"The Big Idea"

Deirdre, Carrick and I are going to be guests on Donny Deutsch's "The Big Idea" on Monday, Oct. 24 on CNBC. The show airs at 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. (Tuesday morning) ET. I've seen a few shows and the format is a relaxed Q&A. Deutsch seems well prepped, and leaves plenty of space for answers, so we're hopeful that it will be a meaningful interview. He did a program on meth last week, and his producer tells us that they want to do a lot more about substance abuse and addiction. Unfortunately, Duncan has a soccer game so it doesn't look like he'll be able to join us for the taping, which begins at 7 p.m.

Just as I wrote that the coast we got from the July air date had ebbed, things are picking up again. MSNBC played "Saving Carrick" several times over the past two weekends. (Unfortunately, there seems to be no way that we can get advance notice so we can alert people we know who haven't seen it yet.) We've also been reading heart-wrenching stories, mostly in emails, although about fifty new members have registered in the Discussion area and a few have posted.

We are making alliances with a wide range of people that will, we hope, will continue to develop. I went to a lecture last night by a guy who quit his job as a high school guidance counselor to get the message out that the college admissions doesn't have to be the nerve-wracking process it has become. He said that he saw himself as a carpenter building a stage to which he hoped to bring a wide range of people, from college presidents to frazzled students. That's what we hope to accomplish, too. This last week has driven home how many people this disease touches, from CEOs to movie stars to students to homeless individuals from the boonies to suburbia to the inner city. Situations vary. Philosophies differ. The trick will be to get people united behind a common goal of tearing down barriers to treatment and eliminating stigma.

My friend Sue emailed me the the other day that her daughter Meri, a sophomore at Skidmore, was sitting with some friends at lunch. One of them said something like, “Wow, we just saw this intense film during class. Saving Cara. Or maybe Carey. Whatever, but it’s about this Westchester family and …. Christ, half the girls in the class were crying but it really gives hope." Meri mentioned that she knew us, and someone said, "Maybe Prof. So-and-So can get them up here." Schedules permitting, we'd be happy to go. We have a friend whose child fell into the drug scene at Skidmore and had to leave, but it could have happened at any college in America. Schedules permitting, in fact, we'd go anywhere.

On Sunday morning, I got a call from a woman who lost a sister to liver disease two years ago at age 42, and whose father died of alcoholism at 39. She wants to show "Saving Carrick" to her group, Wounded Healers, which meets at St. Paul's Community Baptist Church in Brooklyn. St. Paul's has 7,000 members and was the subject of Upon This Rock: The Miracle of Black Churches. She wants to change laws, advocate for recovery, and stay in touch, and I hope we do.

Carrick's counselor from the Chamberlain School also called last week, and through a friend of hers we learned about the Learn To Cope online support group for parents and family of opiate addicts. It's based in southern Massachusetts, where OxyContin has become a major problem. I exchanged emails with founder Joanne Peterson, who told me that a 26-year-old who had just come home from a three-week rehab had ODed and died. "He is the 23rd death since January," she said. That's a shocking number. OxyContin is a highly regulated drug. As much as I don't believe that addicted individuals should be in jail, it makes me wonder what would happen if illicit drugs were legalized.

I also received an email recently from a mother who had difficulty getting a book about her daughter's struggle with anorexia published, just as I did with Elephant on Main Street. She helpfully suggested Hazelden to me. I'm now convinced that Elephant should be online rather than in print, but we are working with Hazelden to add some book excerpts and author's interviews to the site. (All authors belong online!). I also hope that this mom will join the Discussion and offer some insights to the thread on anorexia/bulemia that never got off the ground. Carrick went through a short anorexic phase before she started using drugs, and was just pounds away from being hospitalized. I'm sure this is not an isolated case. In fact, I just read a harrowing story on the Learn to Cope board about an ex-cop who lost one daughter to anorexia and the other to drugs.

I've also resumed contact with Libba Philips, the founder of Outpost for Hope, which attempts to bridge the gap between missing people and their loved ones. Libba contacted us when "Saving Carrick" first ran. We'd like to promote awareness for her Letters Out Loud project with such organizations as the Midnight Run, a consortium of 150 groups that feed the homeless in New York City.

Finally, Dr. Harris Stratyner and I are on the last lap of a book proposal for Conversations with Dizzy about Living, Loving and Becoming a Mensch. Harris is Deirdre's boss at Madison East, a new short-term treatment program at Mount Sinai Medical Center that was designed for accomplished individuals such as CEOs, entertainers and athletes. Harris' dad was jazz great Dizzy Gillespie's accountant and confidant; Dizzy called Harris his "godson." A lot of Harris' treatment philosophy of "carefrontation" can be traced back to the lessons he learned from Dizzy, from sitting on his knee right up to his dying days.

So, it's busy around here, with a lot of promising alliances in the air, but what really keeps up going are the posts, emails and phone calls we receive from people who are going through similar difficulties. And even more gratifying is to see people making connections among themselves on the Discussions boards. I wasn't quite sure what I meant by "an interactive memoir of addictions and recoveries" when that subtitle occurred to me, but this is definitely it. Now all I need to do is find the time to resume writing the part of Elephant that's not interactive. There's one good thing about a publishing contract besides the advance. The deadline.

Downs and Ups

The Elephant website went down yesterday afternoon and didn't return until this morning. I'm not sure why. Visitors got the message "This site has reached its service limits. Please try later." My wizard behind the curtain, Scott Price, first noticed the problem. A customer service rep at SiteCrossing told us that he'd never seen that message before. Later, we were told that we'd maxed out on the amount of CPUs for the month, whatever that means, but that they'd reset the button and get us up and running shortly.

I apologize to anyone who tried to visit the site and was shut out.

This is the second time that the site has gone down without warning since our launch in July. The first time we lost nearly three hundred registrations. This time, everything appears to be intact. It may be that we'll have to invest in a better service provider, or upgrade the plan we have, which is a no-frills alternative to WebCrossing. Still, it's unconscionable to me that there's no warning, poor backup, and untimely support.

On the positive site, it has been heartwarming to see that Julie is doing well, and that Jennifer straightened out her problem at the clinic. I'm hoping that Steve's dad is doing better, and that he's staying well and straight himself. I received a great email from "Ringolevio," portions of which I'll be sharing, with her permission, in the future. I also heard back from the woman whose daughter is anorexic. She had walked out of a program in West Palm Beach last month but called following Wilma to let her parents know that she's okay. It's the same nightmare that parents of addicts live, and I remember well how elated I'd feel when I got an indication that Carrick was still alive.

Finally, I just returned from getting a blood test. As I rolled up my sleeve, the phlebotomist asked, "How's your daughter?" I looked at her, trying to figure out if Carrick had gone to school with her. "I saw your documentary," she said. "As I was watching it, I said, 'I know that family!' I took your wife's blood once." When I told her that Carrick was doing "great," she looked relieved, and told me to tell her to keep it up. It's amazing how effective technology can be in bringing people together when it's used in a heartfelt way and not simply as a device to deliver eyes to advertisers.

Speaking of which, the "breaking news" that preempted us from "The Big Idea" on Monday turned out to be separate interviews with Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee. The definition of news has certainly shifted since I was last in the newsroom. I've not heard back from the producer about a new date, although she promised to call this week. Who knows why. Perhaps someone felt that we'd been overexposed with the recent run of "Saving Carrick" on MSNBC (as if Pamela and Tommy haven't outlived their fifteen minutes by a few decades). Maybe they didn't like my position on alcohol advertising Ishow host Donny Deutsch runs an ad agency). We'll just keep doing what we're doing and the message will get out. In fact, Deirdre just called to say that FAVOR's Pat Taylor was at a conference this week where SAMSHA Administrator Charles Curie several times quoted Carrick's remarks from the 2004 National Survey on Drug Use and Health press conference last month. Progress happens if we just keep talking.

Preempted

I've just learned that our appearance on Donny Deutsch's "The Big Idea" on Oct. 24 has been postponed for some breaking news. We won't have a new date until next week.

Cheryl's Story

"Saving Carrick" ran again on MSNBC last night. We did not know it until the emails started rolling in after it was over. One of them was from Connie, whose daughter Cheryl Dean is memorialized at the Our Wall website. She's the eleventh name down in the second column.

"I still visit my daughter everday in the nursing home in upstate New York," Connie wrote in an email. "That is where they sent her." And in a post script, she wrote: "My daughter didn't get a second chance like your daughter Carrick."

I remember coming across this site several years ago. I filed it deep in my memory. It is painful to read. But we should. One of the main reasons I started writing Elephant on Main Street several years ago was to tell the stories of some kids in our village who had their stories cut short.

I don't know how anyone could read Our Wall and not be affected. We on this site know all too well that anyone of these sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, loved ones and friends could be us, or our loved ones.

Carolinas Conference

Deirdre, Carrick, Duncan and I spoke at the Carolinas Conference on Addiction & Recovery last night for nearly two hours. I think it went well. No one fell asleep. Duncan, in particular, had some good lines that broke the audience up. He left out a couple of cusswords, but I think he'll figure out how to work them into his next speech.

The theme of the four-day event is "Addiction: A Family Disease." I started with a general background on how and why we got involved with "Saving Carrick" and an exhortation for others to use the media to spread the message that drug use has negative consequences (as opposed to most portrayals), and that recovery happens.

Carrick is clearly the best among us at speaking off the cuff. She said she had prepared notes, but I didn't see her refer to them. She handled her theme of "recovery comes in many ways" with passion and humor.

Duncan, who I said had at various times played the "mascot," "lost child" and "hero" roles, coined new sociological jargon to describe how he often felt when everything swirled around Carrick's addition. He called himself "the ghost child." He concluded with an analogy to the addiction of one member of the family being a break in a linked chain.

Deirdre was eloquent on the the need for advocacy. She also talked about Faces and Voices of Recovery and Madison East, and closed by touching on one of her most urgent topics, Timothy's Law.

I wrapped it all up with a short rant on how we treat symptoms rather than root problems in this country (Got a headache? Take a pill. Wrinkles? Botox. Low-level druggie? Prison). Then we took some questions.

Our only regret was that we could not stay for the entire conference. (Well, excepting Duncan.) We could have learned a lot, not only from the presenters, but also from our audience of treatment providers. Carrick talked about returning next year to help Jim Van Hecke, the dynamic organizer of the conference and former administrator of Pavillon International, which takes a holistic approach to recovery, with logistics.

I hope that some of the participants at the conference will check out Elephant on Main and contribute to the discussions. We've had some providers weigh in from time to time, but it would be good to get some steady participation and get the Discussions moving again.

In fact, the coast from the airing of "Saving Carrick" has just about played out. It's time to think about what content will attract some new eyes and rejuvenate those of us who have been on the site a while. I have been lax in posting more of Our Story. But I think I'll continue to put that on the back burner in order to build up the interactive elements. I'll throw out some ideas in a couple of days and see if there's any reaction.