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    • They smoke pot, drink booze and consider themselves sober
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    They smoke pot, drink booze and consider themselves sober

    Online Niel Posted on

    Shane O’Neill
    | The Washington Post

    In January, country singer Jason DeFord, better known as Jelly Roll, testified before Congress about the dangers of fentanyl.

    “I witnessed it firsthand in a way that most people didn’t,” he said, referring to his background as a convicted drug dealer and addict and the impact addiction had on family life its.

    Today, Jelly Roll is sober. A kind of.

    Jelly Roll — who declined through a rep to participate in this story — abstains from cocaine and opiates, which wreaked havoc on his life and landed him in prison.

    But he smokes weed. “Marijuana kept me awake,” he said in an interview with the website Taste of Country.

    And he drinks alcohol. In August, he told the New York Times that he “will have a cocktail now and then” but that Alcoholics Anonymous meetings help him avoid harder drugs.

    Maybe you call it “Sober Jelly Roll”? You could add it to a list of new definitions for “sober” that have popped up in the last few years.

    There’s “California sober,” a term popularized by musician Billy Strings and Demi Lovato for people who abstain from alcohol but still use cannabis (though Lovato now identifies as “sober” without an adjective).

    There are ‘sober-curios’ for those interested in temporary sobriety, with events honoring ‘Sober October’, ‘Dry January’ and its less rigorous cousin, ‘Wet January’.

    People joke about being “Northern California sober” (mushroom only), “Bushwick sober” (ketamine only), and “Florida sober” (meth only). The Washington Post reported that young people are becoming “boy sober” in response to a toxic dating culture.

    User X posted that he heard someone at the Silverlake Lounge in Los Angeles describe himself as “sober,” meaning he only abstains from drugs.

    “We have evolved in our view of what recovery from an addiction or substance use disorder is,” said Bill Stauffer, executive director of the Pennsylvania Recovery Organization Alliance. He cited a 2013 DSM-V update that combined substance abuse and substance dependence into one use disorder, which can range from mild to severe.

    “There is a spectrum of substance use disorders,” Stauffer said. “There is a spectrum of healing. We don’t fully understand any of them yet.”

    He has seen people with substance use problems who are able to use cannabis without harm following counseling. And he’s seen people who have to be totally abstinent to be functional — Stauffer is among them.

    “I don’t think the science is far enough along to fully identify who is who in which category, but I think by having discussions about this issue, we will start to move in that direction,” Stauffer said.

    Meanwhile, he admits that all these new definitions of “sober” can get “confusing for people.”

    Chris Black said, “It’s not what the word means.” He previously expressed doubts about Jelly Roll’s approach to recovery on his “How Long Gone” podcast.

    Black used marijuana to help stop taking oxycontin, but didn’t consider himself sober until he began completely abstaining from all drugs and alcohol and began attending Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).

    “He’s a role model and I think overall what he’s doing is great,” Black said, referring to Jelly Roll’s outreach to incarcerated people and communities struggling with addiction. “I think there is some confusion with the nomenclature.”

    Spike Einbinder, a New York comedian, grew up in what he described as “an AA household.” He recalls that his parents, “Saturday Night Live” cast member Laraine Newman and actor-writer Chad Einbinder, kept 12-step literature in every room of their house.

    Spike Einbinder started using drugs as a teenager and struggled with addiction for years. After kicking hard drugs and alcohol, he tried “California sobriety” – “smoking from the time I was awake until the time I went to bed,” as he described it. After a few years, he realized that the weed was affecting his mental and physical health.

    Today, he is free of all psychoactive substances. But he still struggled with how to describe himself.

    “It was hard to consider myself sober without AA because of the way I was raised, even though I’m so sober I don’t even drink caffeine,” Einbinder said. He is particularly bothered by the term “white lump,” a phrase used to describe abstinence without 12-step recovery.

    By most measures, AA is the most robust and accessible program dedicated to helping people stop drinking. There are round-the-clock meetings around the world, full of people sharing personal stories and offering a range of slogans and tips that have helped millions change their relationship with alcohol.

    But it doesn’t work for everyone.

    “I’m not against 12-step programs, but I can’t ignore the cultural and social incompetence of some of these people in those meetings,” said Khadi A. Oluwatoyin, a Tulsa-based attorney.

    Oluwatoyin recalled an AA meeting where a white speaker described her “ass” as living in a predominantly black part of Staten Island. It was the neighborhood where Oluwatoyin lived at the time.

    Experiences like these led Oluwatoyin to start the peer support group Sober Black Girls Club, which hosts meetings several times a week. She said most, though not all, members of the Sober Black Girls club are in a 12-step group.

    “AA and 12 steps is where we all usually start, and I think that’s a good start,” Oluwatoyin said. “But we don’t all end there.”

    Pete Rubinas, executive director of SMART recovery, believes that the language used in traditional 12-step recovery can be limiting. In the recovery meetings he leads, he says the word “sober” doesn’t come up often.

    “We talk about, ‘I had a problematic relationship with alcohol,’ ‘I ended my relationship with alcohol,’ ‘I struggled with alcohol,'” Rubinas said. “There is very little black-and-white, all-or-nothing language that we use.“

    SMART Recovery bills itself as “a secular, evidence-based alternative to the widespread 12-step addiction recovery program.” It started in 1994 but has grown in popularity over the past five years. Today, there are more than 2,500 SMART recovery meetings worldwide.

    His approach aligns with a body of research that supports the inclusion of harm reduction—reducing alcohol consumption, for example—in addiction treatment. In 2023, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism published an article that emphasized the effectiveness of treating alcohol use disorder (AUD) with more than just abstinence protocols.

    “Today, although abstinence is the safest course for certain subgroups, non-abstinence-based risk reduction strategies have become an important part of the discussion of AUD treatment and the recovery process,” the researchers wrote.

    Those who try “California sobriety” have had mixed success, according to research by Meenakshi S. Subbaraman, program director and biostatistician at the Oakland, California Public Health Institute.

    A study she conducted found “very strong and consistent associations between cannabis use and alcohol and other drug use” among 557 participants living in sober living facilities. But she also acknowledged that other research has found that some people drink less and have fewer binges on days they use cannabis.

    “It works for some people, it doesn’t work for others, and we’re still trying to figure out what distinguishes these two groups,” Subbaraman said. Subbaraman herself hasn’t had a drink in five years, but she uses marijuana.

    A boom in interest and research in the use of psychedelics such as ketamine, psilocybin and MDMA to treat mental health disorders has led some to question what role these substances might play in addiction treatment. The founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, known as Bill W., was himself interested in LSD as a potential treatment for alcoholism.

    Max F., who spoke on the condition that his name be withheld in accordance with the 12-step principle of anonymity, sees the danger in expanding sobriety to include such substances.

    “The way my addiction speaks to me is, ‘You could probably do acid camping or mushrooms once a year and you’ll be fine, you won’t relapse,'” he said. “But I have to be careful with my brain, because it’s a really dangerous place for me.” For people like Max F. who have struggled with opiates, an attempt to use moderately could easily lead to an accidental fentanyl overdose.

    Max F. has an Instagram account called junkie.memez that pokes fun at the various factions in recovery. One of his memes shows a tweed golf cap labeled “AA,” a skull trucker hat labeled “NA” for Narcotics Anonymous, and a propeller cap labeled “SMART recovery.”

    His account also questions self-identified sober people who smoke weed and former heroin users on suboxone as maintenance therapy. But Max F. points out that his account is meant to be a good troll of recovery communities, not a critique of individual choices.

    “How I conduct myself as a member of Narcotics Anonymous and the content I post are two separate things,” he said. “In my real recovery in real life, I don’t judge other people’s journeys.”

    To Max F., it doesn’t matter if your road to sobriety looks like his or Demi Lovato’s or Jelly Roll’s. “At the end of the day, the only requirement for membership in a 12-step community is a willingness to stop using,” he said. “That’s all we care about: if you’re willing to stop, then you’re welcome here.”

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