I mean, your son went into what almost well, thirteen different programs, correct, was it thirteen twelve twelve?

He would have he was on his way to his thirteenth, but he refused entry and came back riding New Jersey Transit right past our house and ended up in Newark. And so I think that the kinds of choices people have nowadays about what to do about addiction are so much more than just a decade ago. Right, a decade ago, Alex was an active addiction and the only strategies that were available were twelve step programs, which worked well for some people. Some of Alex's friends and people that I met along my journey went to twelve step programs and they totally believe in it and good, you know, I'm happy for them. But it doesn't work for everybody. So I think we need to think in terms of multiple paths to recovery. And the other thing that I really want to emphasize here is that our treatment systems are really broken, and the problem is is that people don't sometimes treatment programs. More often than not, treatment programs don't allow for medications. So methodone, I'm sure you've heard about a MOUD medications for opioid use disorder and sybox on right. Most of these medications are MAPP is another one you hear a lot about, are not available in treatment programs. For all the twelve programs that Alex was at, he never once had access to medication. And research suggests very strongly nowadays that medication works, So we should be using those and we should be doing effectiveness evaluations of treatment programs. None of the programs that Alex was was in had effectiveness training so for evaluation. So these are things that are just kind of clear cut, obvious strategies that we need to make. There are programs that do very well that are treatment programs for physicians and nurses, and some of the figures that I've heard is that seventy eighty percent of those programs work and they were they're very effective. Well, you know, so where were they when Alex was in? Weren't was in treatment programs? Right?

And I would argue where are they now?

Because I've had people in my life who have gone taken their people from one place to the next place, and then one place says they get so far and they say, oh, we can't help them. We would recommend this place, and then that place is out ignormously expensive. They can't afford it. There's no way to get this covered. There's no help. People talk about mental health care, but when you're talking about addiction, there's nobody covering that costs.

There's no help for people in this.

I mean, well, that's what the people I've experienced, The people I know how have experienced this. They've struggled with the financial cost of addiction. Is that something that you've also experienced.

Oh yeah, I'll let Christina jump in on this as well. But we know there has been on the book since two thousand and eight a parity legislation which is honored more in the breach than in anything else. Between physical health and mental health and substance used, right, those two are together, and yet many many states do not really address this issue. Not to mention the lack of really sufficient insurance. I always say insurance should be a right, not a privilege, and everybody, every American, should have insurance that covers physical as well as mental health and substance use. Christina, you made.

Well, it's an interesting part of this. So we had a conference with the nonprofit that I worked for, Ended for Good last year, and one of our speakers was Colleen Cowells, who is an attorney, also had sons who struggled with addiction, and she really got interested in this financial aspect of it because she's an estate planning attorney and she began to realize that so many of her clients were having their net worth decreased in their retirement years, and she started looking into it of why this was, and it was because so many of them had children or grandchildren that were struggling with addiction, and they were funding tens of thousands of dollars worth of treatment, and then that was just for one and then that person would come back, they might relapse, they go try another one. A couple, you know, ten twenty thirty forty thousand dollars more paid out of pocket if insurance wasn't paying for it. It's a significant cost issue. I was talking with a doctor and I was telling him a story of a mom who had called me and said, you know, we did everything for our daughter. She struggled with a heroin addiction. She had everything in life, heard her husband were both very successful in their careers. We sent her to the best treatment place as possible, and she said, but I would never send her anywhere that would give her medication for her addiction. I don't believe in that. And I was asking the doctor what he thought about that, because he's an addiction specialist, and he said, he said, you know that it just makes me sad because they might have sent her to the most extensive places. But if they did not offer medication as an option. They weren't the best in terms of outcomes. If you're looking at outcomes what Pat was talking about that evaluation, what's actually working, not what they just tell you they're going to do, but what's the outcome of that is really what we need to be looking for. And I would imagine there's a lot of families who are feeling like they are underwater it's trying to walk with a loved one through addiction. Really encourage people to look into something called CRAFT. It's community reinforcement and family training. It's offered nationally by an organization called Allies and Recovery. We're not connected to them in any way. I just think they do great work, but they offer online training skills groups.

It's a way of.

Interacting with your loved one that has been researched. It has proven to improve the health of the family as well as it actually improves the likelihood that their loved one will make positive changes in their life and eventually reach out and get help for their addiction. So if people feel like they are just looking for a life, RAFT would really encourage them to go check out Alice and Recovery and get trained in the Craft method.

For a lot of people, it.

Has given them some hope and some stability in what can be an incredibly challenging environment of trying to walk with a loved one through addiction.

Do you think it's kind of a natural.

Underscore that craft? It's just excellent and getting exist when I was going through that and I wish it had.

Do you think that it's kind of a natural fear?

Though? And Pat, maybe this is for you to think that if your child is addicted to a substance, that putting them on a medication may get them addicted to another substance. And I say that because I think if there are people out there listening, they may want to understand why that is helpful, because you know, you hear meth and you're like, oh, well they're going to go from this to meth, and that's got to be something worse, right, But it's not that it's getting them off of How does it exactly work to kind of break that down in people's minds who are going, no.

No, I don't want them on a different med.

No, not myth, you don't want them on myth, but MA or methadone, Right, methadone is not the same thing as meth. Right, Meth is another kind of drug one does not want to be addicted to. But methadone is a long proven resource that's been available for decades and the problem nowadays is that meth is not as readily available as we would like it to be. Right. But it's not just methadone, right, it's Syboxon the longest period of time that Alex was ever sober was when he was on suboxone. So that works. But all of the medications, medication assisted treatment, those are those are the kind of medicines that are that are really work and scientists have established those as being medications that really work. And so we have to believe in the science in this way and saying if scientists have h have proven, have established that they work, that we need to give our kids or not just kids, it's but you know, we're talking about addiction to alcohol as well, So we're talking about moms and dads and you know, brothers and sisters and lots and lots of people who are addicted and have history as of addiction. So you know, and there are other there are other kinds of strategies that we don't know about UH, such as a friend of mine UH has talked about UH. And the FDA recently approved a procedure that is called net an e T and it's being it's being evaluated right now, but it's already been approved for by the FDA for use. And UH there's a small little rehab in Kentucky that's actually doing these studies and UH it sounds remarkable. I saw a documentary on it, and UH, at the end of the documentary, I was furious and crying because here was a strategy that's been around for decades and they can't find people because they can't find a kind of financial incentive that would get people to try this strategy.

And I think part of what's important for people, especially family members, to really try to look at full in the face is what are the options. So it might be that they would prefer that their child was not using any substance at all, medication, nothing. I mean, I think I resonate with that. I have teenagers myself, so you know that thought of like I just I don't want them using anything, but what we have are better and worse outcomes that can happen. And for one hundred thousand families a year. Right now, that outcome is a funeral home instead of any opportunity for their loved one to be able to continue down a path of recovery, even if it takes them longer to find it. And so, you know, another friend of mine lost her son to an overdose and she went to a doctor to get medication for him, to get the box in for him, and the doctor yelled at her and he said, do you realize your son could be on this for the rest of his life? And while she was trying to find a doctor to prescribe it, her son relapsed to use drugs he bought off the street, contaminated, couldn't dose them appropriately, and passed away. And so she says, now, what was the the option? There was? Sure he could be taking medication. People take medication for all kinds of things. Long term, he would be alive. Wouldn't I much rather have my son alive and just taking a medication like many people take medications, And oftentimes those medications allow people to not have to deal with the cravings that they're experiencing for the drug they're addicted to, which allows them to have enough mental space and physical calmness to be able to rebuild a life outside of that chaotic substance use that they might be engaged in. So thinking about it more as how can we help people take stare steps? How can we kind of let go of this quantum leave idea that someone is going to go yesterday chaotic addiction and this morning they're going to wake up and they're going to be employed and abstinate and healthy family relationships. That's what we want, That's what a lot of our treatment models have been built on. Is making this shift incredibly rapidly. We know the vast majority of people about ninety percent, will relapse who try an abstinence based approach, and so how do we help fewer of them die when they have that experience? Well, medication can be a part of that journey to really help people stay alive and be able to build that thriving life back.

Let's take a quick commercial break. We'll continue next on a Tutor Dixon podcast.

Families who are listening right now and they're at that point where they say, I need something, I need something to know that I can that this person has a chance at recovery. Give us some success stories of what recovery looks like because even now listening to this, I think some people might say, well, it's recovery, just that they're always still struggling, that they can never get a job, They're just on a different medication.

What does true recovery look like?

This makes me think about to Beckham with the baby that we fostered. His mom, Joanne is the one who really changed my heart and sent me on this learning journey that ended up changing my mind as I read research. And we went to his one year old birthday party. She had been sober since.

He was a baby.

He's yeah, eight years old now. But we went to his one year old birthday party and we sat down across from one of her family members who had been part of her family this whole twenty year chaotic journey of her drug use since she was thirteen or fourteen when she started using. And she looked at me, her family member did, and you know, here was Joanne and Beckham and we're celebrating rale, eating pizza and ice cream together and seeing happy birday. And she looked across the table and she said, can you believe that we're here? This is unbelievable that's not just Joanne. It is possible. It took her a long time to find that journey. I just met someone at a conference a couple weeks ago who went to treatment nineteen times before he was able to find a pathway to recovery. He's now rebuilt his relationship with his son and is working in helping other people find recovery. So it is possible. It often takes time. It is not something that is easy to overcome. But we know research wise that many people recover. Many people recover even if they don't go to treatment, if we can keep them alive long enough to reach that point where they're able to get some perspective in their life and be able to make some different choices. It can be really hard to wait out for a family, but it is possible. Joanne has been sober now for eight years after twenty years of using. She's parenting her son. He's an extraordinary little drummer. He drums with bands all over their region in northern Mississippi at eight years old, and they're doing wonderfully. That's no guaranteed outcome, but it could only happen because she was able to find that path of recovery, and she didn't end up in prison or jail while he was growing up without her, and she was able to have that health centered approach to her addiction and they've been able to build a life that is really just remarkable and beautiful.

Yeah, I think, Christina, that's so true, because we do know that people age out of addiction and the statistics show that. And so I mean Alex Steyde when he was twenty five years old, his prefrontal cortex was not fully developed, and you know, he was a remarkable kid. What could he be doing now? Right? And so I end my book with a counterfactual inquiry, which is something that historians do, and I say, what, you know, what would our journey look like if, in fact, we lived in a compassionate harm reduction world as opposed to the punishment criminal justice kind of strategy that we've been living in for so many years through the War on drugs, which we've you know, which was has never been found to be successful. And you know, I look at that and I think, oh my god, you know, oh my gosh. You know, if we could have lived in a harm reduction world that was compassionate, and you know, would have given him more time to address his issues, his psychological issues, his substance use issues. You know, I still think. I say in my book that if I could that I think if I had to, if I was able to do it over again, and I lived in such a world, I would do things differently. But back ten years ago, right there weren't the kind of strategies that exist now. And so I recommend that people look at and follow up on the kind of strategies that Christina's talking about. I have a section of my book that gives resources, and on my web page patroost dot com, I give resources. Then I recommend that people take a look at and it is you know, it has gotten better. It's still problematic in a lot of ways. But there are available resources that didn't exist when I was going through this. I was a college professor and I was really good at research, and I couldn't find the right kind of treatment programs because they didn't really exist back then. And so there are strategies now and people should take advantage of them and learn what they are and follow them and follow you know, there are good web pages available now, moms for all paths to recovery is a great one. There's a lot of other ones as well, and I encourage people to I learn, you know, every time I go on the Mom's page, I learned something different, and so I really encourage people to do that as well.

I think it's amazing that you stay involved, that you keep doing this, because I do think that there are so many parents out there that feel alone in having someone that fully understands it is so important to have somebody that can at least show you the path they walked and what path that you will maybe walk, or how to walk a different path with your own child. I have seen it seems like there's been an influence from folks like you in government, because I will say just having had major surgery in twenty fifteen, and then my last major surgery was in twenty nineteen, I in twenty fifteen went home from the hospital with a giant bottle of pills of opioids I would never in my life get through. And then the surgery that same surgery I had in twenty nineteen, I went home with a few like big Yberprofen. They were like the giant horse pills, but still just Iyberprofen and I was fine and it just like those little changes that you see in how doctors are prescribing. It feels like that's coming from I've talked to even doctors who've been like, we've been working with Congress to try to change things. And so I want people to know that the work that you do is so important and that if other people get involved, it helps to move these things forward, and not just moving something like that forward. But also you talk about incarceration and Christina, I think you make such a good point about Joanne. What if she had been put in prison and her son then doesn't have the benefit of knowing her, this woman who runs up to her baby boy and kisses him all over even as she's struggling. That is not the right answer. And to your point, I don't think I realized that either, And as I saw some of these people being let out of prisons and saying, was it the best thing to put them in prison for this drug charge?

Is there another answer?

Man? Without people like you, we don't get to know, we don't even get to talk about.

It, and without people like you, we don't get an opportunity to come and talk about it. So really thankful for that. I think people don't recognize the power of their voices. People who are made making the decisions are listening. They're listening to the people around them. They're listening to their constituents. If they're an elected official, They're trying to put their finger on what path should we be taking here in Mississippi, we often have legislation that's put forward to increase penalty. So as fentanyl came in, there was legislation, let's increase penalty, you know, penalties for fentanyl possession. And instead, what Mississippi's legislature did last year was, instead of passing legislation to increase criminal penalties, they passed legislation to legalize fentanyl testing strips so that people who were going to use a drug that they had bought from a non pharmaceutical entity so they didn't really know what was in it, they could test it and know whether or not it was going to be contaminated. And the legislature passed that unanimously, went to the governor's desk. Mississippi is a very conservative, very religious state, and we have been able to make this mental shift away from the answer to this problem is going to be more people in prison, and the answer is not going to be that. It's going to be How can we think about saving lives? How can we think about helping more people have the best opportunity to live a productive and thriving life. So you've seen in some states like Michigan last year did a huge automatic expungement program. Maryland just did it for cannabis just a week or two ago from some of those convictions of in Maryland. It was a pardon, not a full expungement, but beginning to think about even like the workforce impact of so many people with criminal records for low level drug charges. And you know, on the one hand, I think about kind of the messaging I grew up hearing and it was like, well, look, you know, you make your bed and you got to lie in it. You made a bad decision, you got to pay for it. Well, how long do people have to pay for that? How much do the rest of us want to pay for it? Because here in Mississippi, one in four adults has a criminal record of some kind. We are not that dangerous of a state to live in, but we have had this over reliance on the criminal justice system to try to solve all of our problems. That's not just here, that's everywhere. America has had a long history of relying on the criminal justice system for issues that it's not well suited to deal with and actually can create a lot of issues when it tries to deal with that. And so we think about, Okay, how is this going to impact people's ability to provide for themselves and their families. That's a high value. How is it going to impact parents in the home raising their children? Another value? We want, We want families to be intact.

So I think you mentioned the trusting strips, and that to me is interesting because it just goes to show that if people are willing to use that they don't actually want to die. And I think too many people believe that, well, if you're out there doing drugs, you don't care if you live or die. But you know interesting, One of my relatives worked at a clinic health clinic in Kentucky and in the mornings they would often find people in the parking lot.

Oh deed, in the parking lot.

They took the drugs there because they knew doctors would come in the morning, And it just goes to show that they didn't want to die. They had an addiction it was a demon. They couldn't fight it, but they didn't want to die. And I think that's powerful.

Yeah, absolutely, How can we shift to thinking about that number one issue? How can we keep them alive? How can we help more people stay alive? A father and I tell his full story over a couple of chapters in my book Curious. He says, you know, he also lost his son to an overdose. And he says, you know, when you have to look at what's possible full in the face, when you have to realize I really could lose my loved one, you begin to realize there's a whole lot of options that you might not have considered before that begin to look really compelling. Because when you think that the worst that could happen is just you know, they make another bad decision, they use again. Well, then you know, for him, it was I'm going to yell at my son. I'm going to tell him how much he's disappointing the family. I mean, that's just very common because we think of this as a behavior problem that needs correction. And he said, you know what, I wouldn't give to go back now and handle my son's addiction differently. Now that I understand it much better. And for parents who haven't yet had that experience, they haven't lost their child yet, there's still time to shift that approach, to understand what's really going on with their child, and to look at the solutions, whether they're policy solutions or familial solutions of how you handle it inside of your family, that can really reduce harm, that can really save lives. We need to be open, and I think that's what Pat's goal in writing Surviving Alex and my goal in writing Curious was to say, there's other solutions out there. Let's look at them quickly, because we can save more lives. We can help more people survive that addiction and come out the other side and be able to contribute and all the amazing ways that they're able to.

To this world.

We need them, we want them. We do not want to lose more people.

I think that's key is how to look at it quickly, because I feel like when parents and loved ones are going through this, they always feel like that clock is ticking, like that bomb can go off at any moment, and they're chasing.

It's a race against time. What's going to get them first?

And so if you can both tell people where to get your books, and then how else to support you or to find those resources before we go.

That would be great.

Sure, I'll start so I can buy Surviving Alex anywhere you buy books, and definitely, when you have the book, take a look at that resources section, because I think that's the thing. I spent a long time making sure that that was available, because every day that I sat down and wrote my book, I was thinking about people like me, right, people like me who are still going through this and still dealing with the insanity of addiction or what I ended up calling the carousel ride from hell. Like nobody who is in that position wants to be in that position, not the person who's doing drugs, but the families in particular. You know, the families are so at loss about what to do, and so I just think that people want. I want those moms and dads and to be to know they're scene right, that somebody sees them, because when I went through that, I felt so alone that there was really nobody, no medical facility, you know, nobody who was really doing much to help me. Certainly not treatment programs and certainly not psychiatric hospitals. But I want my book to be something that that that I don't want to really lambast all of these programs. I want to say, we can all do better. And that's what I would love it if my book could help psychiatric hospitals and treatment programs and do better and moms and dads and family members to know that they're not alone.

Absolutely. You can get a copy of Curious on Amazon. And it's just my it's my learning journey growing up here in Mississippi. It's written as a memoir, includes a lot of other people's stories that takes people on this this learning journey of how I completely shifted my my thinking on this the solutions that would best align with my values as a conservative Christian, and they're not the ones I thought I would end at. But the book takes people on that that journey and what I think is a hopeful path forward. And you can see the rest of our work at end it for Good dot com. And it for Good is a nonprofit I started after I just became really passionate that we can really help a lot more people if we change how we approach drugs and addiction.

Well, I just love that.

I love the fact that you say that your mind changed and you saw things differently. I think right now, we live in this society that is black and white, and you're either on this side or you're on that side. And to see both of you come together and say, hey, you know what, we can meet in the middle. There's different ways we can approach different people and different problems.

It's just very refreshing. So thank you both for being here today.

Thank you for doing it right. Christina, Yes, absolutely try to breach that political divide and to get people talking about it, focusing on this issue that is so important to each of us.

There's really I say all the time, and we talk about it here all the time.

We're really not that far apart on most things.

Like most Americans, our core values are very but we get torn apart by these you know. It's like infotainment can make us want to, oh, I want to be on this side, I want to be on that side.

And then you get really entrenched in ideas.

So Pat Russ and Christina Den, thank you for coming together and not letting yourself get entrenched on one side.

I just really appreciate it.

Thank you too, Thanks for having us absolutely, and thank you all for joining us on the Tutor Dixon Podcast. Check out Tutor dixonpodcast dot com or iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. You can subscribe right there and join us next time on the Tutor Dixon Podcast.

Have a blessing,