Recovery Month events seek to boost community and advocacy.

As groups ranging from seasoned coalitions to recovery community novices plan their largest community events of the year as part of National Alcohol and Drug Addiction Recovery Month, many say they consider these events' benefits to participants and their effect on outside observers to be of equal importance.

While several groups contacted by ADAW take pains to keep their Recovery

Month events largely non-political, they also aggressively pursue media coverage and realize that September offers them the year's best opportunity to shed public light on addiction, recovery and the benefits of treatment.

"Part of our goal with our event is to send a message to state legislators that mental health reform is killing us," Thomas Britton, who heads the new Mountain Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse in Asheville, N.C., told ADAW. Britton said that bureaucratic requirements for service providers under the state's …