Starting over, again: recovering from a drug addiction is tough, even when it appears that you've beaten it

Kathy M. Melvin has to go through another woman's basement room to get to hers, which is slightly larger than a closet. A television blares from behind one wall, and women's laughter can be heard beyond the opposite one, over the rain outside. Melvin sits up straight on her tall single bed, under her laundry hanging from pipes overhead and across from a dresser crowded with bottles of lotion. "They're donated," she explains. "That's one of our many blessings."

Once, 15 years ago, Melvin was regarded as a model ex-offender who had kicked her addiction. She had a steady job teaching inmates to go straight, and a state-funded nonprofit paid her to track individual ex-offenders. Still, in November, Melvin moved here--Leslie's Place, a West Side shelter for female ex-offenders.

Melvin speaks slowly, her arms crossed over a purple sweat suit and a long gold necklace with the letter "K" on the end. "What do you want to know?" she asks politely. "I guess I can give you an overview. I come from a big family of seven children. My father was Irish Catholic and alcoholic. He beat my mom nightly."

That was in northwest suburban Mount Prospect. Melvin's mother divorced him, and she and her children lived in a car until she married another alcoholic. The family moved to Des Plaines, just outside Chicago, when Melvin was 12. She was a good student until high school, when she dropped out and started doing heroin. A year later, at 19, she had a son, then left him with her mother and moved with her boyfriend to Chicago.

A year later, Melvin was arrested for selling drugs. She did 10 months in prison, eight months in a drug treatment facility and six months in a halfway house.

For 10 years after that, Melvin was clean. She had earned her GED in jail, and the warden got her a job at the Illinois Department of Corrections once she was released. Melvin traveled to prisons across the state, telling inmates the story of her own recovery. Many of them "put her on a pedestal," she said, and took Melvin as a role model.

Melvin also worked at Treatment Alternatives for Safe Communities, known as TASC, where the courts send addicts for drug treatment instead of jail time. She talked to TASC clients and surveyed them periodically to measure their success after they left the program.

In 1995, Melvin left her job at the corrections department to study psychology full-time at National-Louis University. She had all As until March 1996, when she got addicted to painkillers for back pain caused by a car accident. Soon her doctor refused to prescribe more, and she returned to heroin and began forging checks.

Police caught up to Melvin. She then wound up in the TASC program, instead of jail. Four months later, she was clean, but still had to pay $30,000 in restitution for the bad checks she'd written. Struggling to get a job as an ex-offender, Melvin was buried by expenses. In December 2001, she went on the run.

At the urging of her family, Melvin turned herself in two years later, and did eight months in prison. She was released two months ago and is now looking for a job.

Why did you get into drugs?

I was pretty sheltered until high school. I met some people, and they would drive to Chicago to buy drugs. That's the same thing that's happening now--buy the drugs and drive back to lily-white suburbia. Everyone was experimenting. I didn't see where my drug addiction was going to lead me. Otherwise, I wouldn't have had a kid.

Why did you leave your son behind?

I was in a relationship with a guy who was selling drugs and I didn't want to take him into that environment. I was being fed drugs by a drug dealer. It haunts me. Now, at the age of 47, I have always longed for a child that I could raise--to do it right, I guess, if there is such a thing.

How was it possible to get addicted again while you were out there telling inmates what to do?

My pride did not allow me to let my co-workers know I was in trouble. If a person is in trouble and finds themselves succumbing, there's a lot of help. But sometimes for whatever reason they don't use that help. And nine times out of 10 it's because people do want to get high.

Would you ask for help if you could go back?

Oh god, yes. It's unfortunate that I didn't deal with it appropriately. I shouldn't have been so filled with pride. We can sit here all day with 'shoulda, coulda, woulda's.' But that's not as important as what needs to be done. I'm one of many returned back to prison because of addiction. But the key is to not return. I can't change what happened.

Is TASC really effective if people like you could go back to addiction?

Of course it is. You don't know the ones who are going to be successful and who's not. What happened to me was an isolated incident. There were a set of circumstances I let overwhelm me. I didn't use the tools that were given to me. That's not what happens to everybody.

People might feel that addicts have done something wrong--something to get themselves in their situation--so why should we help them?

It's understandable. They're screwed up to begin with, so why waste the time? But, in this day and age, I don't think there's a family in America that doesn't have one of these problems.

It took me two months to destroy what it took me 12 years to build. That illustrates the power of this--it is classified as a disease, just like cancer, diabetes. It's not something people should shrug off. It's not something to dismiss as [the problem of] people who are weak-minded. Some are predisposed because of genetics. There are environmental issues. This is an actual disease that is not treated.

There's not enough people out there willing to help them or employ them. I understand why. I understand people are afraid. But, if you do that to everybody, you're denying people who may be capable of getting their life back.

As both an employee and inmate, has the corrections department changed over the time you've been involved with it?

I think they're getting better in terms of treating an inmate as a human being as opposed to the scum of the earth. I think, from the employee standpoint, that was one of the best things that the department can probably do--be open enough to hire an ex-offender. Who best to tell it but someone who's been there?

How's the job hunt going?

Terrible, terrible, terrible. It's hard. I'm sending out resumes and doing what I need to do. Somebody's going to give me a chance; I'm bilingual and I have a wealth of experiences working with people. Someone is going to see that. I believe this because I have to. If I don't believe, who is? They say, if you throw enough mud at the fence, one day it will stick.

On Dec. 22, I'll be celebrating three years of sobriety. I'm optimistic.

Once a model ex-offender, Kathy M. Melvin battles her addiction again at Leslie's Place, a shelter for female ex-offenders. Photo by Jason Reblando.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Community Renewal Society
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