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Recovery in the News
New line of thinking in addiction
Jon Walker
ArgusLeader.com
January 11, 2010
A Sioux Falls corporation aims to plug a gap in alcohol and drug treatment in such a way that redefines the community's approach and attitude toward addictions.
The organization, called Face It, is introducing a variety of services outside the norm of standard care. Volunteers will make weekly phone calls to check on addicts in recovery. Employees will try to help clients find work. The center will provide drop-in work space and rooms for support groups, along with referrals to other agencies offering 12-step programs or 30-day treatment.
Sponsors of the new group hope its efforts will help form a consensus that sees addiction as a long-term illness instead of a source of shame. They think that businesses, in turn, will see not only moral value but financial gain in expanding efforts to help their employees.
Matt Walz, 29, who was a drinker and drug abuser as a teen, will lead the effort as chief executive officer of Face It. He has no quarrel with services now in place at area agencies to treat people facing addictions. During high school, he went to such an agency to dry out for 30 days and hasn't touched alcohol or marijuana since.
But he wants to help change a mind-set about addictions in a way that treatment centers can't. Approaching it as a long-term illness can push it out of the closet and into the marketplace where support is greater, he said.
"This is part of a new line of thinking in addiction," Walz said. "Treating it as a sin didn't work. Treating it as a choice has not worked. Treating it as an acute short-term disease hasn't worked very well."
Among 'first in the country doing this'
Walz and co-workers Tanya Montgomery and Mathia Rall work at the Face It office in a former bank at 26th and Western. The concept is new ground for Sioux Falls, said Pam Bollinger, president and CEO of Volunteers of America, an agency whose services include drug treatment.
She agreed the effort might seem overdue or obvious for a community that is awash with charitable a nd institutional support for people in need. But she said it can be a key step toward destigmatizing addiction, just as the Susan G. Komen Foundation has done for breast cancer.
"Isn't it sad it's taken all these years to bring it out of the closet? I agree. But we're some of the first in the country doing this," Bollinger said.
The center's creation grew out of a series of monthly town hall meetings that looked at both addiction and response to it. Most people needing help don't get it, and many who do get help never get the follow-up they need, Walz said.
10 percent of area adults chemically dependentThe numbers bear this out. A study showed that of 235,000 people in the four-county Sioux Falls metro area, about 23,000 or 10 percent are chemically dependent adults. About 5,000 of them seek some form of help, but the other 18,000 do not, preferring instead to try to hide the addiction or ignore it.
Charles Day, who worked on the project leading to the formation of Face It, said the study used data from the state Division of Alcohol and Drug Abuse and the University of South Dakota.
The addiction rate by itself creates a burden for families, the courts system and health care industry, but also for businesses.
"Eighty percent of the chemically dependent go to work," Day said. "The real cost of this disease is imposed in the workplace."
It turns up in poor workmanship, morale, absenteeism and unreliable behavior.
A multiplier indicates each chemically dependent adult harms four to five others, from spouses to co-workers, Day said. That brings the number hurt by addiction to 115,000 in the Sioux Falls area.
"Half the population is negatively affected. At some point, you've got to say, 'My God, this is a plague,' " Day said.
Day, an accountant, teamed with Sioux Falls businessman Kevin Kirby in 2007 to look at the problem of addictions. A year later, in fall 2008, they began the town hall series by bringing in representatives of Connecticut Community for Addiction Recovery. The sessions drew 50 to 80 people who by mid-2009 chose to adopt much of the Connecticut model.
"The idea was to get Sioux Falls to develop its own version of a revolutionary concept called recovery-oriented care," Day said.
Instead of someone finishing a month in detox and then returning to his previous environment to fend for himself, he is "released into a community focused on recovery," he said. "Addiction is a lifetime disease that requires a lifetime of attention."
Day said those working on the project successfully enlisted 13 major local employers and asked them to add chemical dependency support to their existing workplace chronic disease management programs. They would treat it with the same consideration as diabetes or cancer, he said.
Benefits for employers becoming involved
Day said he thinks employers will find they have such a stake in this approach that they will financially support the new nonprofit.
"We asked them to share the benefits with Face It. We get our money from the private sector by creating value for the private sector," he said.
He doesn't know what share of the $350,000 annual budget businesses would cover alongside other supporters. But sponsors, using lead gifts from Sanford and Avera Health, supplied $700,000 for the groundwork that Day and Kirby began in 2007.
Much of the work ahead rests with Walz, whose difficulties as a Sioux Falls teenager now weigh on his mission at Face It. In an interview last week he said he once mixed with the wrong crowd and was drinking beer and liquor by age 10 or 11. He smoked his first marijuana at 13 with a friend behind a pizza shop. He regularly found and misused pharmaceuticals. His parents caught on. He was almost 15 when his father took him for treatment at in-patient center in Minnesota.
The drinking and drugs stopped then for good, though he smoked cigarettes a while longer before quitting. Today he doesn't speak of being clean.
"I'm in recovery. For me recovery means abstinence," Walz said.
His background with addiction is not a happy subject, but he thinks it helps him now.
"I don't think you need to have had cancer to help somebody else who has cancer. Recovery is a gift for sharing with others," he said.
Reach reporter Jon Walker at 331-2206 or 800-530-6397.