Courtney Allen remembers the first time she saw the color green. She was 22 years old, a mother of two, and just a few months in recovery. She turned towards one of her oldest friends and said, “Have the trees always been this green?”

Brant Dadaleares doesn’t ask people he hires if they have a problem with alcohol and drugs. The owner of Gross Confection Bar in Portland’s Old Port offers a very specific piece of advice instead. “Don’t try to pull the wool over my eyes because I’ve done it all,” he says.

Maine’s Director of Opioid Response steps in to help get a recovery community center for Millinocket.

By the time Glenn Simpson awoke in a psych ward in Pennsylvania to a nurse putting an IV in his arm, he had lost track of a few fundamentals. He didn’t know what day of the week it was, what had happened to his clothes or how he’d covered the 2,439 miles from the Los Angeles airport, where he last remembered being.

When Melissa Rivera quit drinking, she figured a line or two of cocaine every now and then wouldn’t hurt.

Jennie Joan Ferrare was on her way to a blackout when a most unusual thing happened: she saw herself drink, as if duplicated by magic, and understood with absolute certainty what would happen next.