The road to recovery often has many obstacles and can be very bumpy. This was demonstrated again recently when we had to discharge several people from the program. One of those discharged was a man who has spent a total of four years with us during three stays.

He was discharged after his supervisor found an empty bottle of painkillers beneath the seat of his vehicle. Our rule is that medications are turned into the office, where they are made available by staff members at the prescribed schedule. For some reason this man, who was one time a manager, had neglected to turn this bottle in with the rest of his medications - which were prescribed at the same time. When he was drug tested he came up clean. However, he couldn't explain what happened to the rest of the pills and the assumption was that he had used them.

No, we're not doctors and don't decide who needs pain medication. Pain medication serves a purpose. However, our experience has been that when people are using pain medication in our program it interferes with their recovery.

Therefore, we allow clients to use pain medication only on a short-term basis. If they need to use painkillers for chronic medical issues we usually ask them to obtain non-narcotic painkillers from their doctor. Or else, we refer them to another program.

The purpose is to keep the rest of the clients from being tempted to ask the man for drugs, or think it's all right for them to use drugs. It's a difficult situation. On one hand we don't want to be insensitive to those in pain. But on the other hand we don't want our program to become contaminated by drug use. Our experience has been that sometimes even the managers who are supposed to make sure the drugs are dispensed properly succumb to temptation and use the drugs themselves.

It's not an easy issue to deal with.