About 10 minutes before the 12 step meeting started this morning a man walked in that I hadn't met before. He seemed in pretty bad shape. I could smell him from about three feet away. He appeared to have not showered in three or four days, and his clothing was sweat stained and filthy.
I introduced myself and he told me he hadn't slept all night, that he'd slept on the streets. He said that he was an alcoholic, but had switched from alcohol to fentanyl pills and that he had smoked something like 20 of them in the last 24 hours. He said the drug is selling for something like a dollar a pill, that they were almost giving it away.
Just then the meeting started, but he continued his story when it was his turn to share. He rambled on and on for a while about his adventures with going to detoxes and trying to get into recovery. Like many addicts he had a lot of reasons why recovery wasn't working for him. He said that he'd been to a few detox facilities but left after a few days for one reason or another. He also had been in a couple of residential treatment programs in the past few weeks but left because he had confrontations with the staff. He had a lot of excuses why different programs wouldn't work for him. He was a perfect example for the rest of us at the meeting about how denial keeps us from getting into recovery.
After the meeting, several of us talked to him. We offered to get him into a detox facility for a few days, a place which would refer him to a longer-term facility so he could build up some time in recovery. However, he must've not been ready. Because after we talked for a while he said he needed to go smoke a cigarette. And he didn't return to the meeting hall.
He was a good lesson for all of us.
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