A Skeptic’s Trip to the Recovery Club

[Editor’s note: Garth Mullins, author of ‘Crackdown: Surviving and Resisting the War on Drugs,’ out now with Doubleday, used substances as a means of comfort and escape from a young age, eventually ending up dependent. To stabilize his life he started taking methadone, a medication commonly prescribed as opioid agonist treatment. Methadone meant he ‘no longer felt like shit every day,’ Mullins writes — but sometimes it wasn’t strong enough to get him through the day and he’d turn to painkillers like hydromorphone and morphine. When April, a girl he was dating, noticed, she recommended they go to a 12-step meeting together. The Tyee interviewed Mullins about the book yesterday.]

April and I got off the bus and joined a knot of smokers on Sophia Street outside the Recovery Club. There were a couple nods of recognition. I didn’t know if people recognized me personally or just recognized what I was here for. Dressed in hoodies and leather jackets, jeans and Adidas trackies, they chatted quietly. Some drank coffee from Styrofoam cups. It was mostly beards, stubble and ball caps. Besides April, there was only one other woman there. She was rummaging around her handbag and announced that the next meeting started in five minutes.

“Hey, man,” an old-school biker said to me brightly. He had the confident swagger of a veteran. I could tell he was a seasoned practitioner of the sober arts. “Back again, eh?” he laughed. Some of the others laughed too. It was a common icebreaker. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever met this guy before, but I guess I had “back again” written all over my face.

Pre-meeting smokes were my favourite part. I’d stand on the sidewalk or sit on a picnic table, listening to people’s war stories and just enjoying the camaraderie. Nobody was out to boss you around. Nobody was trying to make money off you. Most of the people were earnest, trying to make an honest change. It was a real fellowship. I liked the people here, mostly. But my creep radar pinged as this one older guy moved in beside April.

“How long have you been in the program?” he asked her, his voice light and supplicating.

“This is my first meeting,” she said.

“That’s great. I’ve got five years,” he said, waving a black key fob. “Do you have a sponsor yet?” OK, I thought, here we go. “We should exchange numbers,” he continued, taking a step closer to April. He lowered his voice. “You’re going to need plenty of support.” April took a step toward me, trying to indicate we were together. She looked uncomfortable.

I could tell right away this guy was working on his “13th step.” There always seemed to be some creepy fellowship veteran dude trying to take a younger woman under his wing.

April looped her arm through mine. The creepy guy got the message and began chatting to the woman with the handbag instead. There were people I needed to avoid at the meeting as well. The 13-steppers had no interest in me, but the sober evangelists, with their new-convert zeal, always seemed to be. I guess I radiated “addict who still suffers.” The sober evangelists had found something that worked for them, which made them absolutely certain that it would work for me too. It was impossible to convince them otherwise — even though the majority of people who try 12-step don’t stay sober.

Don’t get me wrong. I wanted to make the program work. But I couldn’t help feeling turned off by the guys who called themselves “dopeless hope-fiends.” I was much more comfortable sitting with the skeptics at the back of the class. The guys who’d whisper “Don’t relapse without me” after the meeting.

The biker veteran and I stubbed out our smokes. Funny how this is OK, I thought. Cigarettes aren’t just permitted in NA — they’re practically a requirement, even though smoking is addictive and kills way more people than drugs. “Nobody ever robbed a bank to buy darts,” the biker said to me, like he’d read my mind. Then he added, in his “of service” voice, “When we look for loopholes in the program, like a lawyer, we’re just looking for an easy way out. It’s just your addiction talking, bud.” I remembered Dr. M telling me how the “addict’s brain” can’t make good choices.

It was time to go up to the meeting. The biker turned to head back inside, gesturing for April and me to follow. “Let’s get at ’er.” Upstairs, down the hall and inside the meeting room, chairs were set out and leaflets arranged at the front on a trapezoidal table like they had at my elementary school. April and I took our seats. I looked down at the familiar tile floor, patterned in a checkerboard of grey and darker grey. Fluorescent lights gave everything a monochrome wash, including the people. The biker sat at the front, behind the table. “Welcome! My name is Ben and I am an addict.”

“Hi, Ben,” most of the room said in unison.

“Is this anyone’s first meeting?” Ben asked. April put up her hand.

“Is anyone coming back?” Ben meant was there anyone who had relapsed and was returning to start over. Lots of hands shot up. Including mine.

Most of the people here were 12-step veterans. Most had been to an outpatient program, like Dr. M had suggested I go to, or had white knuckled it in Vancouver Detox, which was located in the city’s old dog pound. There were also plenty of residential recovery veterans from places across the province. Programs raved about their “tough love” approach to addiction, which basically meant they’d force you to be totally abstinent. Some places allowed Suboxone, an opioid substitution treatment like methadone, but they’d put you on a fast taper off of it.

The government subsidized many such places without requiring them to show any evidence of success. The programs never had to declare how many clients they’d kicked out versus how many actually graduated. And that meant, if you slipped up, they were more than happy to kick you to the curb. The government also didn’t regulate what kind of “psychosocial programming” these facilities had to provide, or what kind of training their counsellors were required to have. And so most of the places opted for amateur staff and sent their clients to the cheapest programming possible. Residents had to haul their asses to an unaffiliated 12-step program nearby. Like this one.

Many drug users had also been unlucky enough to wind up in one of the nameless small private recovery houses littered across Surrey. Here, they didn’t even pretend to care about “recovery.” The residents were often placed there as a condition of their release from prison. They lived under the thumb of the house’s owner — often just a dealer or gangster looking to steal their methadone kickbacks.

Anyone who’s lived in one of these places will tell you there’s a better chance you’ll die in a fire than get sober there. These shitty houses in Surrey don’t have a monopoly on this kind of exploitation. According to allegations in a 2021 Prince George Citizen article, the Baldy Hughes Therapeutic Community forced clients to work the phones on behalf of a provincial politician. The facility denied it. But if you’re in the life, you know that the recovery scene is full of these kinds of rackets.

None of this is ever mentioned by the endless carousel of politicians who promise to fix Canada’s drug problem. In every city, you can find some asshole standing on a soapbox, yapping about all the money that goes toward saving people from overdoses, HIV and hep C. Instead, they’ll say, we should put that money toward “recovery.” They never specify what that means. We just need more “beds.” These beds should be somewhere where someone is doing something — but those details don’t matter. The point is really just to make us go away. To put us out of sight.

In Vancouver, there’s often talk of reopening Riverview, the old mental hospital. Maybe the drug users could be disappeared there? Sometimes the politicians say that we should give more power to cops. Maybe the cops should be given the right to drag drug users off to a recovery facility against their will? Maybe we should be confined in there? And in many jurisdictions, they’ve done just that: they’ve passed laws making involuntary treatment an everyday response to drug use, even though mountains of evidence show that people do not succeed at recovery when they’re forced or coerced into it.

In spite of all of these political talking points, B.C. still doesn’t have a decent voluntary, evidence-based recovery system. In Vancouver, you have to get on a waiting list just to get into detox. After that, you’re put on another waiting list — often months long — before you can graduate to one of the scandal-ridden, under-regulated, private for-profit recovery houses. If you can’t get a government-subsidized spot, which are limited, it can cost between $9,000 and $15,000 per month to stay in these places. Families remortgage their homes to send their kids there. And some continue to pay off the recovery house after their kid has overdosed and died. Which is not unlikely — because people tend to relapse right after getting kicked out of recovery, this time with a lowered tolerance and disrupted connections to trusted dealers.

“Well, keep coming back,” Ben said from the front. “We ask that no drugs or drug paraphernalia be on your person at the meeting.” He asked someone to pass out the Basic Texts. Only a few people, like me, had brought our own.

We opened our books, and Ben started to nominate readers around the room. We each took turns reading the steps out loud. Some stumbled with the words. As people read, I noticed that the steps were all in past tense. As if we’d completed them already. Someone read: “We admitted that we were powerless, with unmanageable lives. We admitted that only God could fix us — if we let him.”

“We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.”

“We told someone — in detail — the nature of our wrongs.”

“We let God remove our defects of character and shortcomings.”

“We made lists of everybody we’d harmed and asked them to forgive us.”

“We had a spiritual awakening.”

And, finally, “We had to carry the message to the addict who still suffers.”

At the end of the steps you have to start working them again, but I’d never really gotten past the first step before. I already felt powerless, I didn’t feel comfortable about the God or spiritual awakening stuff, and I knew I didn’t have a defective character. Ben could see how daunting this all sounded. “There’s no work in the first three steps. Only acceptance and understanding,” he said. “Then comes the work.” Polite laughter. “Now you’re gonna read from the Basic Text, OK?” he said to April.

April beamed and sat up a little straighter. “Who is an addict?” she said, looking around the room. Then she looked down at the book in her hands. “Most of us do not have to think twice about this question. WE KNOW!” There were nods. Someone said, “Hell yeah, we do!”

April continued reading: “We lived to use and used to live. We are people in the grip of a continuing and progressive illness whose ends are always the same: jails, institutions and death.” The room was silent, listening intently. Even those who’d obviously heard this passage before nodded along.

“We did not choose to become addicts,” April read. “We suffer from a disease. Our disease isolated us from people. Hostile, resentful, self-centred and self-seeking, we cut ourselves off from the outside world... We lied, stole, cheated and sold ourselves. We had to have drugs, regardless of the cost. Failure and fear began to invade our lives.” It seemed to me that a lot of this stealing and lying was about money, not disease. The illicit market made drugs needlessly expensive. And we wound up in jail because drugs are illegal, not because we were broken. I didn’t see how it helped to constantly repeat that we were terrible people. I knew I wasn’t all those things. But the Recovery Club was no place to commit sociology.

There was a little discussion of the meaning of all that. A guy named Chris said, “All decisions I made, I did so out of fear.” And people mumbled their agreement. April listened, leaned forward, nodding along. She was here to support me, but she seemed to be getting something out of this anyway.

April nudged me when the chair asked if anyone else wanted to share. But I couldn’t explain what was wrong with me and why I needed dope. I couldn’t tell them that dope was where I turned for acceptance and relief. My truth was heresy: heroin was my Higher Power. In these rooms, I knew my story would sound like a rationalization. So I said nothing.

Up at the front, Ben said, “Remember HALTS. Don’t let yourself get too hungry, angry, lonely, tired... or serious!”

Ben stood up and squared his shoulders. “This group recognizes clean time by handing out key tags. If you have one coming to you, please come up and get it.” Slowly, the attendees approached the front as if this were an altar call. “Anyone got a month? Thirty days clean and serene?” Ben asked. The woman with the handbag accepted an orange key tag. Next Ben called for people with 60 days. They got a green one. When Ben called for the people who’d cleared 90 days, two stood up. There was a smattering of applause as they accepted their red tags. The applause got louder as the time increased: blue tags for six months, yellow tags for nine months, and a glow-in-the-dark tag for one year. People who had been clean for multiple years got the ultimate prize — black tags. I bet Ben had one of those himself.

“All those with the desire to stay clean today, give yourself a hand. You are the most important people in the room.” Some people clapped at me. I couldn’t imagine a lifetime of sobriety. They may as well have asked me to fly to Yellowknife by flapping my arms. “Come and collect your key tags.”

April nudged me to go up. Ben gave me a white plastic key fob on a metal ring. I turned the key fob over in my hand. It had the NA logo and “welcome” printed on one side. On the other it said “Just for today” in gold letters. I already had a few at home. Ben looked me in the eye and said, “Keep coming back, brother.”

The key fob was a reminder of the one requirement of membership: the desire to stop using drugs — including methadone. But I wanted to stay on methadone — for now — and quit everything else. That didn’t count as sobriety here. The NA Basic Text said, “We are allergic to drugs. It would be insane to go back to the source of our allergy. Medicine cannot ‘cure’ our illness.” NA Bulletin #29 was even more direct. “Our program approaches recovery from addiction through abstinence, cautioning against the substitution of one drug for another.” There was no nuance to all the Basic Text readings. It was a binary, absolutist approach to recovery — all or nothing. You were clean or dirty. You were saved or a sinner.

I didn’t want to lie to Ben and the other volunteers who ran this meeting. They weren’t paid to be here. They were drug users like me, just trying to get well. But then again, the creator of the 12-step system, Bill W., wasn’t totally abstinent himself when he dreamed up this regime. In 1934, while in hospital, Bill W. claimed to have seen a white light that cured his alcoholism in one hot flash. The thing is, he was being treated at the time with belladonna, a hallucinogenic plant. It seemed that even the founder needed a little psychoactive assistance.

Ben had us bow our heads in a moment of silence “for the addict who still suffers.” Then we huddled for a group hug. April got right in there. The creepy guy snuck in beside her, so I joined in too. Arm in arm, in a big circle, we all recited the Serenity Prayer. “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” I mumbled along, conscious of a lifetime spent fighting things I couldn’t change. As the hug dispersed, the handbag woman approached Ben with a piece of paper. Without a word, he signed it, proving she’d been at the meeting. She had been ordered by the court to attend NA.

Outside, a couple of the more seasoned members talked about their lives. I could tell by the cadences that these stories had been told again and again. And I already knew how they went. You start with a cinematic snapshot of your past life in all of its debauched chaos. The time you pissed in the back seat of a cop car. Hold for laughs. Then comes the pivot to a great loss. The people you loved that you can’t get back. The wife left. She took the kids. This is the part of the story that’ll break the listener’s heart. You aren’t the victim here. All that suffering is your fault. Then comes the turn — a sinner struck by a revelation from the Lord. You’re saved. A new man — the comeback kid, born again. The horror of your old life only testifies to the glory of your new life. Of course, the redemption story arc always needs a bit of editing. Dozens of relapses don’t really fit into this narrative.

Twelve-steppers know how to spin a yarn. I’ve often thought that this is probably the most effective part of the program: 12-step gives you a community and it teaches you to tell a new story about yourself. One where you’re not a piece of shit anymore. Waggling a black key fob, one guy said, “Five hundred and twelve days clean!” I was genuinely impressed. Five hundred and twelve days was an impossibly long time, geologic even.

I wished that I could chime in with my own redemption story. But I didn’t see any way of rearranging the sea of depressing shit that I’d done — and that had been done to me — into any kind of uplifting sequence. So I stood in silence, listening to everyone else’s story. Before taking off, Ben gave me a list of phone numbers of other members. “Reach out if you’re feeling weak,” he said, with genuine care. He waved goodbye to April and me and pointed at the list in my hand. “Use it,” he said.

Fat chance, I thought.

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Excerpted from ‘Crackdown: Surviving and Resisting the War on Drugs by Garth Mullins. Copyright 2025 Garth Mullins. Published by Doubleday Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Ltd. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.

Garth Mullins will be in conversation with Andrea Woo about ‘Crackdown: Surviving and Resisting the War on Drugs’ on April 16 at 7 p.m. at the Vancouver Public Library central branch. Free tickets are available via the Vancouver Writers Fest, and the event will also be streamed online.