Hungry. Angry. Lonely. Tired.

In addiction treatment, those four words form the acronym HALT, a clinical shorthand for the states that can trigger impulsive decisions, relapse, or substance use. In Graham Reid Van Every’s debut book ‘HALT: The American Rehab Experience,’ that simple recovery jargon is put up against the untidy reality of life inside rehab and its wider industrial complex.

Published by Blurring Books, HALT is endorsed by Larry Clark, the photographer and legendary filmmaker behind Kids (1995), and includes a foreword by seminal blogger Meg Yates (aka Meg Superstar Princess). The book takes the form of a composition notebook pieced together from journal entries, clippings, quotes, pasted-on ephemera, and Reid Van Every’s own observations from his experience in six treatment facilities across four states. He actually received the original composition notebook on one of his first stints in rehab. The presentation has an almost children’s book-like accessibility and simplicity, even as it captures the misery, boredom, and dark absurdity of rehab. Graham’s brother, filmmaker Blake James Reid, is currently working on a film loosely adapted from the book.

Before writing the book, Reid Van Every spent much of his adult life living between immense privilege and “America’s narcotic underbelly” before alcohol and opiate addiction took him through those six facilities. Between 2015 and 2023, he claims the only period when he wasn’t “completely loaded” was when he was forcibly living on a sailboat.

For anyone who has spent time in treatment, reading a book this accurately detailed is both soothing and vexing. I spent two months in rehab myself once upon a time, so flipping through HALT transported me right back into those halls. I felt an immediate kinship with Graham’s account, along with a strange fondness for a period of time I wouldn’t necessarily want to relive, while his criticism of the system brought back some of the frustrations I’ve carried with me since.

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JENNIFER MAXWELL: One of the reasons I was really excited to talk to you is because of how much I resonated with your book and your story in general. I think you and I are the same age. I’m about to turn 30 too, and I was in treatment in 2022.

GRAHAM REID VAN-EVERY: Oh, really? Wow.

MAXWELL: I think it’s a slightly different experience here in Canada, but everything in HALT just brought me back.

VAN EVERY: Yeah, here in the US, everything is based on a caste system of insurance and whether you have private insurance or not. You’ll have certain policies that only pay maybe $200 a day to a treatment center, and another where the treatment center can bill upwards of $5,000 a day, and those two individuals can be getting the same level of care and be roommates. If there’s one thing that I would like my book to accomplish, it’s conversation around reform in this whole system.

MAXWELL: I went to a private center, a very expensive one. Not a provincially or federally run one, but most of the people I met there had been through those, and a lot of the things actually going on inside were very much the same.

VAN EVERY: I started out in a similar treatment center; private, very high-end, doesn’t even take insurance, just cash upfront payments. It didn’t work whatsoever. I was using opiates within 24-hours of being outta there.

Eventually I started going to more insurance-based facilities, and from there I hit what would be considered the bottom of the caste system: state-run, even nonprofit facilities. It was brutal from the standpoint of mental health. At these state-run facilities, you’re essentially bunching together all of society’s rejects. Even at a state-run methadone detox facility, maybe 20% were true opioid addicts seeking detox; 80% were individuals in and out of this cycle of homelessness and total psychosis. 

MAXWELL: I live in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, which has become infamous for the way the government and rehabilitation system have failed addicts and the unhoused. I’ve lived here my whole life, and I’ve watched it persist and get worse. At what point over your stints in different rehabs did you realize how systemic the issues were?

VAN EVERY: It wasn’t until I ran through the gamut of every tier in the system. Then I realized, “Wow, these programs are all the same.” Yet one of them costs an exorbitant amount of upfront liquid cash, and the other costs a fortune to each insurance company, which in turn raises every American’s insurance. And the third one might cost nothing to the patient up front, but on the back end it costs the state way more than it’s worth.

MAXWELL: You talk about the idea of “selling salvation” and the promises made to you when you’re entering rehab. I still have mixed emotions about my own time there, because there was so much corruption within the staff and the facility. It doesn’t always feel like this pure place of salvation. Their services are for people who are at their most desperate, but that same desperation makes them vulnerable to these false promises and easy to exploit for profit.

VAN EVERY: That’s where it boils back down to this greed filled perversion of the American dream—capitalism. Capitalism has failed us as a system within recovery. 

MAXWELL: You cited that the US rehabilitation industry makes roughly $42 billion every year. What would be the first thing that you changed about the system if you had that kind of power?

VAN EVERY: I would rip the head off of the ability to charge different rates of treatment. Better yet, I would rip the head off of the idea that treatment has anything to do with financial value. It’s currently contributing to the epidemic that we see on the streets today. When corruption in treatment at the admissions or executive level happens, it’s like a disease. 

“Whether it be a state run, insurance based, or six- figure-a-month treatment center — the patients, the war stories, and the social atmosphere are indistinguishable. The food may have varied along the way, but the patient’s words never did. Every single one of them, stuck in a repetitive cycle of anguish. Attempting to escape through a myriad of nicotine, story-telling, and absurdity. On the hunt for oblivion just one last time.” – HALT Author’s Note

MAXWELL: Let’s talk about the inception of HALT. When you’re in treatment, you’re grouped with an amalgamation of different characters. I was with former snipers, veterans, addicts fresh off the street, rich housewives, but I ended up finding common ground with all of them. Those social dynamics make up a lot of your book. Can you explain a bit of how you put it all together?

VAN EVERY: Most of it was done on the spot while actively participating. In the moment I would be critiquing it and commenting on it and creating a dialogue and  narrative in my head about it. I’d say 90% of it is completely unbastardized and is verbatim—anonymously, of course—to what these individuals were saying and going through.

MAXWELL: You mentioned specifically about the stories you heard or shared in the smoking area. That was so real. After I left, I was like, “I need to write a movie about these people and this experience.”

VAN EVERY: I love that. The fact that you feel the same way is a testament to the real people I wrote it for. People that have been through this that can truly say, “Wow, this is so spot on.” I want them to be able to smell the menthol smoke.

MAXWELL: You author this book in quite an anthropological way. You’re living in it, but you’re also observing it. You’re observing multiple cultures and social dynamics at the same time while commenting on the disparity, the absurdity, and the beauty. Did you ever worry about people taking it the wrong way? Mistaking the absurdity for mockery? 

VAN EVERY: If anything, it kind of excites me. Within my own work in general I constantly will come back to socioeconomic themes, to themes of the American way. I think of this book from a standpoint of: how would a middle class American that has never taken a drug in their life, that’s living this white picket fence dream, take a book like HALT? I think they would be highly offended by it, honestly. 

The artist that has impacted me the most in my own work and own interpretation of what holds value—and the lens in which I view that value—is Harmony Korine. I remember watching Spring Breakers for the first time with a large group of highly uninteresting people on Fisher Island in Miami… and just how uncomfortable and upset they were by it. That alone says it all to me, how so many people just want to live in a processed and purified reality. I don’t know, I revel in that discomfort.

A lot of what I went through in treatment and what I wrote about in ‘HALT’ came from overhearing some truly next-level sentences. There was this lady in her sixties that worked in one of the rehabs named “Genee” who used to have to corral all of us to groups or to lunch, and this one patient who was notorious for having a hole in his head from brain surgery and showing it off to everyone would point at her while she’s telling us where to go and he’d say, “Listen lady, go back in your bottle. Genee, go back in.” The same patient would find me in the hallways, stop me, and ad lib 5 or 6 line poems to me. One time all he said was “You see this hole in my head? I’m going to get a tattoo of the core of the Earth and tour the world.” Every time words came out of this guy’s mouth, and right when I’d thought my mind couldn’t further be blown, boom. Mind blown, again. And I feel privileged to have documented it. 

“While America’s socioeconomic classes are all represented and co-existing within treatment, the one aspect of life that did not change was the ability every patient had to tell pure poetry, and escape from the confines of tragedy.” – Final Line of HALT

MAXWELL: When I listened to you on the Rise Above podcast, and I was so impressed by the fact that you are still relatively early in your sobriety but can talk and write about it with so much clarity and confidence and, from what it looks like, not a lot of shame. How did you get so comfortable speaking so candidly about very vulnerable things?

VAN EVERY: Up until I truly surrendered to the fact that I was an opiate addict, that I could say out loud that my drug of choice was heroin, I was definitely still in a form of denial. I couldn’t heal, couldn’t exist soberly, and couldn’t work a Narcotics Anonymous program—of which I credit largely with my still being sober today. I can tell you that for a long time I wasn’t comfortable, but I’ve always recognized that I wasn’t comfortable. I understand now that there is importance in the discomfort, analyzing it, basking in it, identifying why, and expressing it through a medium like writing.

MAXWELL: What else do you credit for your getting and staying clean?

VAN EVERY: I can definitely credit the treatment complex solely for housing me in a position where I otherwise would’ve ended up dead. But what kickstarted my willingness was the proverbial bottom, a divine intervention moment of clarity where I ended up on the street, truly losing it all and experiencing what was my higher power for the first time. Whether you believe in a religious deity or not is irrelevant, what it boils down to for myself is the ability to recognize that deja vu, coincidence, serendipity, etherealness in general exists. The unexplainable.

No matter how romantic your substance of choice may seem to you, or no matter how much you convince yourself that it’s a maintainable vice, it’s not. It will take everything away from you that. Everything. And that’s not a stereotype. I pushed the limits, I lived to the edge, and I’m grateful that I lived to the edge. It was either going to be death or salvation due to near-death experience.

MAXWELL: How do you balance all of the ugly truths about the rehab industry while not discouraging people who are thinking about getting help from a treatment center?

VAN EVERY: Well, I can tell you that at the end of the day: there is no quick fix. There is no magic pill that’s going to take away the spiritual and mental obsession, disease—whatever you wanna call it—that is addiction. The solution we do have is essentially locking yourself in a place where you cannot access your drug of choice. But recovery doesn’t begin and end with treatment. It’s about whether or not you allow that desire to escape to come back into your life. 

MAXWELL: Getting out of treatment and assimilating into real life, for me, was harder than anything I experienced in treatment. Once all that’s gone, you’re just left with yourself and it’s brutal. Was writing this book a necessary component for your post-treatment recovery?

VAN EVERY: It is a major factor of what kept me clean. The book gave me a lifeline of hope and a sense of purpose. I moved into sober living and was like, “Fuck it, I will have a routine solely to create this book.” That might not be everyone’s experience, but I can tell you that routine and regimen, even though I hated it for the majority of my life, provided me with a sense of peace that had never existed for me.

MAXWELL: Final question, what do you hope someone who’s either in active addiction, in rehab, or out of rehab, would take away HALT?

VAN EVERY: I would challenge anyone, whether it be the middle-class American I loathe or the junkie on the street who I could listen to for hours doing beat poetry, to recognize and feel a sense of relatability on a human level. And I really want it to affect as many addicts positively as possible, and give them a chance to recognize that rehab might not be the solution, but it is the start of the solution.

HALT: The American Rehab Experience is available to order now

Upcoming HALT Book Launches + Signings:

Friday September 18th @ Dale Zine | Miami, Florida

Thursday September 24th @ MoMA PS1 | New York, New York

Saturday October 17th @ The Haggerston curated by Deeper Into Movies | London, UK