Merrick had promised recovery in 90 percent of clients. But the definition of recovery, too, needed changing, he believed. The old definition—abstinence forever—wasn’t realistic, given the battles in the human brain between the reward pathway and the prefrontal cortex, which were messy. Recovery “is different for everybody; it means any positive change,” Merrick said as we sat in his office at the jail one day. People failed out of Unit 104 and the LLC all the time; some took several tries to get it right. The trick was to show that while all this was complicated to orchestrate, it was cheaper
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