December 10, 2022
Dear Hossein,
I’m glad to hear that you are doing well. My recovery from the ministroke is going well and I have been able to resume some of our important work. I have nearly completed reviewing all of the interviews I have done with you over the years and selected short 1-5 sentence topical quotes that I think will be good to include within the book we are planning. I’ve focused on selecting quotes that I think will be of most interest to an international audience. I should be able to complete reviewing the interviews this week and will send you in my next email letter to you the selections I am recommending for inclusion. Then we can discuss which writings I should review next—either our email communications or your earlier published books.
I have been out of touch with my regular communications with Drs. DuPont, Seppala, and Kolodner due to my recent health issues but hope to resume them in the near future. The last communication I had with Dr. Kolodner, he was quite excited that his smoking cessation treatment program had begun to enroll patients. We were quite appreciative of his past communications with you about this. I cannot imagine the work that is involved in the university project. Such a project in the U.S. would take years due to all the regulatory requirements for building and operating an educational institution. I am sure with persistence that you will overcome any such challenges. The eventual opening of the university will justify all the work that went into it. The evolution within Congress 60 is testimony that recovery from addiction is far more than the removal of drugs from an otherwise unchanged life. From the inclusion of sports, the arts, smoking cessation, nutrition and weight loss, worldview, and community service, you are demonstrating that recovery also includes progress towards global health and functioning and a reconstruction of one’s character and values. This wholistic view of recovery is one of the very distinctive features of Congress 60 and something that could and should be emulated by addiction treatment programs across the planet.
My congratulations on the continued production of scientific articles and presentations. There seem to be multiple ways of knowing about addiction: experiential knowledge (lived experience of addiction and recovery, clinical knowledge (drawn from treatment specialists), scientific knowledge (drawn from controlled studies), and popular knowledge (often filled with misconceptions by the public). Your efforts in Congress 60 are integrating, correcting, and expanding knowledge in all of these arenas. Such efforts will take a long time, but the progress to date is quite impressive. The work that will be done in the future by your laboratory will inform and add credibility to all that you are doing. As 2022 draws to a close, let me say again what a privilege it has been to collaborate with you over these many years. I do not know what remaining time we will be granted, but we will continue to widen the doorways to recovery for addicted people and their families in Iran and around the world.
Friends and Brothers Forever