People That Have Been in Rehab or Counselors: Can You Tell Me Why?

Most rehabs these days don’t allow smoking. Psych wards either. People who need to go won’t unless they are forced because of it. If you find a rehab that still allows it, it is probably to attract people who are looking for a rehab where they can smoke (and are probably willing to put up with a lot less and pay more for it).

For the full, funny story of The Hazelden Coffee War, go to:http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-coffee.html

excerpt:
In the March 23, 1998 issue of New Yorker magazine, David Samuels wrote an article titled, “Saying Yes to Drugs”.4 It starts with the hilarious story of the coffee war at Hazelden. Hazelden is the richest, most affluent, and most influential twelve-step-based drug and alcohol treatment facility in the country. It should be rich, just a 28-day stay costs $ 15,000. In the spring of 1994, the faithful counselors at Hazelden decided that coffee was a drug, just like any other drug, and that it should be strengsten verboten.

“There was concern that some people could be using coffee as a stimulant, three-bagging it, or four-bagging it,” Russell Forrest, one of the leaders of the anti-coffee camp, recalled. “What we were really dealing with, I guess, was a question of philosophy.”

A question of philosophy, indeed. The 12-Step religion has become more extreme in their opposition to any kind of mind-altering chemicals than even the Mormons or the Seventh Day Adventists.

Coffee was banned at Hazelden. This will undoubtedly strike some people as both very extreme and very odd, considering that coffee and cigarettes have been considered essential elements of A.A. meetings since the dawn of A.A. time, in Akron, Ohio. The A.A. faithful can still make the pilgrimage to Akron, to see Doctor Bob’s famous coffee pot, the one with which he brewed up the coffee for the original group of A.A. members. And Doctor Bob is often quoted as saying, “All we need for another meeting is a resentment and a pot of coffee.”

Bill Wilson was certainly not so fundamentally opposed to drugs. He experimented with things like using vitamin B3 megadoses or LSD therapy as a treatment for alcoholism until the General Services Board considered him to be an embarrassment, and asked him to stop using the GSB for his return address. (Kind of funny, isn’t it? Bill creates them, and makes them what they are, and then they tell him that he’s embarrassing them, so please go away.)

Nevertheless, at Hazelden, coffee had become an illegal drug. But the coffeeholic patients did not go quietly into that night. No, they decided to rage, rage, against the dying of the light. People smuggled in coffee and coffee concentrates. When patients’ belongings were searched, very strange contraband started showing up.

“You had people bringing this stuff in from outside,” Forrest recalls, “and there was an underground market, which, of course, you would point out to patients, and you’d say, you know, ‘Doesn’t this sound like chemical use?’ People were opening up packages, and I saw what was in there. It was the strongest brew you could buy. Somebody was getting coffee from South America, and it was sticky and black, and I said, ‘What is this? This is not Maxwell House from Bogota.'”

Oh, my God, it’s Black Tar Columbian! Not heroin, but coffee!

The black market (pun!) grew rapidly, and people were secretly brewing up batches of coffee in their rooms, and then flushing the incriminating evidence, the grounds, down sinks and toilets. Pretty soon, the pipes were stuffed with coffee grounds, and drains were backing up all over Hazelden. The conflict between the fundamentalist approach to the tenets of A.A. and the practical demands of running a treatment center came to a head. As the plumbing at Hazelden became more and more clogged, the maintenance staff rebelled. Finally, the coffee ban was ingloriously rescinded, much to the consternation of some of the staff, and those darned coffee addicts were able to get their fixes again without being criminals.

The author of the New Yorker article, David Samuels, pointed out that the coffee war was happening at about the same time as a much larger drug debate was happening at Hazelden. Foundation President Jerry Spicer had begun to encourage the use of antidepressant drugs, and other therapies that are not part of the traditional twelve-step process. Thus Spicer was a progressive, putting Hazelden at odds with more conservative, fundamentalist, 12-Step facilities like the Betty Ford clinic. And it put Spicer at odds with some of his own staff — half a dozen counselors quit in protest when Spicer approved of the anti-depressants. For them, allowing both coffee and anti-depressants seems to have been just too much of a departure from a purely spiritual treatment program.”