I may suggest a change in the way they use that substance, the timing of their use, but I’m not taking it away or judging their use. There are good things and we need to understand that. I sit with a person and ask the very simple question – what good things does your drinking or using do for you? Because it always starts there. Working with an artist who may be struggling with drinking or using drugs, gives me the opportunity to reach them earlier, and before the fall. I now work with 4 colleges in LA – 2 colleges of music, a film school, and an acting conservatory. A few colleges in LA took notice of my work and hired me to consult with their students. I now do private coaching for people who are new to recovery as well as with those who are still actively using. Harm-reduction accepts that a person is engaging in something that may cause harm, in this case use of drugs or alcohol, but that there are inherent opportunities to offer help that will stabilize the person and help prevent a free fall and the very real harms that come with ostracizing and ignoring people who use drugs. Harm-reduction is the best way to get help to people earlier. Before there is an arrest or before their life unravels.Ībout 10 years ago, I began learning everything I could about harm-reduction and began applying the principles in my work. And even now, with all the successful cases I’ve worked on, I feel as if we are still not getting help to people early enough. I work independently of any treatment center, so that if my client fails in a treatment setting, I move on and place them in another program. My specialty is in knowing what programs are available with private, as well as public, funding and having the ability to build a treatment plan that stretches beyond the limits of traditional funding and really addresses the full spectrum of needs of a person. Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community? We still have a long way to go, and we still incarcerate far too many people for non-violent, low-level crimes – but we are doing better and the system is slowly reforming to accommodate. The idea of alternative sentencing has become more commonplace now. Over the years, I have seen such extraordinary change in people who have been given a chance. And it worked – each successful case led to additional successes and opportunities for my clients to receive the care they needed. That it might help a DA or a judge trust me a little bit more and let me put a client in treatment who might not otherwise get the chance. I did this not because I needed those skills specifically, but because I thought it might give more credibility to my work. The LA County jail system is the largest jail system in the world.Īnd so, I went back to UCLA and became as a paralegal. As a state, California has more prisons than universities. As a nation, we incarcerate more people than any other country in the world. This was 17 years ago, when not a lot of alternative sentencing was going on at that time and our prison system was bulging at the seams. I saw it then – that there was a gap in the system and what was needed was someone to go into court and speak up for this person, propose a solution for treatment rather than incarceration. Because the work is so much harder for someone to rebuild their life when they need to rebuild their community from scratch. And I realized that we need to get to people earlier in their addiction and before they are facing incarceration. I also began to case-manage parolees reentering the community after prison. Meanwhile, I was getting a lot of calls from family members who had loved ones in jail who were arrested for drug-related crimes and were looking for someone to help. That project taught me a lot about the physiological needs of a person in active addiction. I would go on to help to establish a pilot program with the City of Santa Monica and the Santa Monica Police Department responding to public intoxication arrests, going into the jail and speaking with every arrestee and offering them a bed in treatment. I had worked at an addiction treatment center for a few years, interviewing and assessing people’s needs and then referring them to treatment programs throughout Southern California. Hi Susan, can you walk us through the thought-process of starting your business? ![]() We had the good fortune of connecting with Susan Bowling and we’ve shared our conversation below.
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