Social recovery for problematic drug users

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My work on alternatives to traditional treatment is driven by my ethnographic findings that treatment has failed for the most problematic drug users. Relapse has become the accepted norm even among the youngest drug users who have tried treatment. It has always been clear to me, as a sociologist, that treatment is focused too much on changing individual behaviors; however, beyond the social networking found in 12-step groups (e.g., self help groups), there are few alternatives to individual-focused treatment. Social capital provides a theoretical foundation for a greater focus on the social aspects of recovery. “Recovery capital” is a good start, but we need to get people out of recovery networks and back into, and engaged with, mainstream social networks for sustained recovery. For example, the authors of a study on recovering individuals defined recovery networks as “artificial networks” and mainstream social networks as “natural networks,” finding that access to natural networks was not only missing but also discouraged by traditional treatment and recovery groups (Zschau, Collins, Lee, & Hatch, 2015). In this paper I advance the concept of “social recovery” described in previous papers (Boeri, Gibson, and Boshears, 2014) with a focus on natural networks for the most marginalized recovering drug users.

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