In two recent blog posts starting here, I focused on a qualitative research project we conducted with family members who have been indirectly affected by substance use problems.
Years after this research was conducted, I received a story written by Anna, who lives here in Australia, which relates how her family coped with her brother’s heroin addiction. I published Anna’s Story on Recovery Stories and recently updated it in my eBook Our Recovery Stories: Journeys from Drug and Alcohol Addiction. Anna’s story highlights the need for family members to accept that they cannot take ownership of their loved one’s addiction. They are not responsible for the addiction and they cannot do recovery for their loved one.
One of the things I will be doing over the coming months is to ‘bring back’ some of the classic blogs from our online community 
In an earlier blog, I described the nature of addiction recovery, using what was written in the second last chapter, ‘Factors That Facilitate Recovery’, of my recently published eBook, 
The research conducted by Patrick Biernacki, with 101 former heroin addicts, showed some of the courses that people take in their lives when they give up using the drug without the aid of treatment. This is the last part of this series of blog posts.
I continue my series of blog posts on Patrick Biernacki’s research from the mid-1980s focused on natural recovery from heroin addiction.
In 
Many people believe that if you try heroin, then you are on the path to ruin. They consider that addiction to heroin is inevitable, and the route to being drug-free again is extremely difficult, if not impossible. In fact, the vast majority of people who try heroin do not become addicted to the drug [1].
