Matt Dorsey's Journey Through Addiction, Relapse, and Helping San Francisco's Recovery Community

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Episode Transcript:

Elizabeth Vargas:

Matt Dorsey, welcome to Heart of the Matter. Great to have you.

Matt Dorsey:

It’s great to be here. Thanks, Elizabeth. Thank you for inviting me.

Elizabeth Vargas:

All the way from the great state of California. So we’re bi-coastal, you and I, you’re in California, I’m in New York, but we’re talking about something that affects a lot of people, not just on the coasts but across the country, in the heartland especially, which is addiction. And it’s funny, I feel like your life story, you have addiction in two parts, alcohol early on in adulthood, drugs later on.

Matt Dorsey:

Yep.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Talk to me about how that happened.

Matt Dorsey:

Yeah, so my background and relationship with substances was always different from family members and most of my friends. My family drank alcohol. I never saw my parents excessively drunk or anything. I think my brother and sister who were both older had their episodes, but nobody ever drank like I did. And my relationship with first alcohol and then later other substances was that if some of it is fun, more is better. And I was just one of these people, I think a drug counselor once said to me, oh, you were born without an off switch. So I stopped drinking in my late twenties.

Elizabeth Vargas:

You started when you were about 14?

Matt Dorsey:

Yeah. Yeah. I was an early drinker, and I think that was by virtue of my brother was five years older than I was and I got his driver’s license sometimes, sometimes without his knowledge, at a time when the drinking age was just changing in Massachusetts. So I started early. In my late twenties, it was just really a sense of I just didn’t want to be this person. I was smoking cigarettes and just eating badly. I just wasn’t very healthy. And on my own, it was December 2nd, 1992, I decided that this was the last drink I’m going to have.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Nobody said anything to you? You didn’t have anything awful happen?

Matt Dorsey:

No, no. I think I was just sick of being a person who drank as excessively and as regularly as I did, and I just wanted to lead a healthier life. I got into fitness and started running and working out and that was kind of my program. I was familiar with 12 step recovery and other traditions, but I just felt I didn’t need it. In some ways I have shared in meetings and in rehab settings that I sometimes wonder if my addiction was playing the long game to convince me that I had it in my power to just turn it off. And in a time when I think my demons were just little puppies, I could maybe in 1992 do that and have the resolve to do it. But years later when I was struggling with addiction from drugs, it was always in my head that I can do this, I can do this myself and I really don’t need a program.

Elizabeth Vargas:

And is that why you picked up drugs, because you thought I won’t get addicted? And if I do develop some sort of dependency, I kicked alcohol, I’ll kick this?

Matt Dorsey:

Yeah, I think it was more a kind of deal making that my inner addict convinces me like I’ve never had a problem with ecstasy or crystal meth or any of the other associated party drugs. Alcohol was my problem, so I can do this. And then it usually ended not well.

But around 2000, I was working in tech and started dabbling as a weekend warrior. It didn’t get out of hand for a year or two, but then it did get out of hand. Then I really did flame out. I again kind of white knuckled it in the early 2000s. It was the mid-2000s that I returned to drinking and was really struggling and that’s where I decided maybe it’s time to try a recovery program. So I got into a program and got a sponsor and really found a great recovery community in San Francisco. That was another seven years of good recovery. And then I had another setback for a year and then got sober again.

And up through 2018 and 2019, I think that was where I really got into drug use and what I would say was probably the darkest relapse of my life where I was really questioning whether I had another recovery left in me. I’m still haunted by that. When you’ve had success in recovery for multiple years, having it come apart for no particular reason, and I never had a good reason for why I did any of this other than I just wanted to, it was fun and I thought I could do it and on Monday everything will be fine and I can just put it down.
Experience has taught me that I can’t do that. I’m somebody who has to stay away from everything. I am blessed, I think, to live in a city that while it has a lot of temptations when it comes to alcohol and drugs, the flip side of that is it also has an incredibly vibrant and supportive recovery community. And I think especially being an elected official now and being out and proud about being a person in recovery, I now see a recovery community that is much larger than the self-selecting meetings that I go to.

I remember when I had a conversation with Mayor London Breed when she was interviewing people that she was considering to appoint to the board of supervisors when there was a vacancy on the board of supervisors. And I said to the mayor that I wanted to be considered because I’m a recovering drug addict, and given the problems that San Francisco is facing with public drug use and a public health crisis and drug overdose deaths, that is unprecedented in our city’s history with the exception of the AIDS crisis. I thought it was important for there to be a voice and a perspective from the recovery community on the board.
I had to acknowledge to her at that time, because I had a relapse during COVID, that I only had 18 months of sobriety. And in fact, the day that I met with Mayor Breed, it was literally the eighteen-month mark. And I had to say to her that I don’t have enough continuous sobriety to be a treasurer in a twelve-step program, and I’m asking-

Elizabeth Vargas:

Yet, you want to be on the board of supervisors?

Matt Dorsey:

But I wanted her to know that there’s no hard feelings if the answer is no. She wouldn’t need to go further than the chief of police who was my boss to ask whether I can be a distraction when I go off the rails. So there was a million reasons for her not to give me a chance, but I will always respect that she did. And so far it’s worked out. But one of the things that I mentioned to Mayor Breed when we talked was my belief that the recovery community in San Francisco is a sleeping giant politically, and I don’t think I fully appreciated how true that was until I was appointed.

Elizabeth Vargas:

What do you mean by that?

Matt Dorsey:

Well, early on there was a thing, I went to a local store in my district and I heard a guy from across the store just yell out, “Hey, Dorsey,” and I turned and he pointed at himself. He goes, “Six years sober.” And it was interesting to have people in the recovery community rooting for me. There’s one person in particular, there was a meeting that I went to, it was an online meeting and it was a small group and there was always an expectation that everybody who’s in the meeting was going to check in. And I had been sharing that I was interviewing for a job and I have some anxiety about it. I don’t know if I’m going to get it. I have anxiety about getting it. There’s a lot, because I would have to run right away. I didn’t tell people what the job was, just that I was interviewing for a different job.
And the meeting was a couple of days after I had been appointed to the board of supervisors that I signed into the meeting. And the reaction of the group was that was the job you were interviewing for, because it was a big deal for them as people in recovery. And afterwards, there was one person who called me, and this is somebody who’s been through hell and back and we’ve supported each other and we’ve known each other’s stories over the course of a couple of years through relapses and everything. And what he said to me was how proud he was that I was on the board. And he said something that still makes me kind of choke up when he said, “Now we’ve got a seat at the table.” And I still kind of get emotional about that.
I can see why it matters to him and to others. That doesn’t mean, by the way, that I have this, I got to be really careful and humble about my journey in recovery. There’s nothing that will get me into bigger trouble than figuring that I’ve got this now, I can just audit this class.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Or that you’ve got all the answers just because you’re in recovery, that you know what’s best for everybody else who’s still struggling on the streets, especially not just in San Francisco, but across the country.

Matt Dorsey:

Exactly. In fact, that’s a really interesting point because as a policymaker, I am always really careful to say, listen, my lived experience doesn’t mean that I’m going to be right about everything.
So what I always said in debates and in vote getting settings when I was campaigning for this office was my lived experience as a recovering drug addict doesn’t mean that my position is going to be right or what I’m advocating is the right thing. I think that I am going to try to get it right, but it doesn’t mean that I’m infallible about my position. What it does mean is that this is always going to be priority number one for me. This is never going to be the issue of the month for me. This is why I asked for this job. It’s the obligation of my survival and it gives purpose to my life.

Elizabeth Vargas:

I want to get to the public role part of your story in a moment, but you said a moment ago that last relapse really haunted you. Why? What happened?

Matt Dorsey:

Because I couldn’t stop using. It was-

Elizabeth Vargas:

Was this the one during the pandemic?

Matt Dorsey:

It was before the pandemic. I had sort of after 14 years in working for city government, I went into the private sector and gave up on politics. I was kind of done with that. I thought it was time to go out and do some other things. In hindsight, what I think it did was it enabled me to get away with a lot of things that a more public-facing role wouldn’t allow me to get away with, and that was not a good position for me to be in when I relapsed.
I started using, and I’m a crystal meth addict, I’m a gay man, and a lot of this in the gay community is tied up in sex and intimacy. And then there’s a bunch of other things that go along with it like GHB and Xanax and Benzos and just trying to sort of manage this whole thing. And I was really trying hard to pull it all together and it just really wasn’t. The more difficult and alarming thing was that nothing seemed to be working to enable me to stop. It was just this out-of-control craving.
And it didn’t matter what my resolve was, waking up in the morning that I can’t do this anymore and throwing everything away, and then within a few hours just being back trying to find my dealer. And I think that’s where I started to have questions whether recovery would work on me anymore. I wish I could identify the thing, the switch, the on-off switch. And whenever I talk to people in this realm, when people tell me, well, that doesn’t work or this does work, I always say, listen, if you figure out the on-off switch, if you figure out what works, write a paper on it because you’ll probably win the Nobel Prize for Medicine.
It is almost more frustrating to know that the day just came and it took, and I’m not sure what I did right, but it did, and I have to be really grateful and humble that what I’ve got is something that could be easily lost. I’ve made really bad decisions many times in my life that I knew in some way were just bad decisions. I’d like to think that being in an elective office now, I have said kind of half-jokingly that I represent about 80,000 voting age adults in San Francisco who have been unwittingly enlisted in my relapse prevention strategy. Having a public role, I’d like to think it escalates the cost.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Raises the stakes.

Matt Dorsey:

Yeah. And that’s not a bad thing for me, position for me to be in. Having a busy life, and I think also having a life with purpose, being humble about my recovery and doing the things that I need to make sure that recovery is front and center is also really important to me.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Everybody who has had a loved one who has relapsed, has asked that loved one, why? How could you throw away eight years of sobriety? How could you throw away two years or two weeks of sobriety, but especially long-term. I can’t tell you how many people in meetings raise their hand and say, I’m 10 days counting again, 10 days sober again, because they relapsed. Explain what does or does not go through your mind. Try as best you can to explain the relapse, because there’s nothing that families of alcoholics or drug addicts struggle with more is understanding the why. Why did you relapse? What happened?

Matt Dorsey:

Yeah, so I will say that having a history with alcohol and other substances and then later in life sort of including crystal meth and party drugs, it is often different things where there really is no good answer. And sometimes I feel like there’s a category of explanation that’s just really frustrating for people to hear. It’s sort of the post relapse rationalizations where I’m trying to explain what led to this, and there just is no good answer.

Elizabeth Vargas:

No, that’s the point. There can be no reason sometimes.

Matt Dorsey:

Yeah. I think the way that I have chosen to think about it for my own sobriety is that I need to maintain my spiritual fitness and take part in my recovery program. I have multiple traditions now that I participate in. There’s a life ring secular meeting that I am part of. Sometimes I go to recovery dharma, it’s a Buddhist tradition and other traditions. I like all of that, and I have to be really humble about this has got to be a part of my life. If I do that, then the cravings don’t come.
And in some ways, I think a lesson is if my defenses have fallen down, my recovery, spiritual fitness sort of defenses that keep me, if they are so weak that I am experiencing a craving for crystal meth, it’s almost too late. It usually is something where if I reverse engineer what happened nine times out of 10, it was because I stopped going to meetings or stopped participating or stopped calling my sponsor, ceased to have a commitment. Just started taking an attitude in college when auditing this class, that feeling where I may show up, but I’m not really-

Elizabeth Vargas:

But you’re checked out. You’re not paying attention.

Matt Dorsey:

And I think during COVID, my relapse during COVID was that. That was one where having in-person meetings go away became something where I would be reading the New York Times or ESPN while the meeting was going on in the background. And it really, that was one that snuck up on me.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Yeah. I think it snuck up on a lot of people. A lot of people had real struggles with that. So as an elected official now, you say that we now have a seat at the table, people in recovery, when it comes to policy in the city of San Francisco. Many people in this country look at San Francisco as ground zero for how not to do it.

My family lives in the Bay Area and I love San Francisco like no other city. And yet you walk around downtown San Francisco, it can be pretty bad. And it’s not just San Francisco, it’s cities across the country. And much of what we’re seeing on the streets right now are homeless people who are either severely mentally ill or severely addicted to drugs. And we now have elected leaders across the country saying we have to start to institutionalize these people or hospitalize these people against their will. As an elected official dealing with these kinds of things, what do you think about that?

Matt Dorsey:

We have at least 46 different crimes for which sanctuary is already withheld and withheld from people who are arrested on a second offense, including things like carjacking and extortion and robbery. To me, it makes sense that we should add to that the deadliest crime in San Francisco history, which is fentanyl dealing.

We’re going to add this fentanyl dealing as an exception to our sanctuary ordinance. I think it has popular support and I’ve seen polling suggesting it’s over 70%.

And that I think puts harm reduction into a more reasonable place where it belongs in the continuum of care for substance use disorders. That was kind of an uphill battle.

Listen, my time here as a policymaker is about nothing if it’s not making investments in incentives to get people off of drugs and into recovery and on the other side of their addiction. I will die on this hill. It’s money well spent. Anything we can do to identify obstacles to recovery and remove those obstacles is money much better spent than some of the things that we’re doing out there.

And I will also say, there is a guy I go to a meeting with who I just invited to a hearing that we had recently. He does low barrier counseling. Between seven o’clock at night and three o’clock in the morning he’s out on the Tenderloin with a phone and he’s working with connecting people to doctors and helping people get on buprenorphine. He was homeless himself for four years in the Tenderloin. I think he’s probably in his late twenties. He was a fentanyl addict. And today, to me it’s heroic because he doesn’t find it triggering at all, but he’s been sober for 19 months. And this is something where he has found a lot of purpose and he knows folks, and it’s really inspiring.

The thing about sobriety and recovery is it’s hard, you don’t really fully know. Nobody wears a badge that they’re in recovery. I think from the perspective that I have right now as an out and proud elected official who’s in recovery, I hear it and I see it from a lot of people in larger numbers than I would just for the meetings that I go to. But I actually asked him if he would come give public comment at the hearing, and he stepped up. He brought his father, which was itself really kind of emotional and moving. You can imagine being a parent of somebody who’s been in the Tenderloin addicted to fentanyl for four years.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Homeless.

Matt Dorsey:

Yeah. And to see your son in city hall. And he was the first one to the microphone when public comments started. And he said, “My name is Matthew. I’m a recovering fentanyl addict. I’m 19 months sober, and I give back to my community by doing this counseling for code Tenderloin.” And he said, “I carry the message that there’s a better life on the other side of addiction, and I’m living proof.” And it choked me up then and it started choking me up now. But there are people out there and I just don’t want to give up on anybody. I think the city of St. Francis has values that can do this right and help people get sober, and that’s what I’m going to be fighting for during my time here.

Elizabeth Vargas:

One last question. Since you are in the public policy sphere, you are an elected official. You talked about fentanyl today. How concerned are you about nitazenes, which are a chemically manufactured drug from China that we’re now seeing? There are families who are losing their kids to this. They think they’re taking a Percocet or a Xanax, and instead it’s a nitazene contaminated pill. It is more deadly than fentanyl. How worried are you about this new drug? Or it’s not actually new, but it’s just spreading.

Matt Dorsey:

Yeah. We are in a different era now, the synthetic drug era is going to be helped by some things that are really different. As a policymaker, I would say one of them is that I think we’re going to see diminishing returns when it comes to supply side interventions. And I think we’re going to need to invest much more in demand side interventions just because these drugs are more potently addictive, more easily manufactured, more profitable, and more deadly.

It’s also things like xylazine, medetomidine. But it does scare me, and I think this is what is going to redefine 21st century urbanism. This in San Francisco is the problem that we have to solve. And we are blessed to not have homicide rates that are off the hook or multi-generational gangland violence problems like many other cities.

What we do have is several hundred people who are addicted to drugs on the street, and they’re at the end of their rope. And I think we can help most of those folks, and I think we have to be really serious about making sure that whatever we’re doing to incentivize people to come to San Francisco, and they come and large numbers, this can’t be the destination city for bad behavior and drug dealing and drug use on our streets.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Matt Dorsey, really, really interesting talking to you. Thank you so much.

Matt Dorsey:

Thank you, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Vargas:

You have a really interesting perspective as an elected leader, as a person in recovery, somebody who has sort of lived what that’s like, knows what it’s like to struggle, and doing everything you can to help those who still do. Really appreciate it. Thank you.

Matt Dorsey:

Thank you, Elizabeth. I really appreciate the opportunity to take part in your podcast.