canadian population you can't look at their genes you look at their history their history of deprivation this location alienation and loss of lands livelihood before bidding of their spiritual practices the potlatch which i'm sure was also practiced here and and this part of the united states where people get together and they give something away it's about sharing it's about showing that you're not starfish it's about including everybody else that made that illegal getting m b s of spence that's the ethic giving if you want to spence is forbidden and so on and so on and then we wonder why is it that these indians are so drunk all the time and why they keep sniffing glue and why they're committing suicide at some multiple of the national average well it has to do with social dislocation and dislocation so again what we're talking about is broad social issues not just individual predispositions and problems and choices and genetic determination now then how do you deal with the problem well so vancouver has a very famous facility called insight i n s i t e on the second floor is what  the place is being evaluated in a book to a dozen reviewed studies by no nobody's ever shown any harm what they've shown is those reduced best for over those there's every month and nothing but success but our brilliant federal government wanted to shut it down because  the misconception is that it promotes addiction well it does not nobody comes nobody becomes an addict because of harm reduction and nobody becomes more of an addict because of arm adoption all it does is it reduces the harm is it a bad thing to prevent the transmission of hiv if anybody thinks that's a bad thing then you should be in favor of banning arm adoption is it a bad thing to prevent by providing clean needles and a store swab but that's a bad thing you should oppose harm reduction is anybody becoming more addicted as a result of harm reduction no there's been no evidence for that for anywhere in the world as a matter of fact what do we really see we see that as read there's reduced use why is there reduced because for one thing the people are being treated by you like human there's this judge mental hostility very often even if they get the right treatment which they do but the point is that of the stain you're talking about people who began life as traumatize were never had any trust for authority for really good reason and also the figures beginning with their foster parents very often their teachers because they acted out and by the way i just want to offer you something acting out you say about kids that they act out and by that we mean bad behavior opposition our rudeness aggression that's not what i think it means i think it means that you portray in behavior that which you don't have the language the same words that's when you act out in a game of charades you have to act out because you're not permitted to speak there's a very specific meaning but when these kids acted out they were punished they were ridiculed humiliated that's their experience of authority figures now when i come along on a even if i'm trying to do the right thing but i do so from a place of judgment than this there in our sense of superiority or anything like that that's what they pick up on and they are wounded over and over and over again so how addiction facility may be the first opportunity for people to experience any level of acceptance because this is the army duction is not that we want you to stay an addict for us or your life nor we would love you to give it up tonight but the essence is but we know you're not going to give it up a night because at this point you still perceive that substance as being necessary to maintain whatever you're looking for in life and if that's how it is for you we're not going to be judging you and so the only question is if that's how it is for you how can we help you make that behavior less harmful to you and less harmful to others but that very message that very tone of acceptance and not judgment itself is healing because it is subverts the addict's idea that i'm a shameful worthless being because look all the sudden i'm not being treated like one maybe i'm not and it's not want to give the other it's not one size fits all on the twelve step groups do great job but only would to create jobs for everybody we know that and by the way they missed some very important things including the childhood trauma piece the never talk about but still you know they can be very helpful tremendously helpful but not for everybody there's not a question of it's one or the other it's a question of there's no one size fits all and nobody who sells clothes or restaurant meals or anything else w be the same meal the same size of meal or wear the same clothes and the same size of clothing why would we insist on not in the in the in the very complex area of substance use and drug addiction so it's really a matter of tailoring the  treatment to the particular individual i talk about before compassions when it comes to healing addiction the first compassion is just the ordinary human compassion we see somebody suffering you wish them not to you wish them not to suffer are most of us are capable of that on some level the second level however goes deeper is dick it's what i call the compassion of understanding where you actually take the trouble to understand the other person you're in feel bad for then you actually take the trouble to understand it and that's a step that most politicians would talk about addictions never the never asked and i have to say by the way a lot of physicians also they want to also take i've talked to a lot of doctors who don't realize that every person they seem to the last thirty years has been a traumatized person but you don't see it which is a whole other conversation of why that's the case so the compassion of understanding where you actually inquiry what happened here the third level of compassion then is what i call the compassion of identification reaction get that that person that's labeled or not it is not in any particular different from the rest of us except that they have chosen something or they've been driven into something that is looked upon by society is illegal or someone morally flawed but that's the only difference and there's a lot of people out there causing a lot more damage selling drugs by the way that kill people or hard harm people who are profitable and respectable corporate executives and then you take the drug addict you know like the people who make and pretended despite their knowledge that this is a non addictive narcotic i'm not on them went to jail but if a client of mine sells an ounce of cocaine they go so let's not pretend that these people are different from the rest of us that just happened to have suffered  and then the compassion of possibility and his recovery comes into it because the very word recovery itself is interesting what does it mean to recover something when you recover something you find it and what is it that the person of recovers finds well they find themselves which means that they never lost or selves they just lost sight of it and the biggest trauma actually as the same spiritual teacher also points out is not that you were not loved her supported or that you were hurt the biggest loss was that as a result of all that you lost a connection to yourself and that lost connection to ourselves is what drives all of us to try and fill that emptiness from the outside and i was talking to a friend of mine tommy rosen who who is a yoga teacher and i think l a and he's got this program called recovery tool on the internet and you might want to check it out there's another one coming up in may and that he had to use me and go a lot of other people you know in the addiction world and but tony was telling me they used to live in seattle this is when he still had a basketball team the supersonics and and he was also a sports guy he was into sports and saw but he says he lost his addiction to sports one day at a super sonics tube he says what happened was that so the seattle it's a pain this very tenuous lead over the balls and i was stunned the arena went dark protect that lead which also by the way give you this false sense of community and meeting and purpose and all that there's a lot of addictions in this society with tremendous with tremendous with tremendous harm with tremendous harm so that that compassion of that that compassion of identity identification but finally the what i call the compassion of possibility when you look on the addict not as a lost cause not as a  deficient or somehow defunct human being but it actually is somebody who is good just as much possibility for spiritual holiness and for psychological growth and compassion and functionality as any of us in other words when you see their possibilities we're looking at them not just to the lens of what they look like and what they behave like but what other actual strengths and possibilities what is the one of the human qualities that make them unique and what is it that they could manifest in their world if they could get past these selves to the behaviors and that's the compassion of possibility and we look at people like that then maybe they can start looking at themselves like that now there's the catholic hemselves it takes that it takes possession of themselves that's what the healing that's what the recovery is that's what they're finding and merton says in order to gain possession of ourselves we have to have some books some confidence some hope of victory so i caught this because we have this and yet another myth is that people have to hit rock bottom then i'll get better but what's rock bottom rock bottom for me as a doctor is very different from a bottom is for somebody who's going with hiv in the streets of vancouver and if similar neighborhoods here in washington state so in order to gain position of ourselves we have to have some confidence some hope of victory in order to keep that hope alive you must usually have some taste of victory you must know what victory is and like it better than defeat and victory begins with being treated human being and recognizing yourself as a human being the very thing that our society so chronically denies the addict and so i believe that if we actually understood this phenomena of addiction the people that we separate is that it's are so much like the rest of us that it makes us uncomfortable if we got comfortable with ourselves if we understood something with human development the science of brain development and trauma and all that which is not even controversial and if we adopted social policies and child care policies and prevention policies that didn't focus on telling people what's bad for them but treating them in such a way that so they can feel good about themselves that's where prevention actually begins we would have not only much more effective treatment programs for addicts we would also have a much more humane society for