Remember those heady days of early January, 2026, when we could still laugh about America
trying to take over the world?
Well, in case you missed it at the time, some funny Greenlanders made a humorous meme about
American culture taking over Greenland.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, hmm.
Well it's a funny meme no doubt, but I hope that you are sheltered enough to not actually
know what it's referring to, namely the fentanyl fold, but once you do discover what that is
a reference to and what is being mocked here, you'll see that this is really not so much
of a laughing matter.
In fact, it's a very sad and tragic reality for far too many people in the United States,
sure, but around the world at this point.
And there are many, many things that we could talk about and address when it comes
to this issue of substance use and abuse and addiction.
And there are many sociopolitical factors to talk about.
There are also even geopolitical factors to talk about.
And if you don't know why the opium wars leading to the century of humiliation has forged
the modern Chinese mindset and maybe part of the modern opium war 2.0 that is now
being folded back in on the United States itself.
Well, there's a lot of reading and catch up to do with that.
But that is not our purpose here today.
Today, this is Solutions Watch.
And I want to talk about addressing this addiction crisis and what someone who is out
there who is either dealing with addiction themselves personally or knows people in
their lives who are dealing with addiction can do to start changing that person's
life. And obviously, these behaviors are destructive and they can get out of
hand. And sometimes it seems completely hopeless.
But there are there are strategies, ideas, there is help out there.
And I want to underline that in today's exploration.
I am no expert on these matters myself.
So instead, I've reached out to some people in my colleague group who are
experts on this subject through personal experience on both sides of the issue.
And we're going to start by talking to Ian Davis, who I know that my regular
viewers will know as, for example, the author of The Technocratic Dark State.
And you will know that from interview 1,993 in which I talked to Ian Davis
about his work on that important book and what it exposes about the nature
of the political reality we're living through.
And I'm sure you'll have seen my previous conversations with Ian on similar
conversational topics, and you'll have seen his journalism and his work on many
outlets, unlimited hangout, various places he's posted his work.
But hopefully you will also remember that Ian Davis, in fact, spent 20 years
as an alcohol and drug addiction counselor in the UK.
And you will remember that because we talked to Ian Davis here on Solutions
Watch four years ago now in an episode on acceptance of and commitment
to freedom, where we talked about Ian Davis's own experience, utilizing
acceptance and commitment therapy as a type of behavioral therapy to get
people to change their life for the better.
And that is an important conversation.
I hope you will go back and revisit it if you need to.
But I wanted to follow up with Ian specifically about drug and alcohol
addiction and addiction generally in order to understand how behavioral
therapy can intersect with the idea of addiction recovery.
And so I started this conversation with the deceptively simple question,
what is addiction?
Well, I mean, I think you need to.
So I might say, I mean, people will have a different definition of addiction.
Some people consider it to be a disease.
And some people consider it to be a self-harming behavior.
I personally, I fall on the self-harming behavior side of it.
So I would say that addiction is a repetitive self-harming behavior
that is driven by a variety of factors, emotional, psychological
and physical, physical dependency dependencies
cause that cause that repetitive self-harming behavior
or lead to that repetitive self-harming behavior.
But other people would say it was a disease that you
that you suffer from and there are various different models of treatment
based around those different kind of varying ideas about what addiction is.
And it and it doesn't matter.
One thing I would stress and one thing that we used to say
when we were working with clients is it doesn't matter what works for you.
All that matter is that it works for you.
So if you if you want to go down, I mean, the famous kind of
disease model would be the 12 step programs.
So the 12 step programs are very much based on the notion that you have a disease
that you have that you can't change.
Therefore, you try to try to work with it and defeat it.
Or the behavioral change model, which was the bump model that I personally preferred
purely because it appeared to me to be more affected with the clients
that I work with is more about taking control of underlying behaviors.
But the reason that we have the problem
so much in countries like the UK and there is such a vast unmet need
is a because obviously the numbers of people outstrips the availability of services.
But but that that people have.
You know, there are so much unmet need around other things, such as mental health,
such as emotional well being, such as, you know,
things like poverty, things things that drive people towards
situations where they can find themselves moving towards these addictive behaviors.
And and very much the the the idea of, you know, for the in the services that I work with,
that I work within was that that we're talking about what we might call problematic behaviors.
So that is a it's a problem to the individual, potentially lethal to the to the individual.
But it's also a societal problem because of the knock on affective people,
you know, often committing crime in order to pay for their dependency, whatever it might be.
You know, and I think, you know, there's so much
that is said about addiction in terms when people talk about addiction in the UK.
It's often they're talking about the use of illicit substances,
but we can be addicted to so many things
that a lot of our clients are addicted to prescribed medication.
A lot of people that were initially on illicit or illegal substances
have then moved on to things like methadone, which is a which is prescribed
as an official official substance that then addicted to that.
You know, alcohol is freely available and is legal.
The big I would say that probably the biggest single client base
one, not probably definitely the biggest single client group was
that I work with were facing addiction issues with alcohol.
So it's not just a there's no one size fits all.
It's not a black and white situation.
But it but it is a it's and it remains a vast unmet need.
Well, as you say, the we can treat this either as a self harming behavior
or as a disease, and there are approaches that are appropriate for both of those
those outlooks. But as you say, you prefer to treat it as a case of self harm.
How does that inform the types of strategies that you would use
to help someone recover from their addiction?
So first and foremost, obviously, you have to address any physical need.
So that means detox of some sort, if that's present.
And then you need to start talking about, I mean,
so let's if we take the 12 step approach, which is the disease model,
it is very much about focusing on the things that you can change.
So you have there's an there's an acceptance that you can't change the disease.
You are you are you are suffering from a disease.
Therefore, you know, I mean, and 12 steps is often 12 step pro not all,
but nearly all 12 step programs are based around faith.
So what can you use to overcome
the problems that you've got?
And often, you know, you can turn to your faith, rely upon your faith
and what you what you get from your faith that will enable you
to address the difficulties that are around your disease, that your disease causes.
The behavioral model suggests that that
that the the addiction is driven by your behavior.
So therefore, you need to address your behavior in order to tackle
the addiction, which is a slight a slightly slightly different approach.
Now, so the thing is, you focus on with I used a used a lot of talking therapy.
So now we so we've got you've got the additional the the physical component,
which you've hopefully addressed with the usually with support of medical services.
The rehab component, which is the which is the
initial kind of intensive work that you do.
And then you move into the into the longer term support.
So during the rehab part of that of that process,
which is where the services that I worked in would come into it more.
Um, what you what you would try to do is work with the clients to identify
the problem that the problematic behaviors that are causing their addiction.
So obviously, the problematic behavior might be the repetitive use
of the large amount of alcohol, for example.
But in order for them to be able to for an individual to buy alcohol
or to drink alcohol, there are a whole set of behaviors
individual behaviors that that are also necessary.
So, for example, stepping out of your front door to to go to the off license
or the pub, you know, getting in your car to drive to the pub,
getting the money, you know, setting aside a certain amount of your money
for your for your substance, all these all these kind of behaviors.
So what we would say is, well, if you if your intention,
if what is important to you, and that's a very important thing
about being honest with yourself about what is important to you,
if what is important to you is is not being subjected to essentially
self-imposed, self-harming control based on your your own your own behavior.
Then if you break down your behavior into its constituent parts
that lead to the key problematic behavior,
at any point along that pathway of those little behaviors,
you know, putting it even if it's putting your coat on to walk out of the door.
If you if that behavior of putting your coat on, that is an opportunity
to intervene for you to intervene at that point
in your behavioral pathway towards the thing that is leading you away
from something that is important to you.
So so each one of so what the therapies that the talking therapies
that I worked with predominantly were focused on getting the clients
to notice their behavior, because so much of our behavior is automatic.
I mean, who I'd ask anybody watching this or listening to this now,
who among us notice is putting our coat on to walk out the door?
You know, we just go and put it on and walk out the door.
We don't actively think about putting our coat on to walk out the door.
You know, so so if we need to notice those behaviors,
so this is all about taking self-inventory, about being aware of your own
your own behaviors and at some point down the line,
you might address the drivers for those behaviors.
But what really matters first is noticing the steps along the path
that lead you towards in this case of self-harming
and potentially destructive behavior.
And if you can intervene in those moments, then you've got an opportunity
to take control of that behavior, because.
Almost by definition, if you've got an addiction,
you are not in control of your behavior.
So it's all about giving people the tools
and the methods that they can use to take control of their own behavior.
And that almost doesn't need doesn't require that you actually address
the underlying drivers of that behavior that you can do that.
You can do that further down the recovery road, if you wish.
But what really matters is grabbing control of your behavior now, right now.
And that's that's a key thing that is emphasized with behavioral talking
therapies and behavioral change therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy.
That everything that that you can control,
you can only control it now, right now.
So you have to notice what is happening to you right now.
Then you then you can control it in that moment.
Later on, you can perhaps look at why, why you're doing what you're doing.
You know, what you say makes sense at such a gut intuitive level.
I'm not personally drug or alcohol addicted,
but I understand that everything that we do is preceded by various preparatory
actions that generally go unnoticed by ourselves.
But if you stop and think about them, there is the chance for a pattern
interruption that could stop that process in the cascade towards that behavior.
And it puts me in mind of almost every smoker that I have ever talked to
who has successfully quit smoking has talked about the most difficult part
about quitting smoking was finding something to do to replace
that physical action of taking the cigarette out after a meal
and nor it does, you know, whatever appointed time they usually have the cigarette.
Just that physical action was the hardest part of them for them to break.
And I've talked to many smokers who said they had to replace
the pack of cigarettes with a pack of gum or something that they could use
to emulate that action, but actually produce a different result.
Is that in line with what you're talking about here?
Yeah, absolutely.
Going back to earlier, we'll talk about something where with behavioral
therapy, it's important to be honest with yourself about what is important to you.
So what so so often people you will ask people when they're certainly
when they're in early stages of recovery, what's important to you?
And they will list a long list of things like, you know, their family,
their their relationship, their children, their pets, their home, their job,
all these kind of things that they say that are important to them and very
rarely does someone say alcohol or heroin or cocaine.
They never say that's important to them.
And one of the first steps that we or rarely say that one of the first
steps that we talked to people about is, but clearly, you know,
your use of this thing, whatever it might be, is dominated your life
for the last for the last how many, however many years it might have been
or, you know, however long it might have been.
So is that not important to you?
And I think that it's that kind of honesty.
And often, often people find that very difficult to confront.
And it is probably one of the the highest risk moments, I think,
in anybody's kind of recovery to actually because because people
don't take substances just because they're dependent on them.
People take substances because they get something from them.
So at some point you need to you need to tackle what it is that they get from it.
But replacing that, therefore, if you say, you know, what's really important
to me is rebuilding relationships with my family, for example.
OK, fine. That's really important to you.
But how do you get to do that in that moment where you when you
are thinking about having a drink or, you know, using a substance?
Is it really important to you in that moment that you rebuild
relationships with your family?
If it is, why would you why would you take the substance?
So if you're going to replace that use with something else.
That has to be practical.
That that has to serve some sort of beneficial purpose for you,
because clearly the substance served some sort of, you know, it might be
deleterious in the in the long effect.
But in the moment, there's a that serve some sort of purpose for you.
So what how else are you going to manage whatever this situation
where you need this substance?
What else are you going to do?
So often things like, you know, people might say, well, I quite enjoy
art, or I quite enjoy sport, or I quite enjoy something else,
or I quite I quite enjoy listening to music.
So OK, can you repurpose that?
Can you repurpose that thing that you enjoy, that thing that you like,
that thing that you value, that you get something out of?
Can you repurpose that instead of using
a substance or drinking or whatever it might be?
So quite often, yeah, sure, you're using you're using these replacement
replacement behaviors to to almost serve the same purpose
in the short term as the substance.
But the problem with that is you can then become reliant on that behavior.
And any behavior which you do to excess can be problematic.
So it's important to also address
further down the road to also address the underlying drivers of
of dependency, whatever that whatever they may be.
Again, what you say resonates and it seems just true at an instinctual level.
So let me take what you have the information you've imparted here
and see if I can make a hypothesis that in your decades of experience,
you found that the people who were most honest with themselves
about their behaviors, why they are engaged in those behaviors
and why they want to change those behaviors were the ones who were most
often successful in actually kicking the addiction.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And I would also say those that are most determined
because the failure rate is quite high.
You know, I worked in a service
where we had a positive outcome rate of about 30 percent.
And that was off the charts for success rate.
So the people who succeed are the people who are committed, determined
and don't give up as well.
So they because often it's people will try
a few times before they before they succeed.
But the fact is that they keep trying.
They keep trying to succeed.
And ultimately, absolutely, the honesty with yourself
is essential because you're not you're not.
I mean, and I know one thing that I have to say to people
that perhaps never had an addiction.
And one thing that I that I greatly value from the people
that I work with that were the clients that I work with
is that they've gone through processes.
That most of us never go through.
Now, few of us, few of us really look that hard at ourselves.
And part of recovery is to look very hard at yourself.
All right.
We've talked about a number of different aspects of this.
Is there anything else that you would want to say to anyone
who is going through addiction at the moment
and recognizes that they want to change their behaviors?
What would you say to encourage them along the path
towards actually changing their lives?
Seek support.
It's it's not something you can do on your own.
You definitely need support depending
depending on where you live.
There should be support services available.
And they might not be perfect.
They might not be, you know, exactly what you want right now.
But you must have support.
You you you must have people around you that will support you.
And initially, you know, you need people
that have got some kind of appreciation
and understanding of what you are going through.
And that may be family, that may be friends,
but it may also be services that are available to you.
So you must you must have that.
And also, I would say that just as anybody
and I mean anybody, I've I've worked with clients
from every single walk of life and every single demographic
that you could possibly think of.
So just as anybody can become addicted to anything,
so can anybody become clean.
But there's there's no there's no reason
why you won't be able to turn your life around and become clean.
Once again, that was Ian Davis of Ian Davis dot com.
And I hope you will check out his work generally.
But obviously, he also has some important and interesting insights
on this issue of addiction gleaned from two decades of experience
as a qualified drug and alcohol addiction counselor.
And I think there are some important things to note from that story.
And the record that he speaks of speaks for itself,
where his service had something on the order of a 30 percent positive
recovery rate, which, as he says, is almost unheard of
for those types of addiction counseling services in the UK.
So obviously, there is something to the concept of the behavioral therapy
and how people can learn to change those habits,
not learn to recognize and change those habits.
So there's a lot to be gained from those insights.
But the question may be, oh, that's all fine and dandy in theory
and in some form of practice.
But does how does that look like from the inside?
What does it seem for someone who is actually dealing with these issues,
which at the time that people are struggling with drug addiction
can be almost unimaginably overwhelming?
Well, luckily, we don't have to turn very far for answers to that question.
In fact, you could turn back to a previous Solutions Watch guest
who talked about his own experiences with drug and alcohol addiction
and overcoming it in Pick Your Pieces, some thoughts to think about,
which is a book written by, of course, friend of the show, Joseph Plummer,
who, again, you'll remember from that Solutions Watch and other times
that we've talked to him about his work on tragedy and hope and other such things.
But in that book, as we talk about in that Solutions Watch conversation,
we had a couple of years ago, Joseph Plummer describes
how he used self-directed neuroplasticity to rewire his brain
and to change the addictive behaviors that he had and channel them
and transmute them into something productive
and something that has made him into an incredibly productive and sober individual,
which, again, you can hear more about in that particular conversation.
But for the purposes of today's Solutions Watch,
I want to direct you to yet another book-length resource that people can use
if they want to hear how this process of transformation looks like
from somebody who has lived through it.
And in this case, it is a man of my word
how I overcame addiction, depression and mental and physical prisons
by Derek Brose, who, again, you will know not only from his many, many appearances
on Solutions Watch, but from his activism and journalism generally
at the Conscious Resistance Network, at theconsciousresistance.com,
his work for Ryan Christian at The Last American Vagabond,
his work with Whitney Webb and Unlimited Hangout, et cetera.
Obviously, people know about Derek and his various activism and journalism,
but something you may not know about is the subject of this book,
namely Derek Brose's origin story, his struggles in his teenage and youth years
with drug addiction and how he came through
that incredibly humbling experience to come out the other side
as such a motivated and motivating journalist.
So just to give you a hint of this book, let me go through a little bit of
just read the prologue, which starts on November 16, 2005.
Sir, please step out of your vehicle.
The officer's words cut through the air and sent chills down my spine.
Even though I knew why he wanted me to get out of my car, I still asked,
can you tell me why, officer?
He proceeded to inform me that I had numerous warrants out for my arrest.
Again, he politely requested that I exit the vehicle.
I knew there was nothing left to do but open my door and step outside.
While the officer was handcuffing me and placing me in the back of his squad car,
I began to sweat profusely as I recalled everything that had preceded this moment,
the drugs, the sex, the rock and roll, the self harm, the addictions,
the periods of homelessness and my recent plans to begin a new life,
plans that were now crumbling to bits in front of me.
How did I get into this mess?
How had I let this happen?
I wasn't much for praying to God, but at that moment,
I started pleading for someone up there, anyone to help me.
My only hope was that the officer would somehow forget to search
my car before towing it away.
I wasn't so lucky.
The officer opened the front passenger door and immediately went
for the glove compartment where I had stored a pill bottle
with three point grams of crystal methamphetamine plus a scale and baggies.
There was also a bong in the back seat.
Only moments before, as the officer was approaching me,
I thought of stuffing the most incriminating paraphernalia
into my air conditioning vents in a feeble attempt at surviving this encounter.
But I was too nervous to pull it off.
The officer picked up the pill bottle, held it up to his eyes,
shook his head and shot me a look of disapproval.
It was then, at that exact moment that I knew my life was about to
change big time.
I knew I would never see that car again.
I knew I was in the worst legal trouble I'd ever been in.
But what I didn't know was that this was the start of both the worst
and the best days of my life.
This was the beginning of my transformation.
Well, that's the dramatic opening to this memoir
that recounts that period of drug addiction and abuse
and a lot of crazy events that happened in that time frame for Derek,
which ultimately ended up seeing him living for some period at a crack house
and homeless at various times and eventually his story of recovery,
which we eventually know leads to Derek Bros.
as this activist journalist, a dynamo of energy and enthusiasm.
And it was that process of transforming
his addictive behaviors into productive behaviors
that really was the reason why he is out there and doing such good work today.
So it is a fascinating story from that
perspective and with that knowledge in mind, and that's exactly why I wanted to talk
to Derek about his own experience of transformation and how that came about.
And I started by honing in on one phrase in the book
where he has the realization that what he was doing was self harm,
that he was the author of his own pain and self destruction.
And I asked him about whether and how that realization
helped in that process of transformation.
I think that's huge, you know, for me,
coming to realize that as I say in the book and the architect of my own pain,
like that I was had a habit of self sabotaging
and finally recognizing that and seeing that was a big move
because then it led to taking personal responsibility in my life,
which is obviously a big part of my current political philosophy,
volunteerism and the way I see the world today.
And when I was at that point of realizing, OK,
I could be angry at my father for things he did or didn't do
or for the lies he told and the promises he broke.
I could do that forever.
I could blame society.
I could do all these things that sometimes we find ourselves into,
you know, especially when you're on drugs
or you're just dealing with mental health issues.
You can get into this self pity and I definitely went through that.
But when I started to recognize like I'm doing this to myself,
I keep shooting myself in my own foot.
I keep, you know, creating these same scenarios.
And then afterwards I'm like, oh, no, I feel horrible.
Let me take a bunch of drugs and see if that'll if that'll self
Medicaid and numb the pain.
But ultimately, when I understood, I'm doing this to myself,
you know, I had to then take responsibility
and especially because I wasn't happy.
I mean, some people might go through some of the things I went through
and they believe they're happy or maybe genuinely are happy
for a time or fool themselves into that.
But I guess the difference for me is besides a few, you know,
funny, odd, you know, occasionally happy memories in there,
I was not happy and I knew I wasn't happy.
I was already depressed well before I started taking drugs
and drinking and all those sort of things.
So it didn't take me very long to realize like this.
This is not where I want to be.
And then eventually, yeah, to recognize I'm doing this
to myself, I keep setting myself up to fail.
And then I just in the cycle of failure and then anger
and frustration and then taking a bunch of substances
and then confusion and emotions
and just over and over and over.
So I think for me, that's an important piece of the puzzle.
I also think with, you know, the other piece
of what I'm trying to do, you asked like why I wrote the book.
In the bigger picture, I would like to make conversations
around drug addiction and, you know, recovery
for lack of a better term to be an increasingly important part
of my work, my activism and even my journalism
because I do think it's something
that is an underlying conversation
that even in our truth freedom communities,
we sort of, you know, only speak about in hushed tones.
And I want to eventually, you know, have some sort of,
I don't know about program or institution,
maybe a private member association, something
that will probably be named after my father
who was also a drug addict who died
of a drug overdose in 2018.
Some sort of way to think about how to approach
these things because as I say in the book,
I don't think the addiction as a disease model
is sufficient or is helpful.
Obviously I don't think throwing people in prisons
for their drug addictions is the answer.
And part of whatever that program might look like
in the future, I think is really going
to be helping people come to a place
of taking responsibility for their own actions.
You know, it's interesting that you say that
because it seems from the narrative in the book here,
it seems that there was a certain rock bottom
that you reached when living in a crack house
for some period of time and deciding
that you didn't want any part of that anymore
and getting out of there.
But it seems the real rock bottom
or at least the beginning of the true change
took place in Harris County Jail.
And it seems like journaling and reading
were part of the transformative experience
as you started to learn about meditation
and things like that.
Tell us about that transformation,
how it really got kickstarted
and whether it would have been possible
if you hadn't been put in jail.
Yeah, you know, I've asked myself
that plenty of times over the years,
like if for whatever reason my path in this life,
I had to go through that in order to get to here.
I don't know.
And obviously, you know, you can't change the past.
So whatever happened happened
and it's led me to this moment
and I'm grateful for that.
I wish that I could have received the messages
that which I believe were being, you know, shown to me
both by family and friends who were like,
what are you doing?
You're clearly headed down a bad path.
They could see that I was losing a lot of weight
but I just wasn't very healthy.
And then I also tell a story in there
of sort of feeling like I was receiving a message
from a psychedelic experience I had
where that was kind of where I had a vision
of seeing myself homeless and very, very skinny
and just, you know, this potential future for me.
And that did cause me to at least throw away
a bunch of drugs and for a few months
kind of step away from that.
Ultimately though, obviously I got arrested
and I got arrested with possession of crystal meth
because I decided to go try to do another drug deal
which is what I had become accustomed to doing at the time.
And that I think was the rock bottom getting locked up
at least the first time, definitely the second time
when I felt even more alone
and I had even less resources, family and support,
family and friends support.
And I talk about it in the book and just, you know,
I remember it clear as day when I got locked up
and as you said, I was in Harris County jail
in Texas in Houston, but then at the same time
I got my sentence which was sending me
to basically a Texas state prison
where they give you a counselor and they call it a rehab
and the state gets a bunch of money
to say that they're treating people for drug addiction.
But for all intents and purposes, it's a prison,
you know, you can't leave armed guards, razor wire,
they treat you like crap, all that sort of stuff.
And whenever I realized that
there was nothing I could do anymore
that my mom who had been trying to help
was getting in touch with a lawyer
and seeing what she could do,
my girlfriend at the time who was trying to help
that when I recognize that there's nobody
that's going to help me.
I'm in this four walls with these crazy people
and these insane guards and I'm not leaving
until they call my name and say,
bros, you're out of here.
And from that moment when I realized that
it was going to be at least 10 to 11 months
before that was even gonna be possible
and potentially longer.
And that is a very disempowering feeling to go through,
you know, of just sort of realizing like,
wow, my freedom at least in the physical sense
has been stripped from me.
And I could go try to fight a guard if I want.
I could go yell and scream and cry.
I could do all these things
and it won't make a damn of a difference.
I'm not leaving until these people say I am.
And that, yeah, I remember just the weight of that feeling
and that realization, but as I say in the book
that that was also the beginning of me really trying
to starting to find my own personal power.
And cause as I said, they took away my physical freedom
but as anybody who has ever been in prisons
and people much longer than myself have written
over the years and whether that's the prison of the state
or concentration camp or other sort of harrowing events,
they recognize that they can control your body
but they can't control your mind.
They can't control your spirit.
And that's the realization that I started to have
is like, okay, well, I can't physically leave here
until these people say I can,
but I'm still free in my mind
and that there's a lot of power there.
And so I did have a very big spiritual influence
my grandmother at the time
and she started sending me books on like Christian prayer
and then Zen Buddhism.
She was a very kind of eccentric Christian,
you could say esoteric Christian.
And we just sending me things that were at the time
things I wasn't initially open to
because I had been so very much against anything
that I perceived religious or even spiritual
or related to God, but in that space
of really kind of questioning,
well, how the heck did I get here?
What, you know, what,
what have I been doing the last couple of years?
Here I am mad at my father my whole life
for his drug addiction and his time in prison.
And I'm following that same path, you know,
and I realized I needed to do something about it.
So yeah, that was I think the beginning of the rock bottom.
And as I said, even after a year, I did end up going back
and that was probably even a lower low,
but it was that first initial experience
of getting arrested and recognizing that
while my physical body was caged
and not going anywhere until these people said I could,
they still couldn't control my mind
or anything beyond that.
Well, the book is called A Man of My Word.
What does that phrase mean to you?
Why is it important?
It's important to me because as I share in the book,
there were definitely periods of my life
and particularly when I was going through all this chaos
here where I was not a man of my word
and I was treating different people.
You know, I was a liar.
I was a cheater.
I was never a thief, but I was definitely a liar.
I was definitely cheating on all the relationships
I was in.
I was definitely not being honest with myself
or my family and friends.
And I could see firsthand the destruction
that was coming from that, the hurt, the pain, et cetera.
And then as I was kind of sharing earlier
about that cycle of like, okay, well now I hurt somebody
and now I'm all sad or depressed about it.
Well, let me just go take a bunch of drugs
and then that leads to something else
and it just became this cycle.
And so the second time I got locked up,
and I was sent to another safe pee type facility
and I felt even more determined
that I needed to get whatever I missed the first time
because the first time I did 11 months
and I was only out for five months before I got sent back.
And then the second time going back,
I didn't have the support I had.
My girlfriend who had waited the first time
was like, I'm not doing this again.
My mom's like, you're turning into your father,
don't come back home.
And so when I had to go turn myself in,
it was just like, that felt like, wow,
I don't think I've ever felt lower than that.
And so I went into there thinking like,
I need to get whatever I missed last time.
So they had this workbook that they expected you to work
through over the three to six months period
you were gonna be there.
And I think I did it in two weeks
and I remember somebody telling me,
you don't get out any sooner
just for finishing it faster.
But I was seriously like, I just need to,
what did I miss?
What is the missing piece of this puzzle
that I just can't seem to grasp?
And that second time,
this exercise is probably the one thing
I would say that I took away
and it was just a simple thing
of little kind of visualization exercise.
Like, okay, so,
because they're working through all the fact
of like you've been treating people wrong,
you've been having destructive behaviors,
whether it's drugs,
whether it's other criminal behavior,
you probably haven't been living right.
And so you need to reflect on those decisions
and how you got to where you're at now.
And so the final exercise was something like,
you go to the doctor and you find out
you have terminal cancer
and you have six months to live.
Or you think they started out like five years,
you have five years to live,
what would you do with that?
And then you have one year live, six months, et cetera.
And just kind of getting you to really reflect.
And I was trying to take this as genuinely as possible.
Like, okay, like let me think about this.
Like what does matter to me in life?
And what would I do if I found that
I was gonna die next year or six months from now?
And so you work through that
and then eventually you get to the exercise
and you turn the page and it's like a tombstone.
It's like, you know, this morning
at whatever time you were found dead,
you died from cancer.
What five words do you want on your tombstone?
And it didn't take me long to realize
that I wanted a man of my word,
which is obviously the book title now.
And it was because of that
because especially at that point, this is 2007,
I was still not, you know, I was not on drugs anymore
and I was getting sober,
but I still wasn't living the way that I believed
I needed to in a way that also produced happiness
in my life and I was still hurting people.
So it was important to me,
and it still is important to me
to strive to be a man of my word,
to be accountable to myself and to other people
because I know what it feels like to not do that.
And it didn't feel good.
And it didn't, you know,
it wasn't really about trying to impress anybody.
It was like, look, I've lived that life
and I know that that didn't lead me to anywhere
that felt happy or joyful or anything I wanna be.
So maybe I should try doing the other thing.
And so yeah, for me, striving to be a man of my word,
both in my individual life
and then now as a journalist
and everything else I do, it's extremely important.
You know, I find this entire book
really uplifting in a way,
really empowering because I know the sequel.
Like if I only knew this book, it would be one thing
and I'd, okay, here's a story of a man going through this
and finding his way out of addiction, et cetera.
But because I know what you have done since then
and the journalism and activism that you've engaged in.
Now I see and forgive me for,
I mean, I'm on the outside, I don't know you
but it looks to me like what you've done
is taken that hustling mindset
that was part of the allure of the drug world
and transformed that into your activism
and channeled it into journalism
so that now you're hustling and creating these documentaries
and the great reset and doing all of this activism
and running for Houston mayor
and all of these things that you're involved in.
100%.
It's just kind of taking that energy
and transforming it into something positive.
Can you talk about that experience?
Absolutely, James, that's 100% correct.
And in fact, because of that, the book,
the original title I was gonna go with the book
which I'm glad we chose what we did
because I think it's more suiting
was something along the lines of transmutation
and overcoming depression.
It's a similar title, subtitle,
but transmutation was gonna be the main title
because I feel like that's what I was able to do
is to transmute that young, chaotic, confused energy
that I had which was passion and a form.
And it was, as I talk about in the book,
the excitement of being involved in business
and entrepreneurship which is interesting to me
because a lot of that later on, I would discover agorism
and black and gray markets and all that.
I'm like, okay, well, I kind of already understood that already.
I just wasn't doing it in a healthy way
and I wasn't living a way that is conducive to happiness
and to joy and all that sort of thing.
But absolutely, that same passion and energy
that I had as a young man 20 years ago,
20 plus years ago that was at that time
kind of buried under sadness and depression
and chaos and just not really knowing how to channel it.
I've since learned how to work within my own mind
because I'm not sitting here today saying that
I don't ever have self-worth issues,
struggles still as I discuss in the book
or that I don't ever have my own doubts
and things like that, like we all do as human beings.
But I've learned how to deal with those things
rather than drinking a bunch of alcohol
or taking a bunch of drugs.
I've found other ways to navigate my own mind
and navigate my own personal struggles
that are empowering rather than disempowering.
And a lot of that is putting that passion
or that energy I have into the works that I do,
whether it's documentaries, whether it's books
and things like that, activism of various sorts.
So 100%, that's a big part of it too
is transmuting that pain and that heaviness
and turning it into something positive.
Once again, that is Derek Brose
and you can get a copy of his book
through a manofmyword.com
that will be linked up in the show notes
for today's edition of Solutions Watch, obviously.
For those out there who are dealing with this issue
either themselves personally or people in their lives
that they want to help,
I think it is an important story to know, to hear,
to understand that change is possible,
that it does happen,
that these destructive behaviors
can be transformed into something productive.
And although that transformation will not be easy
and it will take a lot of work
and there will be failures and setbacks along the way
but with enough time and enough patience and enough love
it can happen and healing can occur.
It is important for people who are going through this
to know and understand that at the very least.
So there are some resources
that we have put on the table here.
I hope people will explore them.
And if you are dealing with these types of issues
I hope you can find the support in your area.
And on that note, once again,
Solutions Watch is not a spectator sport
but a community participation exercise.
So I hope that members of the Corbett Report,
member community who have experience with this issue
will be able to chime in with their own experiences
and their own recommendations
or things that they would suggest people avoid, et cetera.
I think the more that we hear
about people's actual experience dealing with these issues
obviously everyone is walking their own path
and will have to come to their own decisions
and determinations.
But it is good to have that feedback
and that knowledge of what other people have gone through.
I think that's an important part
of the healing process itself.
So there's a lot on the table.
I hope Corbett Report members will log in
and leave their experiences at corbettreport.com
so that we can learn and grow our way forward together
and hopefully get more people off of these substances
or activities or behaviors
that they have found themselves addicted to
and towards using their energies and passions
in a productive capacity.
That is the goal.
Let's see if we can make it happen.
And on that note,
I'm going to leave today's exploration there for today.
I'm James Corbett of corbettreport.com
looking forward to talking to you again in the near future.
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