Angels in Motion Provides a Pathway from Addiction to Recovery

Angels in Motion president, Carol Rostucher, came to speak our class on a variety of topics relating to addiction and recovery on Tuesday. Angels in Motion is a community outreach program that helps people struggling with addiction. Among many other things, the group provides food for those in need and helps connect people with treatment services. Carol Rostucher started the program after visiting her son in Kensington to bring him food. Her son is now in recovery, but she continues to reach out to others in need of help with her growing organization Angels in Motion.

Rostucher has a good grasp on some of the complications that arise when trying to get a person into treatment. She talked about how a person could be turned away for not having proper state ID or an insurance company only covering one form of treatment or being denied treatment for not having opiates currently in your system.

There are a lot of barriers for people with SUD to getting treatment. The path from addiction to recovery can be complicated, and some people don’t have the support or help they need from friends or family. Angels in Motion are some people’s only support. The window where a user is open to treatment can be small and only open for a short period of time. If a person in the throwes of addiction walks into a treatment center, only to find out they don’t have proper ID and have to talk to an insurance provider for an hour who tells them they are not covered for that particular kind of treatment, then that window of opportunity could easily close. It is often a difficult process that involves coordinating with an insurance company that wants to cover the bare minimum.

Rostucher said “You have to keep them alive until their ready,” which is where my sentiments lie with respect to naloxone and CUES. Shockingly, some people disagree with this. There are those who seemingly believe that it is better to let a person die than save their lives and give them an opportunity for treatment. That is an extreme view that is hopefully uncommon. But there is a less extreme view that suggests naloxone and CUES are condoning the use of illicit drugs and making the illegal activity safer. This is technically true in some ways, but we don’t let people who break the law die in other situations. Drug use doesn’t deserve a death sentence. They deserve the same opportunity to reform as the white-collar criminal. They are arguably more deserving of this opportunity given all the evidence supporting the loss of agency that comes with drug addiction. People don’t deserve to die for using drugs. If we can save them, we should. We have to keep them alive until they’re ready.

Matthew McCann

Matt is a senior journalism major at Temple. He transferred from New Jersey’s Sussex County Community College where he wrote for the school newspaper. At Temple, he has taken on the role of community beat reporter for the Temple News. During the summer of 2017, he studied abroad and reported in South Africa with an amazing team of Temple students. Matt has an interest in covering addiction and is excited to learn how a more proactive, solutions-based style of reporting can be implemented to help and inform in a meaningful way. Contact Matt at [email protected].

1 Comments

afterumbrage
March 12, 2018 at 4:41 pm Reply
Marc, what in important comment you make here. While it is of immense importance to challenge the stagnant concepts that underlie the study and treatment of addiction in this country, we must simultaneouslyand sometimes separatelycontinue to work in the trenches with those fighting for their lives. These struggles are obviously related, but not one and the same. Calling addiction a disease is certainly more useful than considering addiction a bad choice, and has two obvious effects within our current healthcare system. The first is that it fits within the medical model and, as you point out, this readies it for insurance companies to address. On the other hand, it also opens addiction treatment up to becoming a profit driven industry which seems to edge out social and human concerns these days (at least in America). But, there does need to be both conversations happening simultaneously, one that propels us into a deeper more empowering understanding of addiction than that proposed by the disease model, and the other about what to do NOW with the system that is in place. Hopefully the former will continue to inform and influence the latter.