TDA contributor Screedler sent the following video to me today with the subject line, ‘his life may not be unmanageable yet, but it is surely embarrassing.” Even though it’s rare these days that a journalist will impress me with objective reporting or unmitigated professionalism, but this guy jumps the shark as far as journalists go and lowers the bar to a new level. He calls himself a proper news journalist in the video at the same time bragging about being drunk, biased, and plagiarizing BBC content for his “report”.

Be warned there is some foul language in the video, but probably nothing compared to what this guy said once he had sobered up and seen his performance- especially where he quit his job with an F-bomb flourish. What’s the recovery lesson here? Listen to my advice.

I had a hard time concentrating on a recovery topic during the final night of election mania so I combined the two. As you can see from the very helpful Google gadget you can track the election results by race, state, and county of your choice right here on TDA. On the addiction and recovery side, those of you planning to do the traditional election drinking games as described here, here, and here I have a little advice:

Regardless of the election outcome binge drinking will only assure that you miss it. Alcohol will bring no solace to the losers, only more pain and neither will it bring more joy to the victors, only potential trouble. So please, stay here at TDA- safe and sober to experience in full awareness this momentous night. If a few decades down the road someone asks where you were on the night of election 08’, hopefully you will not have to say I don’t remember or that you were watching extreme wrestling at the county jail drunk tank!

Presidential candidates gearing up for the primary elections in January seem to be eager to speak out on every topic regardless of how meaningless it seems… except for the very relevant and serious issue of substance abuse and addiction. The only mention of this topic I have seen in regards to the 2008 elections is out of New Hampshire which is historically known as the starting point of the primary race.

This story from the Eagle-Tribune has details on a town meeting that was to be held to discuss the various campaign’s responses on the issue of addiction.

PLAISTOW, N.H. – Tomorrow, local legislators, recovering addicts, activists, and members of the public will join together to discuss the problem of drug abuse at a Presidential Town Hall meeting. But some very important guests will be missing – the 2008 presidential candidates.

Not only did the candidates not attend, but their surrogates only presented canned speeches on predetermined topics! The author of the article, Meghan Carey, quotes Denise Devlin who represents the Friends of Recovery and the New Hampshire Drug and Alcohol Abuse Counselors Association as saying, “For us, just having the forum and having people attend is important.”

Unfortunately I have to agree with Mrs. Devlin’s sentiment. It’s almost as if recovery advocates have to bow and scrape while repeating the mantra “we’re not worthy, we’re not worthy” in order to even get an honorable mention of the issue in which we are so invested.

Substance abuse costs our country thousands of lives and billions of dollars each year yet garners not the personal attention of a single Presidential candidate. I will contact both the reporter of this story and Mrs. Devlin if possible to get the details of what was said at this meeting. In addition, I have made it a personal goal to get at least one candidate to respond to my question in a public forum:

In one month alone more people in the US will die from substance abuse than during the entire war or terror and the economic cost to our nation is approaching half a trillion dollars annually. If elected, what will you do to raise the public’s awareness of the substance abuse problem our nation faces?