Joshua Bennett-Johnson, LADC-II, a licensed counselor with 14 years' experience, argues that the for-profit rehab model focuses more on billing, marketing, insurance, luxury amenities, and short-term stabilization than long-term recovery. The article urges readers to scrutinize patient brokering, revolving-door treatment, underuse of medication-assisted treatment, and weak aftercare.

John Makohen emphasizes the importance of family history of substance use disorder without viewing genetics as fate. Citing research on genetic liability across substances, he explains how inherited vulnerability interacts with trauma, stress, sleep issues, pain, access, and social factors and describes practical ways to build healthier responses to daily stress triggers.

Needle exchange programs are often debated from a distance. Michael Cline writes about them from the inside. He remembers using the Lower East Side Needle Exchange during active heroin addiction in the 1990s, learning safer injection practices, accessing clean supplies, and avoiding HIV. His piece is pro-harm reduction, but not simplistic. It asks what these programs can prevent, what they do not solve, and how they could connect more people to recovery.

Kristen Crisp opens her Author of the Month article with a line that refuses to soften the pain: her sister is dead, and the guilt remains. In this deeply personal story, she writes about Robin, a beloved older sister whose cancer history, job loss, family stress, secrecy, and escalating alcohol use made the crisis harder to see until it was too late.

A vivid dream of sleeping children becomes the doorway into a larger reflection on organismic intelligence: the body’s built-in capacity to move toward regulation, safety, and wholeness. Kristin Onderdonk explores what the body already knows, why modern life teaches us to override those signals, and how pausing long enough to listen can reconnect us with a quieter, older form of wisdom.

Real victimization exists, and Diane Russell Chrestman does not minimize that truth. But in this candid reflection, she explores what can happen when suffering becomes an identity. Using lived experience, ACE awareness, and Internal Family Systems language, she examines the victim role as a protector, the relief it can offer, and the courage it takes to build a life beyond the worst things that happened to us.

Kristen Crisp writes with sharp humor and lived-experience honesty about the reasons she kept drinking for more than 30 years. From low self-esteem and “liquid courage” to the social pressure that made sobriety seem strange, this Author of the Month piece names the loops that can keep alcohol feeling normal long after it has stopped being fun. It is direct, funny, uncomfortable, and deeply human.

Harm reduction is not permission to use. It is a practical plan to keep people alive long enough to have choices. John Makohen offers a direct, compassionate guide to building an overdose safety plan before the most dangerous moment arrives. He covers naloxone, fentanyl risk, reduced tolerance after a break, using a safety buddy, avoiding substance mixing, choosing a safer space, using clean supplies, and writing the plan down so people know what to do under stress.