Disenablers: officials (firing officials), a wife (of Paul Weller) and a child (who got mom arrested!).
Disenablers of the month:
Officials in Broward County, Florida, who fired veteran prosecutor David Weigel after learning he deliberately failed to file over 293 cases involving county ordinance and traffic violations, including 177 DUIs. We might suspect Weigel was only trying to hide his own cases or those of his fellow alkies.
English singer-songwriter Paul Weller’s wife Hannah Andrews, who gave Paul a credible ultimatum. Weller explained why he got sober: “I got bored with [alcohol and other drugs]. You know the cliché of feeling sick and tired of feeling sick and tired?….It got to the point where I just wanted to stop doing that, so I did….And the drinking—which I loved—became too much for me as well. It helped that another influence was my misses: she said I had to make a decision. It was either her or the bottle.” So, after saying he “just” got sober, the addictionologist might observe he didn’t just get sober; he got sober because of a credible threat of consequences. As story after story recounted in Drunks, Drugs & Debits shows, only when there are severe consequences or the credible threat of same do addicts ever tire of feeling “sick and tired of feeling sick and tired.” See how this works? Weller who started out with The Jam as lead guitarist and vocalist in the late ‘70s, has been sober since 2010 not because he “realized the drink was killing him,” as so many journalists say, but because of the ultimatum he received from someone he loves.
The 16-year-old daughter of Melissa Holloway, 39, who offered to drive her 12-year-old sister with their drunk mother to the store to get an outfit for the younger daughter’s sixth-grade graduation, despite not having a license to drive. When the daughter got in the driver’s seat, Holloway grabbed her and tried to pull her out; when that didn’t work, Holloway began hitting her daughter and the daughter fought back, telling deputies arriving on the scene it was in self-defense. Deputies correctly arrested mom.