People in recovery from substance use hope to change the political

Thomas Higdon was a politics fanatic his entire life: He kept up on the news cycle, he door-knocked for candidates, and he volunteered for a number of campaigns. 

He long dreamed of working in government, but he and everyone around him felt it wouldn’t be possible because of his substance use. His use of alcohol and other drugs began causing problems when he was in law school in the mid-1990s, and in 2014, the consequences of his substance use left him living under an overpass. He is now abstinent from the drugs, but even years later, he felt he had ruined his chances of running for office. 

“I allowed this internalized stigma, over decades, to blind me to what I could really do,” Higdon, now 52, told CBS News. 

That thought stayed with him for years. He moved into grassroots organizing and advocacy spaces, but in 2023, he learned about the Recovery Advocacy Project’s upcoming “Run for Recovery” program — and realized that working in public office might still be possible. 

Building a political bootcamp for people in recovery 

Courtney Gary-Allen, who began using drugs at a young age and overdosed multiple times before getting sober in 2015, has successfully run for office twice. In 2020, she was elected to the position of at-large City Councilor in Augusta, Maine. She was reelected to the same role in 2023. Both times, she won in a landslide, but the experience made her realize the need for a campaign bootcamp centered around people in recovery. Similar bootcamps are conducted by major political parties, but she wanted to create a bipartisan space tailored to the recovery community’s specific experiences and needs. 

“For the last decade or so, the recovery movement in America has been very focused on telling our stories and advocating and pushing for better policy around substance use disorder and recovery efforts, and I think this is a new chapter in the story of the recovery advocacy movement,” said Gary-Allen, who is also the organizing director at the Maine Advocacy Recovery Project. “We’re no longer just advocating to policymakers. We are running for office to become the policymakers that are making decisions around these issues and many more.” 

From that idea, Run for Recovery was born. The program graduated its inaugural class, made up of five Democrats, five Republicans, and five Independents, in August 2024. The 15 participants were selected from across the country. Once a month for a year, they met online to talk the ins and outs of mounting a campaign. Lessons ranged from learning about finance laws to drafting position statements to preparing to talk openly about their substance abuse. 

Higdon was one of the selected participants. Even though he had “been around campaigns all…