Leadership Quote by Jim Ramstad

It takes a special kind of political nerve to stand at a microphone built for abstractions and admit to something this bodily and specific. By opening with "Mr. Speaker", Ramstad anchors the moment in institutional ritual, then punctures it with lived experience. The formality isn’t a shield; it’s the point. He’s telling Congress that addiction isn’t an anecdote from “out there,” it sits inside the chamber, inside the respectable, suit-and-tie story America tells about itself.

The phrase "grateful recovering alcoholic" does two jobs at once. "Recovering" signals ongoing vigilance, not a tidy before-and-after redemption arc. "Grateful" frames sobriety as communal and contingent: it implies help received, systems used, people who intervened. That’s a quiet rebuke to the bootstraps mythology lawmakers often lean on when discussing “personal responsibility.”

"24 years" is a credibility move, but also a political one. It preempts the cheap cynicism that recovery is flaky or temporary. He turns his own timeline into evidence, collapsing the distance between policy debate and human consequence. Then comes the deliberate redundancy: "treatment does work" and "recovery is real". The first is aimed at budgets and programs; the second at stigma. He’s lobbying for funding and for cultural permission in the same breath.

In context, this kind of disclosure reads like strategy and risk. It humanizes a speaker in a profession that rewards invulnerability, and it dares colleagues to treat addiction as a health issue rather than a moral stain. The subtext: if someone like me needed treatment, your constituents do too - and they deserve it without shame.