Sober Stories: Beth
What led you to get sober? I was 23 years old, and at that point I had been using and drinking for a decade. I was sitting at my kitchen table in my little mice-infested apartment, and I had this sudden awareness: if I didn’t stop, I would be dead within a year. My life […]
Holly Whitaker
Holly Whitaker is a recovery advocate who created sobriety blogs The Temper and Hip Sobriety, as well as the digital recovery program Tempest. Her book, Quit Like a Woman—which details how her own experience in sobriety informed her work with Tempest—is a New York Times bestseller. Whitaker has been sober since April 15th, 2013. 12-step […]
Danny Trejo
The actor Danny Trejo has been sober since August 23rd, 1968. He started attending AA meetings in prison, where he landed after trying to sell heroin to an undercover cop. Trejo first smoked weed at 8 years old, had his first drink by 12, and started shooting heroin at 14. He was in and out […]
French Montana
The rapper French Montana has been sober since November 2019. He got sober following a hospitalization a little over a week after his 35th birthday, when he collapsed from mixing Adderall, Percocet, and alcohol. Montana says his life was out of control, but he was the only one in his orbit who didn’t notice. “It’s […]
Sober Stories: Tommy
What led you to get sober? I own my own business, and when I was drinking, I had severe anxiety about why I wasn’t getting more work. I blamed everything else and didn’t really look at my behavior. It occurred to me how frequently I was coming into my shop very hungover. I’d have brain […]
All About Medication-Assisted Treatment
Medication-assisted treatment (MAT) is the use of medications—typically in combination with therapy—for treating addiction. Medications like Vivitrol or Suboxone help curb cravings and stave off some of the more unpleasant withdrawal symptoms, so that a person can focus on recovery. For now, there are only approved medications for opioid and alcohol use disorder, but research […]
Kaveh Akbar
Poet Kaveh Akbar got sober in 2013. Since then, he’s released a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic, and his first full-length poetry collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf. The latter—which draws from his experience as a Muslim Iranian-American in recovery—won several major awards, including a Pushcart Prize. Akbar says that he didn’t write with any […]
Sober Stories: Mark
What led you to get sober? My wife and I had talked several times about how my drinking was a problem. I tried multiple times to tone it down, thinking, “Maybe I can just have one drink.” But I’m sure you’ve heard the usual: one drink turns to six or however many. There were some […]
Leslie Jamison
Leslie Jamison—author of The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, The Empathy Exams, and others—has been sober since 2010. In The Recovering, Jamison tells the story of her own recovery and those of other famous creatives who got sober. Like some of the artists mentioned in the book, Jamison produced work while in active addiction. “It […]
Recent Review Measures How Many People Receive Medication-Assisted Treatment for Alcohol Use Disorder
The 2019 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) was the first nationally representative survey to ask respondents who received treatment for alcohol addiction if medications were part of their care. A new review in JAMA Psychiatry used data from this survey to understand how many Americans receive medication-assisted treatment (MAT) for alcohol use […]