I was the first counselor employed by the world’s first drug treatment program for medical marijuana patients. I also worked in a number of traditional 12-step recovery programs and sat on the Hospital and Institutions Board for an organization that prefers not to be named. In the years before that, I managed to rack up 12 felony convictions and countless arrests of the variety that accompany a life of IV drug use on the streets of Los Angeles. I did 2 years for sale and transportation of cocaine then at 25 years old I found myself getting cleaned up at a “federally approved” behavioral health program, getting baptized at a historically-black community missionary Baptist church after a 10-year stint with atheism, and starting to care about other people. I have a lot to say about drugs, the recovery movement, religious trauma, Christianity (I have this idea to explore: “Pop-Comparative Theology”), and suicide. I was working on a pitch for a column in Vice Drugs when all of a sudden I found myself getting married on short notice and trying to have kids, it made me reconsider the platform choice. In the events surrounding my wedding I finally got a box of letters from my grandfather that my mother had kind of been “hiding” from me my whole life, as they were all written in the 3 years leading up to his suicide, they read like a real like suicide letter. I’m a dope fiend from LA, my grandpa was a WWII vet, farmer, and journalist in rural Maine. I only met him twice. I was mad at him the first letter I read. Let’s read the rest together because they helped me formulate an archetype that ties every subject I want to write about together: RELIGIOUS TRAUMA SYNDROME.
