Abstract

Recovery from addiction is often viewed as the achievement of abstinence as well as the reclamation of the things lost to addiction: agency, health, productivity, spiritual wellness. This study, based on fieldwork at a Twelve Step-oriented men’s treatment centre in Vancouver, recasts addiction and recovery as a problem and solution on opposing sides of an unbalanced equation, where the problem is greater than the solution: ADDICTION > recovery. With the solution retroactively oriented to the individual’s unwellness, the social conditions that continue to produce addiction remain. It is argued that the treatment centre in this study is “treating” three intersecting “crises,” not just one: the drug and addiction crisis, the “masculinity” crisis, and deindustrialization. As such, attention is given to the conditions affecting the overrepresented treatment residents encountered in this study, known to be dying in the toxic drug “epidemic” at rates disproportionate to other groups (Perrin 2020): working class white men. These conditions include: unemployment, abandoned communities, loss of social status and security, and masculine norms that valourize risk, invulnerability, and “working hard and playing harder.” Additionally, this imbalance potentiates the exploitation of those who work and volunteer in the treatment industry, many of whom are “recovering addicts” deeply concerned with saving their “brothers.”
Still, while the recovery solution is misaligned with these problems, the spiritual, disciplinary treatment process – which encourages men to depend on God, to open up, to ask for help, and to be “of service” – does offer men in treatment a kind of moral reskilling that can mitigate the risk of working class white men turning to the dangerous politics of aggrievement, and can help orient them to the “soft skills” of the “service economy.” The recovering men who end up working in treatment can be seen as the once “hyper masculine” becoming effective workers in the historically feminized realm of carework. As such, a man who starts out injured by deindustrialization and then comes to work as a recovery/care worker is a living embodiment of the transformation of labour, of heavy labour being reborn as service work.