About the Documentary.

A Vancouver therapist triumphs over alcoholism and embarks on a mission to ensure his clients get the treatment he didn’t.

We are riding a wave of enormous change in addiction research & treatment, yet most Canadians don’t know it and – what’s worse – neither do their doctors. In the documentary Wasted, therapist and alcoholic in recovery Mike Pond, along with his life partner filmmaker Maureen Palmer, take viewers on a very personal journey of discovery. They reveal tantalizing clues to what causes addiction and focus on compassionate evidence-based treatments that pick up where AA leaves off.

“Mike kept failing the program but is it possible that it was the program that failed him?”

Mike Pond knows addiction from the inside out. After two decades as a successful therapist helping clients battle addiction, Mike succumbed himself. He lost his practice, his home and his family to alcoholism and ended up homeless on Vancouver’s notorious downtown eastside. For two years, Pond bounced between the streets and rundown recovery homes. The only treatment offered to him: Alcoholics Anonymous.

In fact, AA does not work for the majority who try it, leaving many to feel like failures. Remarkably, most medical doctors still believe it’s the only effective treatment for addiction, insisting their patients attend meetings while they ignore – or remain ignorant of – therapies proven to help addicts and their families.

Pond and Palmer make a powerful case for an expanded tool kit to treat our number one public health care problem – a tool kit based on science and presented by some of the world’s most renowned addiction researchers.

Watch Wasted.

The documentary is available for streaming, on demand, outside of Canada.

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