Pot everywhere makes staying sober much harder: Young New Yorkers in recovery need support and each other

Lost in the weeds of our city’s marijuana legalization and the accompanying proliferation of cannabis shops are the on-going, heroic efforts by tens of thousands of young, recovering New Yorkers to stay substance-free.

The smell of marijuana seems to be everywhere these days, and at all times. A morning rush hour wait on a Manhattan subway platform, for example, was recently interrupted by giggling high school students taunting each other with whoops of, “Skunk! Skunk,” a reference to the pungent scent of the pot they’d just smoked.

Even Mayor Adams has observed that “The No. 1 thing I smell now is pot. It seems like everyone is smoking a joint now, you know. Everybody has a joint.”

Headlines warn that the number of toddlers getting sick from accidentally eating marijuana-laced treats has dramatically increased, but the challenges faced by young adults determined to stay away from weed receive scant attention.

One such young adult is 28-year-old Laura, now in her third year of recovery after struggling to get sober since she was 21. She says breaking away from drugs and alcohol is the hardest thing she’s ever experienced — and that includes overcoming cancer as a child.

She is confounded and dismayed by what she now sees and smells on our city streets.

“We should be doing more to celebrate recovery and living without drugs and alcohol,” she told me recently. “We don’t condone drinking alcohol in front of office buildings early in the morning — what does it say when kids are no longer concerned about smoking weed on their way to school?”

I lost my 23-year-old son Isaac to an accidental drug overdose in 2014. Prior to his death and after years in and out of treatment, he struggled mightily and unsuccessfully to find a peer community to support his recovery.

My world collapsed when Isaac died. As a parent, I was drowning in guilt — I could have done this, I should have done that. Sitting shiva, I told all the people who came by that I was going to do something to make meaning out of his life.

I knew that there had been a void where his ability to experience joy without getting high should have been. And over the course of the next year, I came to understand that he wasn’t alone.

Drugs and alcohol play profound roles in the lives of many young people for the simple reason that anxiety, social discomfort, and debilitating self-doubt all fade in the haze of intoxication. So, too, of course, do clear judgment and the ability to make good choices — which is when disaster hits.

What struck me was the number of young people I met who’d done the excruciating work of facing their demons in recovery yet were still struggling to live engaging, enriching and exciting substance-free lives.

Part of the problem, I learned, was that young people trying to stay sober can find plenty of meetings to attend but, as one 26-year-old woman told me, “There are very few places to go to have fun, where you can actually revel in and enhance your recovery with people who are going through the same thing.”

In 2015, I launched BIGVISION, a non-profit organization offering young adults in recovery a community to belong to. It is not a treatment program, though treatment programs across the city use us as a resource. Our mission is to help young sober people — from late teens to mid-30s — by providing free (and substance-free) activities such as sailing, kayaking, yoga, meditation and, just as important, a supportive social network.

The need for programs such as ours became abundantly clear during the pandemic, when thousands of young people, searching for a balance of mental well-being and social interaction during quarantine, found our virtual events and workshops on the internet.

Coming out of the pandemic and the mental health dilemma it triggered or exacerbated, we are encouraged to see, for example, “sober” bars popping up in neighborhoods in Brooklyn and other parts of the city. I am not surprised that their novelty has garnered media attention and attracted young people looking for ways to socialize without alcohol. But such establishments are only one piece of a much bigger puzzle.

Helping young adults solve the mystery of how to build rewarding, fulfilling lives without drugs and alcohol should be the priority of a city that, unfortunately, now seems more interested in figuring out how to cash in on the demand for legalized marijuana products.

Goldberg is the founder of the non-profit BIGVISION community and co-owner of William Goldberg Diamond, a family-owned business for three generations.