It doesn’t take a sociologist or expert in addiction science to sense that the opioid crisis isn’t just worsening, but is rapidly metastasizing and assuming devious and deadly new forms. That while the rehabilitation industry is booming, with increasing public dollars flowing to makers of contentious recovery drugs, and as antiquated 12-step programs with questionable efficacy stubbornly persist.
We have learned a lot about efforts to curb the opioid scourge since starting to impugn Mass remediation spending last year. The commonwealth will get upwards of a billion dollars to mitigate the problem over 15 years, and the red flags we revealed so far include a reluctance to actually spend at the local level, and no apparent openness to alternative measures like psychedelics therapy. Natural medicines are so taboo among the Mass recovery establishment, in fact, that Tara Grace is one of the few people we’ve seen advocating for them while bridging the weed and rehab realms.
Several members of our BINJ team that covers the opioid crisis heard Grace, who creates content questioning the recovery status quo under the Burn The Stigma banner, speak at this year’s “Shame On Stigma” event in Revere, and her candid words were as shocking in that context as they were refreshing. It may seem obvious that information about marijuana’s track record with detox and avoidance, for starters, should be readily available, but it isn’t. In the face of that enormous barrier, we asked about her mission “to break down misinformation, challenge outdated recovery narratives, and advocate for harm reduction, drug policy reform, and evidence-based treatment.”
CF: In Revere, you mentioned that you ran into your own problems with opioids in a different era, when OxyContin was front and center. How much would you say the changing substances driving the epidemic at any given time create unique circumstances that make it especially hard for long-standing service providers and other programs to adapt? Or is it more the case that we’re basically facing the same monster with a new mask every few years and, for some reason or many, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men just can’t seem to solve this problem?
TG: I think it’s both a new set of circumstances and the same old monster. The monster is prohibition, stigma, and systems that respond to drug use with punishment and treat SUD (Substance Use Disorder) like a moral issue.That hasn’t changed. What’s changed is the supply: illicit fentanyl, xylazine, nitazenes, metatimodine etc. The substances out there are more potent, more unpredictable, and more contaminated than ever.
Long standing providers struggle because a lot of their models were built for a world that no longer exists.The detox isn’t a simple opiate detox and they are slow to respond to the supply. And that doesn’t even touch the reality of people dying from one-off use, party use, leaving after abstinence, or after leaving jail. And the 12-step based treatment centers and resources, they didn’t work during my time in the OC real heroin era, they sure as shit don’t work for most people now either.
So it’s the same monster with a new, deadlier mask. And the systems that refuse to evolve, that cling to nearly 100-year-old faith-based pseudoscience instead of adapting to the actual supply and what we know from evidence, are a huge part of why we can’t seem to solve this problem.
What were some aspects of the 12-step program and/or other recovery communities that you took enough umbrage with to start looking elsewhere for answers?
Honestly, I had given up on recovery. I spent my twenties in and out of treatment and only had 18 months of abstinence when I was locked up in Framingham. I kept trying what I thought “real recovery” had to look like and then I just said F it. I ran hard with drinking for a while because I never had that bar scene in my early twenties. Then I stopped drinking and started using cannabis. Cannabis has been life changing for me and is something I consume daily to this day.
What experiences, observations, and missing support systems led to you ultimately founding Burn the Stigma, and how did you go about developing a mission and getting started?
I spent about a decade in and out of treatment centers cycling through the same 12-step based programs and watching so many people disappear, to overdose and prison walls. I was someone who eventually stabilized with cannabis and harm reduction and there was absolutely no space for that story in traditional recovery spaces.
I lost my best friend to an overdose. On top of that, my husband comes from a family of 12 kids and has lost five siblings to overdose. Carol Morris is my mother-in-law. You may have heard of her when she used to speak out more. So when people talk about the “opioid crisis,” that’s not abstract for us, it’s our family that has been forever changed.
My mission started online but I knew I had to get involved locally. I’m tired of these old-school OC jerkoffs speaking for everyone who has a past with substance use disorder. But at the same time, I don’t want to be in recovery spaces. Burn the Stigma outreach really started with a folding table on Overdose Awareness Day at Uptop Dispensary in Framingham three years ago. I handed out naloxone and fentanyl test strips. From there I decided I wanted to do cannabis events and local spaces where no one was talking about overdose prevention, especially for recreational or occasional users. I kept meeting people whose lives had been saved or stabilized by cannabis or by harm reduction, and they all had the same story: There was never room for me in the recovery narrative.
The mission has evolved from there and honestly, keeps evolving: Humanize people who use drugs, not just the ones in crisis. Challenge the dogma that says abstinence is the only respectable goal. Get overdose prevention tools and real information into everyday spaces like dispensaries, bars, restaurants—not just street outreach and recovery spaces.
What kind of spaces do you try to represent your organization in, and what are some current initiatives and short-term goals?
Currently I am just in cannabis spaces and not many of them. … I think some people don’t like to have cannabis in the same conversation as other substances because cannabis has fought so hard to be seen not like those other drugs. But for the most part, people have been really appreciative and loved it and agree that we should have more of these resources in cannabis spaces.
I have had backlash from bars too. I had a Christmas event I was planning at a brewery last year for handing out naloxone and promoting safe partying during the holidays but then right before I was going to start posting about it, they backed out. One of the managers was really into it, but the rest were not. I am sensitive so I haven’t attempted a bar space since then but that’s definitely a goal for 2026.
I want to get into more cannabis spaces too but I also work 44 hours a week as a service writer and warranty admin at a truck dealership so that puts a damper on my goals. I would love to be able to make a career out of making content about this topic as that would also open up more time for me to table, but I have never been consistent enough for that to be in the realm of possibilities.
Considering that you have the word stigma right there in the name, I’m guessing that’s among the biggest obstacles to what you’re trying to achieve. From your perspective, even this far into legalization, what are you still up against trying to get people to consider cannabis and other nontraditional tools for recovery?
Stigma is still the biggest barrier especially because so much of it comes from inside the traditional recovery community itself. Cannabis is treated like a relapse instead of a legitimate tool that helps people step out of chaotic use, reduce harm, sleep, regulate emotions etc. and rebuild their lives.
For a lot of people who’ve only been exposed to abstinence only thinking, cannabis gets lumped into the same category as “using,” and that shuts down real conversations before they even start. I can go to a cannabis event with Narcan and test strips and still get pushback because some people don’t want cannabis associated with “drugs.” Meanwhile, I talk to people every week who use cannabis to manage withdrawal, to stay off street opioids, to taper, or simply because it supports their mental health better than anything they’ve been offered in the treatment system.
My mission is to normalize conversations that already exist privately. People are using these tools. People are recovering with these tools. The only thing that hasn’t caught up yet is the narrative.
The stigma runs deep, especially because so much of our “recovery culture” has been shaped by 12-step thinking and the war on drugs. A lot of people still believe if you use cannabis, you aren’t really in recovery, that medication or psychedelics or anything non-abstinent is just substituting one drug for another, and that feeling good or altered in any way is inherently dangerous if you’ve ever had a problem with substances.
I’m someone who got out of IV heroin use and stabilized my life, in part, by using cannabis. I’m not saying cannabis is the answer for everyone, it’s one tool among many. But getting people to even consider that possibility can be hard when the entire recovery framework is, You have a lifelong progressive disease and the only acceptable state is total abstinence.
As you may have seen, we are covering the administration and spending of opioid remediation funds in Massachusetts closely. There are many different kinds of expenditures, on the state and the municipal side, that we could discuss for hours, but I’d like to ask you about two spending buckets in particular. First, an extraordinary amount is going to programs administering Suboxone and other harm reduction treatments. We have a draft of the new numbers from FY 2025 that aren’t out yet, and it looks like about a third went to funding programs designed to help people get this kind of care. From your experience in these spaces, what’s your reaction to that kind of allotment?
I think funding Suboxone access is one of the smartest things the state can do—as long as it isn’t tied to abstinence-only programming and doesn’t funnel people into systems that shame them for using medication. The treatment industry has spent decades underfunding evidence-based care, so now it looks like MAT (Medication Assisted Treatment) is getting “too much” money but really it’s just finally getting enough to undo decades of damage.
At the same time, we have to ask: Where is the accountability? Where is the evaluation of outcomes? Are these programs low-barrier? Do they meet people where they’re at or are they 12-step dressed up as MAT?
A lot of “MAT programs” are still abstinence-obsessed underneath. People get cut off for cannabis, for missing groups, for not being “program compliant.” That defeats the entire purpose. So yes, MAT deserves strong funding but it needs to go to true harm reduction models, not systems that treat medication like a probation sentence.
And we also need to make room in the budget for the people who don’t want MAT or who can’t access it safely. If a third of the money goes to MAT, the other two-thirds should be doing more than propping up the same abstinence based programs that helped create the mess in the first place.
What if any nontraditional programming are you seeing get support from opioid remediation funds? Anything with cannabis or psychedelics? And if not just yet, what’s on the horizon?
In Massachusetts as far as I know, none of the remediation money is touching cannabis or psychedelics—not because there’s no interest, but because stigma and federal red tape still dominate decision making. To be honest, I am not as well versed in this area as I should be, I need to get more into what is taking place with funds.
Anything else you’d like to say for now on this endless and amorphous tough-to-tackle topic? What are you keeping a close eye on? What should we pay closer attention to?
I would like to see more around post-incarnation overdose risk. This is one of the most predictable, preventable overdose spikes and yet reentry support is still massively underfunded. This is an area I hope to get more involved in this upcoming year.
