Systems & justice · essay
On elite capture, the wellness industry, and who gets to stand in the warm light and narrate addiction.
This essay discusses addiction, alcohol and substance use, overdose, and the way the wellness industry frames all three. If you or someone you love is in active addiction, you may want to skip this one — and especially skip the transcript it responds to, below. There are real resources at the end. Pausing, skipping, or coming back later is always welcome.
A note on how I'm doing this. The video has since been taken down, and I'm grateful it was. I'm not linking it and I'm not naming her, because the person was never the point — the pattern is. I've kept the transcript below so the thing I'm responding to stays legible, but this is not an invitation to find her, pile on, or send anything her way. I reached out to her directly, human to human, and I'd ask you to extend her the same grace. My argument is with the advice and with the machine that amplified it — not with her worth.
I want to show you the thing I'm answering before I answer it, because you should get to see it with your own eyes. What follows is the transcript of a video — a woman, lit warm, speaking warm, offering advice about addiction to other autistic people. The video has since come down, which I'm glad of; I'm keeping the transcript here, unattributed, because what matters is the pattern, not the person. I've cleaned up the auto-captions only where they garbled into nonsense; the shape and the sentences are hers.
The video, transcribed
Lightly cleaned auto-captions from the (now removed) video. Read it in full — the whole argument of this essay depends on you having seen it.
"I share tips and tricks that make your life easier as an autistic adult. Today I wanted to talk about substance abuse. A lot of autistic people, a lot of neurodivergent people struggle with substance abuse because that's what happens when you grow up in a world that wasn't built for you and isn't giving you the proper accommodations that you can survive comfortably, so you can live comfortably. Okay? This is our time to do it. Now I've had a lot of talk with us since you've had personal experience. You have to detach shame from the — like, from the pleasure of that — addiction is giving you. Okay? Because mixing shame and desire is only gonna be, like, that relationship is just gonna get stronger and stronger and stronger. I like to think about it as, like, you know, you wanna diet, I think you need yourself a treat day. And on that treat day, like, I just eat all of the treats because I'm gonna let myself do it tomorrow. That's how I say that. The first thing I want you to do is I want you to start thanking your addiction. Every single ounce of champagne. Be excited when you do it. You're so happy. You're so grateful. Because getting in that shaming — especially when you're like, you shouldn't be ashamed… you shouldn't be ashamed for doing something good for yourself. And if this addiction is no longer serving you, that's not gonna feel good to do anymore. So don't force the shame to push it away like that. At the end of the day, kindness to yourself, love to yourself, thanking a thing that has served you in the past but maybe is no longer serving you anymore, is gonna be a lot easier to quietly distance yourself from than… don't take it back to it, because it's always there. And you have to give yourself permission whenever you want to indulge. Indulge in it without shame, complete freedom, and be so thankful. I promise you, detaching that shame from that desire and quietly distancing yourself from it bit by bit works so much better than this crippling, like, oh my god, I'm so horrible, I need to stop eating this or drinking this or doing whatever it is I do — that is not gonna work. So what do we think? And do you have any other questions?"
A note on language. She says "substance abuse," and I've left it inside the quote because it's hers. I don't use it anywhere else. "Abuse" frames the person as the problem and loads the exact shame that the evidence says keeps people using — which is the whole argument of this essay. Clinicians moved to "substance use" and "substance use disorder" for that reason: language that names a condition to be treated, not a character to be condemned. If shame is fuel, the words we reach for are either an accelerant or a door out.
I want to say two things plainly before I say anything careful. The first is that my heart broke open watching it — because she so clearly means no harm. She is warm, she is earnest, and she is, in the most literal and least cruel sense of the word, ignorant of what she is handling. The second is that it is, all the same, frightening. It is so detached from the reality of dependence that reading it back gives me a chill. "Thank your addiction, pour the champagne, indulge without limit, and it'll quietly fall away on its own" is being said, gently and lovingly, to people who may be tangled up with substances that can kill them on the way in and on the way out. That is the part I can't move past. So let me take it apart — with care for her, and more care for the people listening.
There's a woman on my screen, lit warm, speaking warm, telling autistic people who are drowning to be grateful to the thing pulling them under. Thank your addiction, she says. Give yourself a treat day. Pour the champagne, be excited when you do it, be so thankful, indulge without a flicker of shame — and then, the sentence the whole video is built on: once it stops serving you, it won't feel good anymore, so you'll simply, quietly, drift away from it.
What strikes me first is that she has all the words. Every one of them. Self-compassion. Shame-detachment. Kindness to the self. The full liturgy, delivered fluently, and I believe in most of it. That's not the problem. That's the problem's delivery system.
Because some of it is true, and the true part is load-bearing. Shame is fuel; couple "I'm disgusting for doing this" to the craving itself and you have built one of the better-documented engines of dependence. Self-flagellation does not loosen a habit. Meeting yourself with something other than contempt genuinely does more. If she had stopped there — stop treating relapse as a moral failure — she would be echoing, almost word for word, every harm-reduction clinician currently doing the work. But she doesn't stop there, and where she goes is a cliff.
"Indulge freely, drink all the champagne, it'll fall away on its own" is not harm reduction. Harm reduction has architecture. It reduces harm: it meets people where they are with scaffolding, with naloxone in the drawer, with a medically supervised taper, with a plan for the next bad night. "Permission to indulge without limit" is not the cure for dependence. It is a fairly precise description of the disease. And the promise underneath it — that a substance stops feeling good the moment it stops serving you — is simply not how any of this works. Substances keep paying out. They keep relieving the withdrawal, keep firing the reward, long after they've taken the house and the car and the marriage. Nobody gently outgrows physical dependence the way they lose interest in a podcast. She is saying this, remember, to people who may be tangled up with alcohol or benzodiazepines — where the withdrawal itself can kill you — and there is not one word in the whole loving monologue about a doctor.
Now the number she gestured at and got right, which makes the rest worse. Autism roughly doubles the odds that use tips into disorder, and the doubling concentrates — this is the part that should stop you where you stand — among autistic people with average or above-average IQ. The cognitively able. The ones who slip through every diagnostic net ever woven, especially if they're women, especially if they learned young to perform a fluency they never felt. The mechanism is not a mystery. It is self-medication for a nervous system asked to survive a world that was never built to hold it and never offered the accommodations that would let it live in comfort. Which is, word for word, the thing she opened with and got exactly right. And when it tips, autistic people die of it at higher rates than everyone else. Meanwhile the country she is broadcasting into buried roughly eighty thousand people to overdose last year — down, mercifully, from a hundred and ten thousand, but still the single leading cause of death for every American between eighteen and forty-four. The audience for a soft-lit video about self-medicating autistic adults is sitting inside the most lethal statistic of its own age bracket.
So the question is not whether she's kind. The question is who gets to stand in that warm light and narrate this.
Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò gave us the shape of the answer, and once you see it you can't unsee it. Elite capture: in any group, the people with the most resources, the most reach, the most comfort, drift to the front, and quietly redefine what the group is supposed to need — and it drifts, every time, toward whatever is legible and pleasant to them. Watch it happen in real time. Addiction, narrated by someone insulated from its consequences, becomes an aesthetic. A treat day. A champagne flute. A gratitude practice. A thing you tastefully outgrow. That version is calming. It performs beautifully. It is enormously shareable. It is also survivable only if you have precisely what she has and never once mentioned: housing, money, no physical dependence, and a net wide enough that "quietly distancing yourself" is a thing an actual body can actually do. Hand the same script to someone detoxing in the front seat of a car and it is not wellness. It is a dare.
The platform did the rest. It handed her a credibility she never earned on this subject, and handed the clinician, the sponsor, the person nine months clean and shaking, a credibility deficit — not because they know less, but because they don't have the ring light or the reach. The follower count read as expertise. It never was. It was only ever a number that meant a lot of people were watching.
And here is the part I keep circling, because it's the part that isn't cruel. She isn't cruel. She's warm, and the warmth is exactly what carries the poison across. Her true opening premise — we self-medicate because the world wasn't built for us — is real, and its realness is what launders the conclusion. The grievance is genuine. The vocabulary is immaculate. And both of them get conscripted to deliver a payload that could kill the specific people it was addressed to. That is not a monster. That is a pattern. It is what happens every single time the comfortable are handed the microphone for the survival of the precarious, and mistake the fact that they can afford the advice for evidence that it's true.
The champagne was always free for her. That's the whole tell.
I've written about this from the inside for years, so let me bring that here instead of leaving it implied. The people most likely to be pulled under by self-medication are almost never the people handed the microphone about it. That isn't an accident; it's the same sorting running through addiction specifically. And it runs along the exact fault lines the comfortable are trained not to see: class, race, and a nervous system the world was never built to hold.
Start with class, because it's the one that gets abstracted away first. I've said before that you cannot do a real power analysis with the class cut out of it — and the same is true of addiction. Advice like "just drift away from it once it stops serving you" quietly assumes a life with enough slack to drift in: housing, income, a partner, a net. I know both sides of that line from the inside.
I grew up lower class… I carry both the social protections of whiteness and the systemic vulnerabilities of poverty. Those realities shape each other.
Strip the slack away and the same warm sentence becomes a dare. "Quietly distancing yourself, bit by bit" is a luxury good. It requires a body that isn't in physical withdrawal, a home that isn't contingent on staying functional, and time that isn't already spent surviving.
Then neurodivergence — and here the data and the lived experience point the same direction. Self-medication is not a moral weakness; it is a recognized pathway for a nervous system asked to survive conditions it was never accommodated for. The autistic people who tip into dependence at the highest rates are so often the ones who slipped every net: late-identified, cognitively able, usually women, fluent in a performance they never felt. And the category that's supposed to protect them frequently doesn't.
Disability is not a protective category. It is not safety. It is not shelter. It is often exposure.
The ones who don't yet know they're autistic are among the most exposed of all — no name for the overwhelm, no accommodations, no language for why the world costs them so much more. They reach for what's available. Then race and access sit on top of all of it: who gets the medically supervised taper instead of a cell, whose relapse reads as a health event instead of a moral one, whose neighborhood has the naloxone and whose has the arrests. I watched this up close inside Oregon's behavioral-health system, from the staff side and the human side both. The crisis is not evenly distributed, and neither is the grace extended to the people living inside it.
None of this is an argument against self-compassion. Self-compassion is real and it is load-bearing. It's an argument against mistaking the ability to afford the advice for evidence that the advice is true.
I want to end the argument here, because what came after matters more than the critique. After the video came down, we talked — privately, and kindly. I thanked her for taking it down, and offered resources and education if she wanted them before making another video. She wrote back:
"I'm glad you gave me the feedback! You're right — advice about substances isn't something that should just be thrown around on the internet without the proper disclaimers. The line between helping and hurting is thin, which is why I don't take it personally when I'm corrected. I only wanna help. I'd love to look into any of the resources you'd be open to sharing."
I told her it's rare for anyone to accept feedback that graciously, and that I'd send her this essay when it was finished — it's full of resources, and I'm always glad to answer questions. That is what repair looks like: not a pile-on, not a public shaming, but a correction offered with care, received without defensiveness, and a door left open on both sides. Everything I wrote above about the danger is true, and I stand by every word. And the person who made the video met it with exactly the humility the internet almost never rewards. Both things are true at once. That is the whole point.
You don't have to do this alone, and you don't have to be in crisis to reach out. These are free, confidential, and staffed by people who won't shame you. I'm sharing what's available — a starting point, not an endorsement that any one of these is perfect or right for everyone. Take what helps, leave what doesn't.
This essay is not medical advice, and I'm not a clinician. If substances are part of your life, a real human being — a doctor, a harm-reduction worker, a helpline — can meet you with far more than a warm light and a champagne flute.
The video was a symptom of a much bigger picture. This is where I've written the fuller version — the research, the lived experience, and the systems underneath. These live in the members' archive.
I'm not writing this from the outside. I hold a degree in the psychology of addictions and certification in drug and alcohol counseling. I've worked as a recovery mentor. I carry trauma-informed and trauma-awareness credentials, and a master's in Transformative Social Change. And most importantly, I write from lived experience — nearly seven years of recovery, and the daily, unglamorous practice of not reaching for substances to survive being autistic in a world that was never built for me.
I believe in harm reduction. I believe in decriminalization. I believe in the right to safe use. And precisely because I hold all of it at once — the clinical training, the systems analysis, and the body that lived it — I know the fine line between a coping strategy that can alter or end a life and a comfortable, privileged understanding of the sociocultural mechanisms of addiction. That line is the whole reason I wrote this.