Book review: the weight of air, by David Poses

the weight of air is a fast-paced story about one man’s decades-long struggle with addiction and his hard-fought recovery. David Poses was a “functional addict”, able to hide his addiction from others (and sometimes from himself), but his need for drugs played havoc with both his inner and outer life. In his memoir, Poses recounts his story from the time he was a teenager landing in an abstinence-based treatment centre that lacked anything resembling compassion, critical thought, or quality care through his early adulthood when he seesawed between periods of abstinence and relying on street drugs to self-medicate his depression and mood disorders, to his ultimate recovery and “coming out” following years of counselling and medically assisted therapy (MAT), via a prescription for bupenephrine.

There is lots to love about this book. It’s engaging and well written; the characters are well drawn and relatable; there is plenty of inner and outer conflict; and, we know if we read the back cover, an ultimately happy ending. Poses’s story is a strong call for easier access to MAT, raises our understanding of why many people turn to street drugs in the first place, and points to the dangers of unregulated treatment centres. And if he let his story speak for itself, I’d have not a single bad thing to say about the weight of air.

Unfortunately, Poses’s editorializing takes what could have been a compelling memoir and turns it, at times, into a soapbox speech that not only advocates for evidence-based MAT but slams traditional recovery models, including abstinence-based treatment centres and twelve-step programs, as being universally dangerous. This created a frustrating experience for me as a reader, bouncing between the story’s narrative and the author’s current-day, journalistic opinions of those experiences. I applaud that he is an activist, but I would have preferred to stay in the story and read about his perspective of the current approaches to addiction support in an afterwards.

As a recovery ally myself, I also objected to his painting all abstinence-based programs as dangerous and not evidence-based. While the effectiveness of abstinence is not as widely researched, and the findings not as widely distributed, as studies financed by the Big Pharmas (go figure), there have been plenty of reputable studies done showing that abstinece and twelve steps works for some people. In fact, there are many millions of people throughout North America who say they owe their life to it. I’m tired of the divide in the recovery community where advocating for one approach means disparaging another. We’re in the middle of an all-hands-on-deck crisis, and we need all options available.

Based on the story and writing alone, I would have given the book four out of five stars. But Poses’s editorializing distanced me from the story as a reader and seemed unecessarily divisive, so I’m giving it three stars.

Overall rating: 3/5 stars