March 7, 2025
Dear Hossein,
Thank you for your most recent letter marking the beginning of the month of Ramadan.
The details you provided on the annual tree planting ceremony were most interesting. I think this ritual is a wonderful way to celebrate one’s own regeneration and to offer gratitude and service to the community. It is also a wonderful way in which the Twelfth Valley is made manifest each year within the Congress 60 family. I had also not realized until your letter that the seeds and saplings and lands on which they are planted are selected in cooperation with the government’s Natural Resources Department. What a productive collaboration this is. I cannot think of anything similar here in the U.S., and cannot imagine such a collaboration given our current political and cultural climate. I agree with you that it would be a beautiful thing if this practice was adopted by addiction treatment and recovery support programs throughout the world. It would signal that recovery can give back to individuals and communities so much of what addiction has taken from us. I look forward to the photos you will share with me of this year’s tree planting ceremonies.
I wanted to share with you an excerpt from my latest writing project.
“Traditional clinical evaluations focus on what opioid use did to the patient and the extent to which this damage may be ameliorated and future damage prevented through the vehicle of specialized professional treatment. New innovations in service delivery might come from examining what opioid use did for the individual and addressing the extent to which such functions may be addressed within the context of OUD treatment. Such “doing for” effects include the experiences of pleasure, protection, performance enhancement, relief, release, respite, wholeness, belonging, and purpose. Within the most severe patterns of OUD, the drug relationship becomes everything until it becomes nothing—when the perceived instrument of one’s salvation becomes an instrument of one’s own destruction. Given the power of such drug-related experiences, the question becomes how to initiate and sustain motivation for relief, repair, and eventual transformation of values, identity, intimate and social relationships, and lifestyle via the manipulation of treatment and environmental contingencies until remission and recovery can meet those same needs and become self-rewarding and self-perpetuating. “
I was thinking of Congress 60 when I wrote this. I do not know of any program other than Congress 60 that has done more to address needs in recovery that were once sought to be met through drug use.
I wish you, your family, and all members of Congress 60 the very best during this month of fasting and reflection.
Friends and Brothers Forever