1980s started ripping apart the lives of individuals, families, and whole communities like a Category 4 hurricane, the prevailing belief was that cocaine was psychologically, but not physically addictive (as if there was a definitive separation of mind from body that made for any meaningful difference between the two).
Anyone who had ever done an appreciable amount of the drug knew otherwise. My master’s thesis (which was completed) addressed this topic, arguing for the addition of a category of “substance dependence” for cocaine in the DSM. It was an easy argument for me to make. When DSM-IV was published in 1994, it was there—professional expertise having finally caught up with hard-boiled experience.
The road from junkie to graduate student was circuitous and full of impediments, beginning with an arrest for the criminal sale of a controlled substance in January of 1983. My habits were expensive and I funded them through illicit manufacturing and sales. There is an inverse correlation between active addiction and judgment. As my addiction advanced, my judgment declined and with it, my attention to detail. Mail order was part of my business. It was a very different time and sending drugs through the mail was not that uncommon. I sent a large package to someone in New York who came recommended by a friend I had known since childhood and with whom I had done plenty of similar business. Little did I know that the person on the receiving end of this particular package was a cop.
Ironically, I had already made the decision that I needed a lifestyle transplant. I had dismantled my business infrastructure and was planning to move back to New York within the month. My relocation was expedited when the cops arrived early that morning with weapons drawn to wake me up and execute the warrant for my arrest. I had planned on driving back to New York; instead, I took a plane and had a police escort.
Between the time of my arrest and sentencing in May of that spring, I don’t remember breathing much. Encased in prolonged stress and anxiety, I experienced physical symptoms of trauma, including elevated pulse rate, edginess, muscle tension, insomnia, and when I did sleep, I had nightmares. I went through the full gamut of emotional and psychological trauma symptoms: shock and disbelief, anger, irritability, sadness and hopelessness, worry and fear, difficultly concentrating, feeling disconnected and wanting to withdraw from others, along with unabating guilt, shame, and self-blame.
During my presentencing interview, I was asked whether I had a “drug problem.” “No” I answered unequivocally, mobilizing my most deferential and diplomatic persona. “Sure, against my better judgment I sent a few packages as a favor to friends who had requested them, but it’s not like I have a problem with using drugs myself.” It was a line of denial, minimization, and bullshit similar to many I would hear years later as an addiction treatment professional.
I received “lifetime” probation, meaning that the length was indeterminate. After five years I was eligible to apply to have it terminated, but the decision would be based solely on the judge’s discretion. If there was anything remotely positive that came out of my bust, it was that I had to change the course of my life; it was not an option not to.
After a couple of unsatisfying jobs in (legal) business, I came to the realization that since most of us have to spend so much of our waking time for so many years doing whatever it is we do for a living, if I wasn’t fundamentally okay with my chosen vocation, I’d be setting myself up for long-term discontent. I figured that since I had a degree in psychology, I should try to put it to use.
At about the same time during the end of the summer in 1984, my girlfriend and I got married. Even though I was from Long Island and she was from northern New Jersey, we met in psychology classes at UC Santa Cruz. For months, even before we met formally, we were drawn to one another, tuning in to each other’s presence across a cavernous lecture hall in a class of over two hundred students, though neither of us had any inkling of the other’s attraction. For me, it was physical attraction; whereas she described intrigue with this long-haired hippie-like character who casually strolled in late, took a seat right in front of the professor, and matter-of-factly posed questions and interjected comments.
We were friends for two years before anything romantic evolved. She grew up the hard way, in a challenged and challenging family, and demonstrated a phenomenal resiliency, growing far beyond her upbringing. From the time I could remember, I was programmed to go to college. She had been actively discouraged from going to college. She did it almost entirely on her own, and after several starts and stops across five schools, she became the first person in her family to graduate from college.
She was not an addict, and never used like I did. She had a core of honesty and integrity that I marveled at, but could only aspire to. We had planned to move back East together prior to my arrest, and surprisingly she still came, leaving her own master’s program in vocational counseling at Cal State San Francisco in the process. I absolutely adored her, and in the aftershock of my self-inflicted trauma, I would have been lost without her, and whether or not she was aware of that, she was extremely intuitive and likely sensed it. Knowing me in all the ways she did, joining me in New York was either an act of pure mercy or a desire to see some of the potential that she saw in me actualized, or some of both.
We got married during Labor Day weekend, and the following Tuesday I started as a diagnostic caseworker at St. Mary’s Family and Children’s Services, a residential treatment center in Syosset, NY, for latency-age and adolescent boys from all over Long Island and the five boroughs of New York City. I got the job in part because they saw me as a diamond in the rough that they could train, and in part because I was willing to accept the $12,500 annual salary—even in 1984, that was a near poverty-level wage.
I was part of a five-person multidisciplinary treatment team in a ninety-day diagnostic unit that conducted comprehensive evaluations and made placement recommendations on kids who were removed from their homes due to abuse, neglect, or juvenile delinquency. I performed psycho-social assessments, made home visits, and represented the agency in the family courts of the six counties from which our clients came. I saw some grotesque, stomach-churning examples of child abuse, the most heinous of which was a fourteen year-old whose fingers on both hands ended after the first knuckle. When he was six years old, his crack-addicted mother’s crack-addicted boyfriend had held this child’s hands over an open stove flame until, even after multiple surgeries, that was all that remained.
It quickly became clear that if I was going to continue in this area of work, I needed to get an advanced degree. I weighed the options of a master’s in social work versus a doctorate in psychology, and based on bang for the bucks in terms of money and time, decided on an MSW at the Hunter College School of Social Work in Manhattan. I was also accepted to the prestigious MSW programs at Columbia University and NYU, but at that time the annual tuition was $9,600.00 at Columbia and $7,500.00 at NYU. Because the School of Social Work at Hunter was part of the City University of New York, tuition there was $1,900.00 annually. All three were among the most highly rated graduate schools of social work in the country, and the ratio of cost to quality made the Hunter program the most competitive of the three to get into.
I received my MSW in 1987, and was released from probation in May of 1988 with a Certificate of Relief from Disabilities, restoring all of the civil rights that were forfeited as a result of my felony conviction. I had stopped using intravenously. I snorted heroin and cocaine a small handful of times before forsaking them altogether in the late 1980s. But I continued to drink and smoke pot.
[A PERSONAL PRISON IN] PRIVATE PURGATORY
“A man who carries a cat by the tail learns
something he can learn in no other way.”
MARK TWAIN
