Maia Szalavitz is an award-winning, best-selling author and opinion writer, whose focus is on changing the narrative of addiction and recovery. Two of her books Undoing Drugs: The Untold Story of Harm Reduction and the Future of Addiction and Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction, are among a long list of publications that address this growing need for rebuilding a broken system.
In this podcast, she talks about:
 Her New York Times opinion piece about Oregon decriminalizing drug possession
 How external force undermines internal motivation
 How the Black Lives Matter Movement showed the racial disparities in the justice
system
 That criminal drug laws aren’t based on science and how emotions are decision
algorithms
 The debate over decriminalization is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of
what actually works
 Explaining the analogy of addiction to that of falling in love or having a baby; people
do crazy things
 People with addiction are not lazy, they are hurting
 Trying to punish our way out of addiction is not the answer
 Why it’s important to meet people where they are and welcome them to treatment
 Not calling it Medically Assisted Treatment (MAT)
 Why we need more expansive definitions of recovery
 How chronic pain patients are being negatively affected by the opioid epidemic
www.smartrecovery.org