“If a windstorm came through town, everyone would be talking to roofers. But what if the roofers said there is a 60-70% chance it will be blown off again after I fix it?” This is the question Scott Strode poses.
Strode is the founder and executive director of The Phoenix, a peer-led nonprofit network (unrelated to The Phoenix Recovery Center in Utah) that provides free fitness classes to people in recovery. When Strode, a former addict himself, looks at our system of drug and alcohol treatment, he thinks about those roofers. If you have to go into treatment six or seven times before you can achieve sobriety, he doubts that the answer is just funding more treatment beds.
But that is what our government and much of private philanthropy have supported. Indeed, much of the public still believes that our addiction crisis is a healthcare capacity problem. I heard this in 2018 when I interviewed people in West Virginia about the number of kids ending up in foster care, and I heard this in 2024 when I asked people in Portland, Oregon, why they voted to decriminalize drug use a few years before. Folks across the country were convinced that the reason for the drug crisis was a lack of capacity at treatment facilities and the solution was to stop arresting people and just fund more treatment.
In the years since, it’s clear this plan hasn’t worked out. As a recent expose in The Wall Street Journal noted, “Fraud has become a multimillion-dollar problem in America’s booming rehab industry, according to state officials, lawsuits filed by insurers and former clients, and federal indictments and convictions.” Part of this is because we offer public funding for an unlimited number of these short-term rehabilitation stints. And part of it, Strode told me, is “we don’t ask what’s happening when you leave that system of care.”
There are, of course, the 12-step programs, but Strode also believes that if a lot of addiction is the result of trauma generally, and a lack of healthy attachment in particular, then “we should create the opposite.” For Strode, that meant forming groups where people didn’t just talk about the struggles of addiction. Instead, he started groups that are dedicated to physical fitness for people who were in recovery. You need only be 48 hours clean and sober in order to show up at any of the hundreds of groups nationwide. You can choose from weightlifting, yoga, running, bicycling, rock climbing or any number of other fitness classes. The people who join often end up forming their own groups later on.
The story of The Phoenix is chronicled in a new documentary called “Sober.” And it is worth watching for a lot of reasons. But one is certainly the message that there are no quick fixes for addiction. It took the people featured in the movie a long time to fall into their situations and it takes them a long time to get out. It is not only that they experienced childhoods defined by family addiction and mental illness. Some spent time in prison. Others have been in years-long relationships that ended badly. Nothing will be fixed in 30 days. As Strode says, “We need to build a new and healthy attachment.”
At the same time, he doesn’t want people to “dwell” on the trauma. You don’t need to introduce yourself as an addict every time you come to one of the fitness meetings. And you don’t need to spend time talking about it, though you can. More often the conversation is about how to hold a yoga pose successfully or whether you have the right form when you try to lift those heavy weights. Strode tells me, “When I started to think of myself as climber and triathlete, there was not as much room for me to think of myself as addict and stupid.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, the longer people stick with these programs, the better they feel about themselves. The Phoenix did a survey of members using something called the Secure Flourishing Index. They asked participants at various stages of recovery how they rated factors like their financial stability, social relationships, meaning and purpose in life, and life satisfaction. All this produced a number on the index. The researchers found that “flourishing was perceived to increase from joining to the present, with larger increases among members in early and sustained recovery and among those with longer membership duration.” They suggest that “community engagement contributed uniquely to flourishing beyond time in recovery alone.”
In other words, it’s not just that people who are sober for longer are better off. It’s that the community they form offers them extra benefits beyond just not being addicted.
The Phoenix has expanded to hundreds of thousands of members, and it seems easily replicable. People who find success seem excited to form new groups. What can the rest of us do? Volunteer to help, encourage the people we know who are struggling with substance use to join, donate space or equipment. Just like recovery itself, the program needs time and space.