Harger: Seattle families confront addiction ahead of Thanksgiving

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. All around Seattle, families will gather around tables. But for too many of those families, there will be an empty seat.

Not empty because someone is working late or traveling. Empty because of addiction. Because someone they love is lost to drugs, either still alive but unreachable, or gone forever.

If you know this emptiness, you know it’s complicated. Family dynamics that nobody outside can fully understand. Well-meaning friends who enabled instead of confronted. A treatment system that often feels designed to fail. And increasingly, a public policy approach in King County that treats addiction as something to be managed indefinitely rather than overcome.

The harm reduction model dominates here — de facto safe injection sites, free pipes, no pressure to get clean. The theory sounds compassionate: meet people where they are, reduce immediate harm, don’t judge. But if you’re living with addiction in your family, you see something different. You watch someone you love circling the drain while the system hands them the tools to keep circling.

And you’re afraid to say this out loud. Around here, if you even question that approach, you worry you’re being cruel. Worse, you risk being written off as heartless or ignorant, someone who just doesn’t understand the complexities of addiction. Who are you to demand someone get clean? Who are you to impose your values?

So you stay quiet. You watch. You hope. And the seat stays empty.

Battlefield Addiction

Earlier this month, I went to a fundraiser in Auburn for a group called Battlefield Addiction. It’s an organization I hadn’t heard of before this year. They work with families to break the cycle. Former addicts help families confront active addicts and insist, not suggest, insist on treatment.

I watched families tell their stories. Not stories of managing addiction or reducing harm. Stories of healing. Of getting their son back. Their daughter. Their spouse. Some of these families said they had hope for the first time in years. One mother said over a decade. More than 10 years of watching someone she loves destroy themselves while everyone around her preached patience and acceptance.

Then came the hardest moment of the evening. They asked families who had lost someone to addiction to stand and be seen.

A handful of people stood. Then more. Then dozens. Dozens and dozens of people rising in that ballroom, carrying a grief that never fully heals. Empty seats at their tables that will stay empty forever.

I wasn’t prepared for how that felt. To see that many people in one room. To understand that each one represents a family shattered, a life ended too soon, a Thanksgiving table with a permanent absence.

But here’s what struck me even in that moment. There was something else in the room besides pain. Determination. The families who’d found their way back were there to help the families still fighting. The formerly actively addicted were there to prove recovery is real. Not easy. Not quick. But possible.

We’ve been told for years now that compassion means accepting people where they are. Groups like Battlefield Addiction operate on a different principle: Real compassion means refusing to accept the unacceptable. It means loving someone enough to draw a hard line. It means families learning to stop enabling and start demanding change.

Look, I don’t have all the answers here. I could be wrong about some of this. Addiction is complicated, and maybe there are aspects of harm reduction that serve purposes I don’t fully understand.

But what I saw in that room was undeniable. And what we’re doing right now in King County is clearly not working. The empty seats keep multiplying. The funerals keep happening. Families keep breaking.

If you’re sitting at a table tomorrow and someone is missing, if that absence is hollowing you out, if you’ve spent years being told to be patient and understanding while watching someone die slowly, I want you to know something. There’s another way. County and city leaders keep insisting harm reduction is the only compassionate path, but there is building evidence that says otherwise. What I saw in that room proves it.

Maybe next Thanksgiving, that seat isn’t empty. Maybe your family finds its way back. The path exists. People are walking it right now. You just have to be willing to take the first step.

There’s hope. Even now. Especially now.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here. 

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