The Addiction Affliction
By William Cope Moyers
[William Cope Moyers is vice president of public affairs for the Hazelden Foundation, based in Minnesota.]
Let me tell you a few things about me.
I pay property taxes because I own a home. I pay income taxes and contribute to Social Security because I have a job.
I serve on the boards of several nonprofit organizations in Minnesota, volunteering my time to improve my community.
As the father of three children, I do my best, along with my wife, Allison, to raise them in a loving and healthy environment.
Perhaps that seems unremarkable to you. After all, society expects each of us to do some or all of those things regularly. But let me share something else with you, too, to put all of this in context.
I am an alcoholic and drug addict who is in recovery today. And none of this would be possible if I hadn`t overcome substance abuse.
Science tells me I have an illness. I didn`t ask for it, I am not quite sure how I got it. But I have learned that if I don`t take responsibility for learning to live with it, I will die from it.
For years, I struggled on my own to master a baffling inability to "just say no." It started not long after I innocently experimented with marijuana in 1975, when I was a teenager. Soon, I was binge drinking on weekends in college. Alcohol turned to hard drug use. By the time I was 30, I couldn`t even take care of myself.
What is remarkable about my slow but steady spiral downward is that nobody saw it happening, not even when I was a reporter for the Dallas Times Herald in Texas, where I spent many good years–and some bad ones in the 1980s.
Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade and Dallas Police Chief Billy Prince didn`t see it. As a newspaper reporter whose beat was their offices, I gained their respect and their trust, even as my substance abuse problem blossomed into full-blown addiction.
My editors at the Dallas Times Herald were unaware of my private battle with alcohol and drugs. They saw in me an aggressive, accurate, and enthusiastic journalist who never missed a deadline.
The pastor at Tyler Street Methodist Church in Oak Cliff didn`t know I was an addict. I sang in the choir and helped teach Sunday School.
My parents, the two people who knew me best, had no idea of what was happening to me. Why should they be concerned? They had raised me to be a healthy, loving, and caring person. I had good roots.
I was born in Fort Worth while my father, Bill Moyers, was studying at Southwestern Theological Seminary and my mother, Judith Davidson Moyers, was working as a home economist for the Texas Electric Service Company.
My summers were filled with fun on the family farm in southern Dallas county, where I played hide-and-seek among the towering rows of corn or hung out at the Wilmer City Hall with my grandfather, Mayor H.J. Davidson. And when I wasn`t there, I was in East Texas, with my dad`s parents. Yes, ma`am and no, sir, became part of my vocabulary. Roger Staubach and Bob Hayes were my heroes.
I was raised with everything good. I lacked nothing emotionally, morally, or spiritually. As a child, I came to know God; in the seventh grade, my father helped to baptize me at a small Baptist church in Wilmer.
I share these things with you in hopes that you will realize that nobody–no family–is immune to substance abuse problems. No amount of love, parenting, money or religion is necessarily enough to shield somebody like me from the ravages of alcohol or other drugs. People like me need help, and we need to be treated with compassion, not punished, by our community.
We are good people–with a bad illness.
Teenage binge drinking in the Park Cities, heroin overdoses in Plano, drunken driving accidents on the interstate; more often than not, what is happening here involves good people up against a bad problem–substance abuse. Pointing fingers or assigning blame does no good. It is time for the community to extend a helping hand.
I got the help I needed to get well. Professional treatment was the answer–not once, or twice, but three times I received treatment for my substance abuse problem. Today, I am healthy and happy and recovering from an illness that has no cure but does have a solution.
Sadly, many families discover their private health insurance won`t cover substance abuse treatment as it does cancer, diabetes, or hypertension. There are severe limitations on what kind of treatment is available and for how long.
How bad is it these days? The Hazelden Foundation, where I went for treatment in 1989 and now work, has extended about $10 million in financial aid in the past three years alone to people and their families who otherwise couldn`t afford treatment. Ironically, most of those families had health care insurance.
That is unfair and doesn`t make sense. `There is no better place to start than with the young people in this community. Let`s give them a chance. One day, they might grow up to be adults like me.
