December 26, 2023,
Dear Hossein,
Thank you for your Christmas and New Year’s wishes. We are enjoying holidays with family amidst much gift giving and wonderful food. It is a time of rest and replenishment as we await arrival of the new year.
The videos you shared with me were a source of great joy. You are creating this vibrant culture within Congress 60 in which recovery is celebrating through the vehicles of sport, music, art, theatre, and daily rituals of mutual support. The vision of a Congress 60 orchestra is one that will bear much fruit in the years to come, similar to what it has meant for your local communities to see former addicts now performing as exceptional athletes. All of this conveys the transformative power of recovery that is possible and a reality within Congress 60. Please extend my compliments to those who participated in these music recitals. I enjoyed them very much.
One of the things I most admire about Congress 60 is your understanding of both the complexity of addiction and the complexity of addiction recovery. Your methods of recovery support reflect a profound understanding of the biopsychosocial and spiritual (worldview) aspects of addiction and recovery and haver designed methods of repair that address all of these dimensions and that work hand in hand with each other to not just delete drugs from an otherwise unchanged life but to create conditions through which people can thrive and flourish. People in Congress 60 have the opportunity to get well, but they also have the opportunity through this range of activities to get better than well—to become better persons that they would have otherwise been without the recovery process. The DST method provides a vehicle for neurobiological repair while the other Congress 60 activities provide a means of reconstructing one’s character and daily lifestyle.
The amphetamine experiments now being conducted are quite important. Here in the U.S., there is so much attention given to opioid addiction that there is little recognition that most addiction involves addiction to multiple drugs used at the same time or at different phases of one’s addiction. To test the power of the DST method across these choices of drugs will be an important milestone in addiction research. In my country, we have medications used for specific addictions to alcohol and to opioids, but we have few drug users addicted to only one drug. As amphetamine continues as a significant problem here, we lack medications that can aid the recovery process. Testing the use of OT in this regard is then quite important.
In the coming weeks, I will be working on the presentation I mentioned to you in my last email. I am also working with Dr. David Best from the U.K. on a paper and a book chapter—all of which confirm your observation that we will continue to contribute to the knowledge of addiction recovery as long as we are able to do so. I am also mentoring some younger people who I hope will carry our work far into the future beyond our own lifetimes.
Please extend my best wishes to your family and to all members of Congress 60 for a happy and healthy 2024.