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Welcome to "Connections," the podcast that bridges the gap between addiction and mental health through the prism of policy and practice. Join the hosts, Morgan Coyner and Sara Howe, as they unravel the intricate connections within the world of addiction. In each episode, they dive deep into the intersection of prevention and recovery.
Welcome to Connections, the podcast from addiction professionals of North Carolina, where we explore the nuances of addiction and mental health through the lens of policy and practice. We are your hosts, Morgan Koiner and Sarah Howe, and we're here to help you see how it all connects. Today we are excited to have with us our good friend and colleague, Kim Laube, who is the executive director of HUGS.in New York. Welcome to the podcast, Kim. Ah, well thanks for having me and what a fantastic name and way to bring us all together. We are so excited to have you. Um, for those of our listeners who haven't yet had the opportunity to meet Kim, she has spoken in North Carolina several times and comes back by popular demand to help us connect prevention to recovery.
So, this is a perfect place for us to start. Kim, you have worked on both ends of the spectrum in the prevention field and with our recovery communities. So tell us a little bit more how those two things, which often people think do not connect, really are closely connected. Help us see how that, how that happens. Fantastic. So, so first of all, I love, love, love prevention and I've been in the business for, for prevention for many, many, many years, but I'm also a person in recovery. And so I absolutely understand the very way upstream way. We need to look at things in order to create good community change. And I also understand what happens when you're one of those people who falls into the river and wasn't protected upstream. And it's important that we realize that we are actually more connected. As a matter of fact, Sarah Potter, who, uh, is well known to so many people at APNC, Sarah Potter is quoted in one of my webinars as saying that prevention and recovery are the most natural allies. And we are, because when prevention, it's a great quote, right?
And oftentimes when we think of prevention, we just think of schools. Those are the programs that happened in schools. But prevention is about community change. It's about environmental change. It's, it's working when preventionists work to reduce the, the hours of sale of alcohol or substances when they get good, good placement where it's not just.
sitting right on the counter so you can grab and go when they work on great store policies. That's not only protecting our young people, that that's protecting our friend who goes in after a fellowship meeting and goes to the store and maybe he's feeling a little bit down. They don't have product placement right in front of them.
So when we create healthier communities as preventionalists, it actually supports and enhances. This is the lifestyle and shows less, um, less exposure to not only our youth, but our recovery community as well. That's fantastic. I just, I love that because I don't think we often see that, that that's one continuum.
We see them as very individual. We have prevention over here. We have recovery here. And then we maybe have a treatment episode in the middle, right? Sometimes we think of those in those very clear silos and yet we're, we're one individual. That comes in and out of different places in our life. And it's so important that we spend more time talking together.
Oftentimes our conferences will be a prevention conference, a treatment conference, a harm reduction conference, a recovery conference. And if we have them all in the same place, we put them into different tracks. And if we only look at things from our lens, our vantage point, that's what we're going to see.
And so it really becomes important and paramount of leaders like yourself. And exactly what you guys do is have conferences that brings everybody to the table with meaningful opportunities to, to talk and engage in and understand. Prevention is so strong on teaching emotional intelligence, and we know emotional intelligence is a key factor.
Not only. To how to live life, but also a key factor in recovery and such an important piece for us to learn as many of us use substances to not deal with our feelings. So, again, the partnership is it's prime for this opportunity for us to really talk about what we can do more together as looking at this as different ends of the spectrum.
Sarah and I were talking earlier and, you know. Um, there's a lot of conversations around recovery ready communities and how do we create communities that can support people in recovery? Um, and we're talking about, you know, we need people doing harm reduction. We need people who, who keep people who are currently using drugs alive.
We need treatment because when people are ready to get, you know, healthy, when they're ready to kind of address the issues that they're facing, we need those people, right? We need recovery ready communities who can support them. Okay. But if we don't have prevention, this crisis continues, because all we do is raise up another generation of kids who don't know how to cope, who don't know what to do when, when hard things happen.
And so prevention to me can be this linchpin that could potentially turn the tide. In what has been a very difficult 20 years for this field. Right, and we have science. I mean, that's the piece like, when we talk about prevention. We have the strategic prevention framework. We have this way that we can bring together the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker and join forces to really not just say, hey, the kids are drinking and drugging and that's bad, but really to turn around and take a look at.
But why? And why specifically here in our community? And that starts by doing by bringing everybody together by building capacity, By doing a hardcore assessment of your community, taking a look at qualitative and quantitative data to begin to put those pieces to the puzzle together, and then to begin to plan strategies.
And here's the challenge. We can't just plant plan 6 month strategy. We can't just say. Oh, let's try this and see if this works. We actually have to be strategic and understand that community change takes 5 to 10 years to begin to happen. And so, by planning, by implementing by evaluating, we can begin to use that strategic prevention framework and.
Communities that have done it, and you utilize that show a 30 day reduction of substances. Um, they show longer, they show a delay of onset of when a young person starts picking up a substance. And those are two key indicators, right? What's our behavior been for the last 30 days? What? At what age did we begin to pick up?
What were the community norms and what were what were low perceptions of risk? These are all things we talk about that have to be in the conversation because it's not like somebody just picked up a drink and boom, they had, you know, they had a disease. This is really about how did we get there and why specifically in each of our communities.
Has addiction substance use has sort of been allowed to almost grow and flourish based on community norming based on, um, access to substances, both retail and in the home and based on low perceived risk. I'm so glad that you brought up science and Kim, you know, you and I've had this conversation a lot that there's a myth out there that there isn't science at backs prevention and.
Unfortunately, you know, we know some of the prevention in the past probably helped proliferate that there's programs out there that shall remain nameless that had, uh, didn't have a good rap. Right? Right. But for sure, for our listeners. What we're trying to do here is not only make these connections for our field, but for our listeners who don't do this every day, who don't talk this language, why is prevention so important from the science perspective?
I mean, you just brought up the data, which I think is really critical, but really. That it works, and we know that it works. How can we help the, the average person, like you said, the baker, that doesn't do this every day, understand, okay, it's not just those programs of old that were just saying no, that it just didn't work.
Let's talk a little bit about more why we, why we know this works. Right. You know, it starts with messaging and normalizing, right? So many times in our daily life, whether it's our emojis that we send, or the gifts that we give. Oftentimes, you know, even people to me, I share a story once of how I went out onto social media and I put the post.
You know, that it was, it was my recovery anniversary and people were like, congratulating me and we did it in order to break stigma. And then so many people like, we're like, wow, wait, you know, how awesome is this and naturally just sent the champagne bottle and the chant, the emoji of the champagne bottle and the glasses.
It's become so ingrained in our culture and even from our social media and our bitmoji that we don't even begin to question anymore. And so that subliminal messaging that's out there is just very huge and weighs heavy and normalizes this. The amount, again, I'll always go back to advertising and it's so important for everyday friends.
Those of us who don't touch the field to realize that there are simple things they do to begin to help and support like one, they're going to tell their kids if they have kids, they can have fun without the use of alcohol. And so we need to showcase have a backyard party 1 time a year, get your friends together and say, look, here's the deal.
We're not going to have alcohol. We're going to show our kids. That we can have a good time without substances, just as a great way of example, if they do have substances out there, if they do have alcohol at their parties, separate the coolers, make sure that they're clearly marked, make sure that there's a system where, you know, the piece that is so important is those young developing brains that time when that brain is an adolescence, when it's going to grow the most and is going through that neural pruning process.
Yes. It's so important that we keep all substances out of there and the average brain, the average adolescent brain doesn't hardwire until an average age of 20 of 25 and oftentimes we think like we hear the word 25 more like, okay, brain's good now. And the truth is, it's an average age of 25 and you have to kind of know your kid to know which side of the average they are on.
Right? So it does become for the everyday to understand that. Prevention the same as we teach to put seatbelts on. We teach to put sunblock on. We teach, um, to look both ways to wear a hat. There's so many other harm reducing strategies we use to teach our Children. This is 1 layer of it. And as we can begin to incorporate health policy into family with a key focus on including.
Substance misuse, including underage drinking in that conversation that really takes us further down the road of being able to one, reduce access, reduce early onset, and really change culture within our families and within our, uh, our communities. I think prevention has been 1 of the more challenging.
areas to explain to people because you can't prove what you don't see, right? So you can't say, in theory, you can't say, right? Because of this, I didn't pick up that drink. I didn't use substances. But there is science that actually tells us exactly what we were just saying about the brain development. The longer we can keep that youth from picking up that first drink, the less likely they are to develop a substance use disorder.
We know that. And I think it's important that that messaging really gets out there. Because yes, you can really clearly look at, I've been to treatment, and this is how long I've been on my recovery journey. This is how many years my recovery anniversary. There's those milestones. But me, as somebody, a youth that grew up in prevention, I don't say, this is my Teen Institute anniversary.
Right. Right? We don't say that. But yet, I know that the, all those intersections helped keep me to a point of healthiness. And so, integrating that language, I think, and how we help, like you were saying, the community norm to shift. Shifting that community norm that prevention language is not only okay, it's common.
It's how we it's how we work in this community, and we are seeing some sign of this becoming since cobit. In fact, if you start to pay attention to your menus at restaurants, there are more non alcoholic choices on our menus. that we've ever had before. It increases your your bill, right? Because if you should just get water now, you gotta pay 8 for a fancy drink that has no alcohol in it, right?
So, so, but we starting to see the little changes like that. You saw people take on a 30 day challenge to challenge themselves to not drink during certain months of the year. And then what we have seen is people who've done that 30 day challenge and have not used substances, not because they had an addiction, just because they wanted to just...
Try and see if they can do it. They actually chose another month and another month because they realized their body starting to feel incredible without any substances in it. So it's really important to realize, again. We often look at this as the, you know, the way downstream conversation, but this is just a conversation about health.
And this is about how do we, how do we become our optimal self? And, and oftentimes, you know, if you aren't somebody who has an addiction and you do choose alcohol, that's a choice. And also understand that it definitely has some health effects on our body. And the last thing I want to just kind of say to your point, Sarah, about when we're talking about numbers.
When they took a look at 90, when they took a look at all the individuals who had been diagnosed, who had a diagnosis, right, where they wound up in, in treatment, 90 percent of them reported using substances in their teen years, 90%. So, if we said 90 percent of all diabetics ate sugar when they were in their teens, we would make sure that no teens ever got sugar.
Yep, sure would. Sure, that we use that bit of science to understand the impact of that young developing brain early on when I think that's why so much of this happens. Like, you said, at the community, and even the family level, because, like, families have their own norms around these things, right? There are some families would be like, yeah, great.
No sugar. That's not going to be a hard change for us and there are some families that are like my kids might die because they won't eat anything now, but you know, like if we have those differences and you know, we've got families who don't drink alcohol and you have families who are like, you can do whatever you want as long as it's in my house, you know, like all of that, like it's a big task to put forth and that's why folks like you have been doing this work.
Like you said, for years, Um, to get there, I would say, Oh, no, go ahead before I ask you the question. We just really need to be so much more comprehensive about prevention and really double down on it, double down on it with funding, double down on it in recognizing its seriousness in this conversation, that this isn't just about schools.
This is about community, and it's really about making conscious change in the 4 different domains, making conscious change With schools, with communities, with families, and of course, amongst young individuals as well. And it has to be concentrated around all four areas. I mean, you kind of actually just answered my question so well done, first of all, because I was going to ask you, you know, what, what's the, the key takeaway, right?
If there was one thing that someone could take away from today, and I think you really did, you hit on it. We've got to double down on prevention. And we really need to focus more on it than less. It's an area, I think Morgan said it really, really succinctly earlier that, how can we raise the next generation of substance free kids?
That's the way to resolve some of these other large crises that we know we are addressing post pandemic. This is, this is the actual answer. So, and it really becomes so important to just to question why to begin to build in good strategies to address the why and to stop normalizing kids drinking or minimize kids drinking.
Right? Oftentimes we're like, oh, they're just drinking. They're not doing the heavy stuff, but follow the science, follow the people who wound up in, you know, into some of those heavy. Oftentimes it starts with alcohol. We cannot play one drug against another alcohol still took out. Yeah. 180, 000 last year, right?
But we get alarmed by fentanyl because it's quick and it hits people at a younger age. It's not as long term. We still can't, we can't begin to like favor one over the other. We just really need to protect those young developing brains and create health policy all around. Yep. Yep. Kim, I hope you'll come back.
Of course, because we just scratched the surface on prevention, and we're going to be bringing a lot of different prevention experts from North Carolina and across the country, but we are so grateful that you took the time to join us today and just get a little bit of a teaser, really. On this conversation that we need to keep going.
Absolutely. And thanks for highlighting prevention. Oftentimes we find even across the country. We don't want to talk about the upstream stuff because it's a little bit more vague. So, thank you for being willing to highlight this and give us give us a space and give us a voice. Absolutely. Absolutely.