This is the social network for The Elephant on Main Street website and blog. We discuss substance use and addiction with an emphasis on recovery and families. Anyone with an interest in these topics — from people who are actively addicted to counselors to family members to the vast recovery community — are invited to share their experiences.

Addiction is a disease that affects all of us, whether or not we drink or drug ourselves. It's time we talked about it openly, as we would any other treatable illness that destroys lives. At the same time, we need to take responsibility for treating our illnesses.

The rules are simple. No personal attacks. No commercial messages (except in your personal profiles). Respect the wide variety of our experiences and the fact that recovery happens in many ways. Though one of our major goals is to erase the stigma associated with the disease of addiction, we are realists. You may choose to be anonymous or to use a pseudonym.

As Evan T. Pritchard writes in No Word for Time: "According to the medicine teaching, there is no bad person, no crazy person; each person's flaws are part of the wheel of life, which is itself flawless. Each person's struggles are a great mystery to be revealed, each struggle becomes a story, each story becomes teaching, each teaching becomes medicine, and medicine makes the people whole and well in spirit."

Those words have guided us from the beginning of this site.