The lowest rungs

Yesterday afternoon I went to a conference for the Recovery Alliance Initiative, an NGO that convenes conferences from people across the spectrum of the substance abuse community (law enforcement, clinicians, rehab people, state and county employees, people like me in recovery, drug court, clergy....) to talk about holistic and all-embracing approaches to addressing the needs of individuals with substance use disorders. After a couple of great talks including one from a judge who does both drug court and criminal court, from which I learned that drug courts were defunded at the state level back in 2011, a fact both shocking because it's so stupid and perfectly rational given that Phil Berget got it done.

Late in the day we were doing roundtables on specific use cases. Our table took up the case of a hypothetical 18-year old who had been in and out of foster care and also had some juvenile run ins with the law who gets busted for breaking and entering. He is also meth dependent. In discussions, pretty much everyone at the table agreed how integral the role of Peer Support Specialist (PSS) is for someone like this who really doesn't have family or well-formed relationships to fall back on. Peer Support Specialists are basically people in recovery themselves who help support others in rehabs and other in- and outpatient navigate the recovery process. There's a certification program with criteria.

Like public school teachers PSS is a low-paid job but one acknowledged as a keystone. My initial thought was that it would be important to be sure that they spend a certain amount of time learning about the ecosystem of services above them that they can bring to the table for the people they're helping. I think in practice what happens is that good PSS folk end up staying in the recovery world and migrating into other better-paying (but still not particularly lucrative) roles. 95% of the people I meet at these events are in recovery themselves and all are strongly motivated to help others. The rest of the people there are very senior, sherriffs, judges, etc., people who know the deal and know what they are seeing in a room like that. Gold.

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