First, however, advocates must agree upon what their message will be.

In the first-ever national meeting of local recovery leaders, organizers rolled out a national survey of people in recovery and their families -- intended, in part, to help shape the planned media campaign, which would target both the recovering community and the public at large.

The survey of 500 people in recovery and their family members found that the people most directly touched by addiction believe that the campaign should transmit a positive message, focusing on the fact that recovery changes lives for the better. "There is overwhelming support for this campaign" among people in recovery and their families, said researcher Allan Rivlin, senior vice president of polling firm Peter D. Hart Research Associates. "People are looking for someone to tell this story."

The Faces and Voices of Recovery meeting, held in St. Paul, Minn., Oct. 5-7, provided a forum for people in recovery to provide their input into the planned media campaign, which will be developed by the Washington, D.C.-based communications firm GMMB. "We need to make these materials relevant and useful to people at the local level," explained Jeff Blodgett, coordinator of the Alliance Project, which organized the meeting. "Otherwise, it'll be a failure."

David Mitchell, a partner in GMMB, told advocates at the meeting that the first goal of the campaign will be to "create a broad base in the recovery community with the capability to organize and activate." The second goal is to change public perceptions about addiction and recovery, added Mitchell; the third will be to create or change public policies.

Recovery Advocates Tear into 'Red Meat'

Mitchell brought drafts of a campaign brochure and a call-to-action statement as "red meat" for conference attendees to dissect and use as a starting point for making recommendations on both internal and external messages.

Feedback was extensive: for example, participants told Mitchell that any messages aimed at people in recovery must tackle the question of how to advocate without violating the anonymity traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous. Attendees also said that internal messages should encourage people in recovery to "give back" to others in need of help, and to view recovery as a political, not solely personal, issue.

Also, people in recovery should be told that there are ways they can get involved without "outing" themselves to the public, attendees said.

The Peter D. Hart survey indicated that the recovering community would be surprisingly receptive to a call to action: half of those polled said they would like to get personally involved in a recovery advocacy campaign, with 31 percent saying they would definitely speak or work publicly. "It's not about convincing people to go public, because one-third of the recovery community is saying, 'Tell me when to show up,'" noted Rivlin.

Many Pathways to Recovery

Advocates also said that internal messages should stress the fact that there are many paths to recovery -- a refrain that was especially resonant with the many methadone advocates in attendance at the St. Paul meeting. The survey affirmed that enrolling in addiction treatment was not the only way that people achieve sobriety: while 31 percent of respondents said they had gone through treatment, 52 percent said their recovery was assisted by a self-help program like A.A., and only 10 percent said they had received both professional treatment and attended self-help programs.

Most significantly, a quarter of those surveyed said they recovered without benefit of either treatment or self-help. Rivlin acknowledged that the finding that so many people got well on their own "may challenge the recovery community," and could portend the presence of a large number of people who don't necessarily agree that treatment services are hard to come by.

This, too, was reflected in the survey results: When asked what they considered the major barriers to treatment, 60 percent of people in recovery said denial, while 40 percent said shame. But only 27 percent cited access to treatment or cost, and just 11 percent said lack of programs. When asked how easy it is to get treatment, people in recovery were split almost evenly in their opinions.

"The recovery community is divided on whether it is easy or hard to get treatment," noted Rivlin, despite statistics showing that treatment capacity falls far short of demand.

On the other hand, Rivlin said, the statistics showing that many people recover on their own suggests that the population of people in recovery -- and potential advocates -- may actually be much larger than experts think.

A 'Miracle Cure'

When asked to assess proposed messages aimed at the general public and policymakers, the recovering people surveyed by Rivlin and colleagues found that the one deemed most important was this: "Millions of Americans are in long-term recovery from alcohol and drug addiction, and thousands more get well each year. These people are living proof that recovery happens and that there are real solutions to the problem of drug and alcohol addiction."

Some conference participants said that the message should tout recovery as a "miracle cure," while others felt the campaign should be cast as a civil-rights or human-rights struggle. "There's an awful lot of things the community wants to tell the public," said Rivlin. "What we need to do is trim it down to a single message."

According to the survey, people in recovery also believe that focusing on the impact that addiction has on children is critically important to the success of any media campaign: 75 percent said that supporters could be motivated by messages pointing out that children are the most helpless victims of addiction and the biggest beneficiaries of recovery.

However, conference participants objected strenuously to language in a draft brochure that called on people to help "protect" children from addiction -- language they felt was too stigmatizing. Some suggested that the focus of campaign materials should be on families, not children.

Family members of people with addictions are a key constituency for the recovery movement, summit organizers and participants agreed. But their support is not a given: As one summit participant noted, "The biggest stigmatizers of addiction are the spouses and children of abusers who never saw family members get well, and never saw treatment work."

Conference organizers noted that groups like the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill -- founded by family members of people with mental illness -- could serve as a role model for recovery advocacy. Statistics indicate that families are sorely in need of support: the Hart survey found that only 26 percent of family members had received help of any kind in dealing with their loved one's addiction.

Campaign Advisory Committee Chosen

The Faces of Recovery wrapped up with participants choosing a 21-member campaign advisory committee that will continue to help guide development of advocacy materials. The Alliance Project's Blodgett said that the immediate post-conference goal will be to finish work on the brochure and call to action previewed at the meeting, which should be ready for dissemination by the end of the year.

Blodgett said the St. Paul meeting achieved a surprising amount of consensus on the need for a national advocacy campaign and what it should focus on. "What surprised me was the lack of contentiousness," he said, adding, "I think we're close to the elusive common message we've all been looking for."