Thank you for replying to my questions, Tazman53 and warrens.
Wow! There's some profound and thought-provoking material in what you said, warrens. Sometimes when some of us in the family are talking about my brother, somebody will comment that we're amazed at the things he does, as if he doesn't have a conscience at all. We were not raised like that, that's for sure. My parents raised us to be kind, giving, to think of others and help them when they needed it. And when he's not drinking, my brother can be that way too. It's just when he's drinking/drugging. It's as if he doesn't care about anybody else at all, as long as he gets what he wants.
My sister and I are looking today for a local Al-Anon meeting.
Are you all saying that it would be best to have my brother leave our house anyway, even if he catches up on what he owes us? What I think I'm understanding from everybody's comments is that, because we don't ask him to pay us much at all, just enough to cover his portion of the expenses, it's just allowing him to have plenty of cash left over to drink/buy pot with. If he moved somewhere else, he'd have to pay the going rate for rent, which would mean he had less money to spend on drinking/drugs.
My husband had suggested that we raise the rent to something realistic if my brother wanted to keep living here. Is that an unwise idea? Should we just be hurrying him along, no matter what?
And what on earth would I tell him anyway? Oh, by the way, we've changed our minds and you have thirty days to find a new place, even though we had told you it was ok to stay here until October?
Just trying to sort all of this out in my mind, and make a plan for talking with my brother...