The Crying Room

The Crying Room

I just heard about a government report, which extinguishes even a flicker of credibility for the efficacy of medical marijuana. As the report ascertains pot just masks symptoms and renders the patient unable to properly assist in his treatment.

This is an immensely sensible conclusion. I have the unhappy duty to weigh in on this issue. Our son, Michael had, like so many of his friends experimented with pot. When illness struck him, he stared an early death in the face. Scared, he began smoking pot in earnest. This was many years ago and I, unfamiliar with any kind of drug, did not even recognize the symptoms. Stupidly innocent I thought that my son was just a little silly at times; was a little contemplative, perhaps a little withdrawn. Then, because of severe medical conditions requiring operations, he became addicted to prescription drugs. My husband and I helped him to get clean of the meds a few times, but he always returned to the pot.

It got so bad that in his pot-addled mind he began to refuse a life-saving transplant operation. Our family, small and very intensely focused on each other, decided we needed and intervention. We tricked our son and brother to drive with us to what he thought was a party and checked him into a treatment-center.

Now the real story begins. Part of the treatment was a week of family participation. We, even his sister, went through lectures on addiction, went through confrontations with the addicts. And those confrontations took place in what I came to call the “Crying Room.”

Patients of a particular treatment group, grouped together not by choice of drug but temperament and resistance to compliance, together with their respective families came to the “Room,” dreading the confrontations. Patients and family members were to confront each other by revealing their feelings: describe how terrible we felt, seeing our loved ones ruin their lives, how hurt we were by their behaviors and how helpless we felt that we could not help them and prevent them from sliding into a mental and physical abyss.

They, in turn, did what addicts do best before they really want to give up their addiction, they laid blame. While the addicts seldom cried when we bared our souls to them and the strangers in the room, moms, dads, sisters and even a few brothers would break down and cry their hearts out, especially when we were accused of being the cause of all their problems. The process went on for days.

After Michael had been in treatment for six weeks, at incredible expense I might add, he was released—unbroken, untroubled and still addicted. An old man in this group, addicted to alcohol, his wife was leaving him, and his daughter avowed she would never see him again if he continued drinking, left the facility and kept on drinking. A politician with great carrier ahead of him, a beautiful, young wife crying for him bitterly, left the facility one night to get his cocaine. Of all the people in Mike’s group only one man finished his twelve-steps, the rest lost this particular treatment bout.

I have come to believe, as most of the young men and a few women there began their addiction with marijuana, that it was their gateway drug to the next drug of choice. Some liked pot and alcohol together, some went to cocaine, some shot heroine. Quite a few of the addicts, I came to realize, self-medicated because they suffered from undiagnosed mental illness.  Undiagnosed milder forms of manic depression were, in my opinion, the greater culprits.

One lesson I learned the hard way: You cannot help an addict get clean. There has to be a sincere desire to get well, to seek help, proper medication. One can only stand by and facilitate when help is truly sought.