We learned on Friday that the title of the Dateline special report will be Saving Carrick. My immediate reaction was "that's wrong."

"Saving" implies that outside forces had the controlling hand in Carrick's recovery. In the end, despite the efforts of literally dozens of people over the years, nobody saved Carrick except herself. (This opens up a whole discussion of "higher powers," I suppose, but I'll deal with that elsewhere.)

I'm all too close to the story, of course, to give it the best title. And as I thought about it from the perspective of having written a few headlines in my life, Saving Carrick pithily conveys the tenor of the piece. Everybody certainly was trying to save Carrick. In fact, some of our lives revolved around it.

Deirdre had the same reaction. I left it to her to tell Carrick. She was upset, but not enough that she couldn't joke about sarcastically it at dinner. Last night Carrick told me that she'd called her boyfriend, Pete, on Friday. He laughed for a long time and then put it all in perspective: "Nobody is going to remember the title. It just draws people in." What's most disturbing to Carrick, perhaps, is having that distinctive name shouting out from the marquee. She might have been just as upset if the title was Carrick's Philosophy of Life. There aren't too many Carricks around.

The working title for the show for several years had been Addiction in America. We knew that was not going to hold up. Our small stories cannot carry such a huge burden. But it's indicative of the wide net we cast when we started out in June 2003 after Jennifer Sherwood, a Dateline assistant producer, contacted Deirdre. Her phone call was prompted by the bust of some local teens on the Jersey Shore for possession of alcohol and marijuana following the Hastings High School senior prom. The story first ran as a front page story in the local daily, The Journal News, then made the New York Post, New York Times, and Daily News.

Deirdre was interviewed by a Journal News reporter and and he used one quote from her: "I think a lot of people are in denial about how much alcohol and marijuana is being used here." The next day, Deirdre told a reporter for the local cable news channel that she thought that some of the parents in the village were more concerned about the kids being caught or written about in the press than about their use of drugs and alcohol.

The bust, the ensuing media coverage, and Deirdre's comments — even the fact that she would comment at all — touched off a firestorm of messages to the online discussion group we'd set up the year before for parents of teens in Hastings who wanted "to share ideas, information, and support about social issues such as substance abuse, curfews, cliques, and peer pressure."

In the midst of the back and forth, I drafted a message that I thought about sending to the group but didn't. The debate was already devolving into ad hominem attacks and questions about process (basically, who has the right to say what), and I felt that the following would only further divert attention from the real issues, so I held it back:

A respected national news show is contemplating a story about underage drinking and drug use. They want to tape a keg party, ostensibly to show that the activities that go on at these events go beyond a beer or two, a toke or two, and innocent socializing. They would, of course, obscure all faces. They wanted our assistance in finding a group willing to be taped, or a teen willing to do the taping.

Sherwood was undetered by our refusal to put her in touch with teens, and asked if she and producer Soraya Gage could meet with us in Hastings for background. She also sent us a videotape of a powerful special report that Gage recently had produced for Tom Brokaw, Sudden Impact: Ripple Effects of Drunk Driving, that convinced us that their intent was not sensationalistic.

Gage, Sherwood, Deirdre and I had a far-ranging conversation on our back porch on July 12. We made the point that teen drinking was a national story, not one confined to Hastings or Westchester, even if friends and neighbors seemed to be at each others throats — or ours — over the issue.

There was a lot going on at the time. Carrick had walked out of a long-term re-hab on Father's Day a few weeks before. Deirdre was about to go back to school to become a substance abuse counselor. We told Gage and Sherwood about our own recovery from alcoholism in the '80s, and Deirdre's near-fatal depression and psychosis in the late '90s. But mostly, we pushed our point that any story about teen drug use should focus more on parents than kids. My notes from the discussion:

Kids are going to make bad decisions. Life is all about learning from mistakes. But if you don't know the difference between a good decision or a bad one in the first place, or if you believe that something is "good" because "everybody does it"; or if you're led to believe that drinking and drugging are harmless activities that won't affect you, then how will you learn to learn from mistakes (since there are none in this world)?

The message certainly must have sounded ironic coming from us since we had been spectacularly unsuccessful in keeping Carrick away from drugs. But that was the point. "Just say no" is a nice slogan, but it doesn't begin to address reality, particularly when the social norm revolves around alcohol.

We also expressed major frustrations that the politicians and activists on either side of this issue are so far apart. Addicts, and the people they affect, are caught in the crossfire of the policy war, and little of value gets done although billions of dollars are spent putting penny-ante junkies behind bars for years.

Dateline quickly came back to us with a proposal. They wanted to do a story, but "only" if they could tell it through us. They'd give us a digital video recorder, and send crews to follow us at scheduled, relevant events. None of us really had an idea what the story would be about. Deirdre and my activism? Deirdre's new career? Carrick's struggles with heroin? Some tragedy in Hastings related to drinking? Some tragedy in our own lives related to drugs?

What we did know was that we had the opportunity to reach millions of people with a few simple messages. Perhaps the more important one is that addiction is a disease like any other. Although it is chronic and prone to relapse, it is treatable. Carrick became proof of that. But we are all too painfully aware that the outcome could have been very different.