People new to NADA work often marvel at the fact that acupuncture for addiction treatment thrives in places in the world noted more for their social conservatism than for innovation. NADA held its 2007 annual conference in one of these places – Roanoke, a small city in the hills of the state of Virginia.
Among the conference speakers were two state officials, one a human services administrator and the other a pioneer drug court judge. Their remarks showed how well NADA has found acceptance in the region.
James M. “Jim” Martinez, head of the Virginia mental health system, spoke about some of the reasons why the NADA method has been widely adapted in his “conservative, fiscally responsible” state with a tradition of being “low tax, low service.”
Mental health and addiction services operate in the state through 49 different “community service boards” (CSBs). These are located in urban as well as “very rural” areas and, according to Jim, “They’re quite different from locality to locality … They’re local government entities and there’s a strong tradition of local government autonomy here.” [Editor’s Note: Since NADA services exist in all types of areas in Virginia, this means that the value of NADA proved itself repeatedly at the local level within each CSB.]
Like all states, Jim explained, Virginia is having to transform its service delivery system to deal with increasing demand and shrinking resources. “We want to change the culture of our service system – both the organizational culture to become kind of a culture of healing and hope and recovery and also the physical culture of our service system,” Jim said, adding: “We want to change the language that we use in the way we talk about each other and about what we do.
“That’s a tough nut to crack. We have people that we serve who have been in our rehabilitation programs for 18, 19, 20 years. And we have to ask ourselves – what is it about that experience that we need to look at and facilitate recovery. I think that’s partly because our funding doesn’t create an incentive for recovery. It, in fact, may create an incentive for dependence.
“I think we underestimate the degree to which getting a diagnosis of mental illness or having an addiction can be a spirit breaking experience for people… And to believe, because of the stigma that we have, that that’s the way you are going to be for the rest of your life is a pretty crushing blow for people … we forget sometimes that for the individual we need to find a way to re-awaken the hope in that person following that despair … It involves active coping versus just a passive kind of adjustment, reclaiming a positive sense of yourself, and having a new and different kind of connection with other people.
“ My own belief is that [NADA work is] very much consistent with that vision of recovery. And acupuncture can help create a welcoming, healing kind of environment for people, support a culture of healing, and help providers and participants collaborate in a different way in a recovery process. My understanding is that [NADA] takes people where they are, and it doesn’t really matter where you are – it matters where you’re going. And it can show people that they can take some control over their own recovery path and that change is possible, that there is hope of full recovery for everyone. To the extent that that happens, that is exactly what our vision is.”
Diane Strickland is a retired judge who spoke about her experiences presiding over Virginia’s first drug court, located in Roanoke. Because of the availability of the NADA protocol in the treatment system run by the local CSB, drug court participants could receive the benefits of auricular acupuncture.
According to Diane, an evaluation of the Roanoke drug court outcomes by professors at nearby Virginia Tech University showed that participants were 60% compliant, compared to 35% for drug offenders in the criminal justice system who do not go through the drug court track. The evaluation also found a 10% recidivism rate for drug-related felons participating in drug court, compared to a 45% rate for drug-related felons that go through normal case-processing.
She concluded that “the real successes of drug courts are not in the statistics, but in the stories of the individuals that go through the drug court programs: the mothers who birth drug-free babies, the mothers who are able to reclaim their children from foster care, the fathers who begin to play a role – both financially and personally in the lives of their children. They’re the stories of the individuals who have never held a job, who get a GED, who get job training and become a tax-paying citizen. And they’re the stories of people who have been addicted for 5, 10, 15, and sometimes more than 20 years who come into the program and leave the program with the tools that they will need to serve them well through the rest of their life to being a responsible member of society.”
