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George McGovern's daughter, Terry, died drunk on the street. The former senator and presidential candidate wrote a tragic book about Terry, for which he received a lifetime addiction achievement award from Harvard in 1997. McGovern's son Steven McGovern has just died, the second of McGovern's children to predecease him due to alcoholism. I revisit the earlier award; the conference at which the Harvard Division of Addiction Studies presented it, called "Treating the Addictions: What Works"; and the other award-winner there—former general and Drug Tsar, Barry McCaffrey.
The Harvard Medical School Center for Addiction Studies was named in honor of Norman Zinberg. Zinberg, who died in 1989, was a friend and mentor of mine. He stood for two critical elements in the addiction field. First, he opposed the criminalization of addiction and the legal repression of drug use. Second, he stood for broadening our ideas about addiction, represented by his masterwork, "Drug, Set, and Setting: The Basis for Controlled Intoxicant Use." Zinberg's work inspired my own "The Meaning of Addiction: Compulsive Experience and Its Interpretation."
Both Zinberg's and my work indicate that the chemical effects of drugs comprise only one component in the addiction equation. Both the individual's interpretation of this experience and their life settings impact responses to drugs and alcohol, up to an including whether the person becomes addicted and whether they remain so. Thus, for both of us, many people use drugs without becoming addicted, or else while subsequently outgrowing addiction—which was a very radical idea in Zinberg's time, if only slightly less so today.
Zinberg was never fully respected within the Harvard Medical School community (he never received tenure, for instance). So it was a significant achievement to many of us when HMS created its Division of Addiction in Zinberg's name. We were almost immediately disappointed, however, when Harvard presented its Zinberg Lecture Award to Barry McCaffrey, a general whom Bill Clinton selected as his Drug Czar, at a 1997 conference entitled, "Treating the Addictions: What Works." Our disappointment occurred for the following reasons:
Reform advocates who knew and worked with Norman Zinberg have expressed outrage at the McCaffrey selection, saying that "Norman would roll over his grave" if he knew about it. Reformers regard McCaffrey's talk about shifting funds to treatment as mere lip service, and consider his opposition to needle exchange and his vehement opposition to medical marijuana as unconscionable and diametrically opposed to the principles for which Norman Zinberg stood.
I wrote at my Website about the irony—or, as above, the "outrage"—of McCaffrey being given the award, since the selection of a general with no knowledge or experience in the addiction or public health fields embodied what was wrong with the American approach to addiction, something that holds true under Barack Obama. I even staged (with Archie Brodsky) an imaginary debate between Zinberg and McCaffrey, pointing out the extreme differences between the two men's perspectives and approaches to addiction.
But it is towards another lifetime achievement award winner at the same conference that this post is directed, former Democratic Presidential candidate and Senator George McGovern. I voted for George McGovern (although, remember, he had to throw his vice presidential selection, Senator Thomas Eagleton, overboard for having had serious mental illness problems earlier in life, thus practically guaranteeing McGovern's defeat before the race had barely begun).
McGovern's selection for an award at a conference entitled "Treating the Addictions: What Works," was based on his book, Terry: My Daughter's Life-and-Death Struggle with Alcoholism. Terry froze to death on the street after leaving treatment. What a tragedy. In the last years of her life (Terry died at 45), she entered detox and rehab dozens of times. As I wrote, "as much as one can sympathize with him for the death of his alcoholic daughter due to exposure while intoxicated, she is not a good demonstration of effective treatment" or an indication that McGovern could "increase the medical understanding of addiction."
The argument was that Terry had special problems: "the truth is that it seems that Terry [as a teen] was already reacting to chemical substances marijuana and amphetamines in a way that her peers weren't." Now, it should be noted, Terry had had long periods of what, in the recovery business, is call sobriety. It's just that the standard medical approaches and 12-step bromides to which she was repeatedly exposed didn't sustain her recovery. It is for this reason, among others, that we have changed the meaning of recovery and how to achieve it.
Terry was the third of McGovern's children. As troubled as she was, It turns out that she wasn't the only McGovern alcoholic child who failed to recover. Another of McGovern's children, his son Steven, has predeceased him at age 60, also apparently due to alcoholism. His sister Ann McGovern said in a statement, "Steve had a long struggle with alcoholism. We will all miss him deeply, but are grateful that he is now at peace."
Thus,15 years after receiving an award from Harvard Medical School for espousing "what works" in treating addiction, George McGovern and the treatment experts he has repeatedly turned to have no better idea than they had with his poor soul of a daughter what to do about alcoholism and addiction. It is a tragedy, one that many of us are intent on remedying, both in how we treat addiction, and in how we understand it. McGovern is a tragic victim himself, along with his dead children. The former Senator relates in his book listening to experts who told him hands off his daughter until she had hit bottom -- this for a woman who had abandoned all hope, along with her family.
Terry, like so many alcoholics, fell victim to a field incapable of considering alternatives that might have diverted her from alcoholism, or at least kept her them from dying on the street. And Harvard bestowed an award for this crime, while disease proponents (see the comment on this post by Anonymous) celebrate the event as proof of their rightness and as a triumph!
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