Going Straight

For thousands of former drug addicts, the road to recovery began on a quiet block of Fair Oaks Avenue in Northwest Pasadena, where Impact Drug and Alcohol Treatment Center has been helping even some of the most hardened users for more than three decades. Since 1969, the nonprofit Impact — which also offers sober living homes off-site — has treated more than 30,000 people from all walks of life.

“We’ve had attorneys, judges, doctors, airline pilots, soccer moms,” says Executive Director Jim Stilwell, who came to Impact 36 years ago to kick his own heroin addiction.

While celebrities — including James Caan and Robert Downey Jr. — have also been treated here, the 130-bed facility stands a world apart from the luxurious treatment centers of Malibu. There are no swimming pools or five-star chefs at the 2.5-acre campus. What the 12-step-based center does offer is a highly structured program of daily chores, individual counseling and group meetings designed to teach self-discipline, self-worth and strategies to stay sober in the real world. “This is like a microcosm of life here,” says Stilwell, 62. “Everybody has a job. You have to perform just like an employer would expect you to do.”

Most of the staff are alumni of Impact, which is accredited by the nonprofit Joint Commission. Indeed, the philosophy of addicts helping other addicts is a cornerstone of the program’s success. “You start learning how to apply some of the principles that we’re trying to teach you while you’re watching other people and hearing how they’ve applied the principles to stay clean,” Stilwell says.

While he notes that it’s difficult to pin down hard numbers measuring the long-term effectiveness of any drug rehabilitation program, some of Impact’s success stories provide evidence that the treatment appears to be working. L.A. Municipal Court Judge Stephen Marcus, who sentenced numerous offenders to rehab at Impact when he presided over drug cases from 1993 to 2001, says the center delivers on its promises. “I think the program is very effective,” he says, noting that Impact has had considerable success in producing graduates who remain clean five years after recovery. “In the drug treatment area the actual number of people who succeed and become fully clean is not a huge number. It could be 20 percent, it could be 25 percent. I think that with Impact we were hitting 40 and 50 percent at the end of a five-year looking-back period. And that’s pretty good.”

Adds Michael, a retired TV producer who sent his heroin-addicted son to half a dozen rehab centers before trying Impact 11 years ago, “I think Impact is an extraordinary place. My son has been clean for 10 years. That’s a miracle.”
Here some graduates come clean about their sometimes rocky paths to recovery at Impact. (Last names were withheld at their request to protect their privacy.)

Kasey

At 35, Kasey is now a veritable pillar of the community — the director of operations for an oil company and proud mother of 4½-year-old twins. Kasey found her piece of the American dream even though she began using drugs when she was just a child. She had her first alcoholic drink at age 6, and by 12, she was “dipping into the medicine cabinet to see what I could find,” she says. She started smoking marijuana in her early teens and was using meth and cocaine by the time she was 16.

After high school, Kasey moved to Long Beach to study fashion design and merchandising, in the hope that a new environment would provide a distraction from her drug problem. “That was kind of a joke,” she says. “I was in a new city and within two days I knew where all the drugs were.” At Long Beach State University, she started experimenting with heroin and, before long, she was shooting speedballs — a potent mixture of heroin and cocaine.

Kasey dropped out after one semester and began selling drugs to pay the bills. At 21, she moved to North Hollywood to enter a drug treatment program — one of eight she would attend in her early 20s. Over the next few years, she moved from hotel to hotel, working sporadically and shoplifting to support her habit.

Then in 1998, Kasey was arrested for being under the influence of heroin and ordered to complete six months of treatment at Impact. She lasted there for only three months. But another eight months of heroin abuse was the final straw: That December, Kasey begged Impact’s intake staff to take her back. They agreed on the condition that she first complete treatment at a medical detox facility. “I said ‘I’ll go after Christmas,’” Kasey recalls. “And they told me, ‘Either go into detox tomorrow or don’t ever come here again.’”

Despite overdosing at the detox center on Christmas Eve after sneaking in drugs to get high “one last time,” Kasey entered Impact on Dec. 26 and stayed in treatment for the next 14 months. She says she bucked the system at first, before learning to “trust the process.” She eventually joined the staff training program and became a counselor, eventually moving up to a managerial position. In the end, Kasey gained not only self-esteem there but true love: That’s where she met her husband of 7½ years, Don, an Impact staffer.

Kasey no longer works at Impact, but she says her life has changed “tenfold” since her arrival there. “My husband and I love each other unconditionally, I have two beautiful children, and, for the most part, I’m at peace with myself,” she says. “I don’t have any desire to ever go back to that lifestyle.”

Ryan

Ryan, 32, moved to Pasadena three years ago to break free from the cycle of drugs and violence that landed him behind bars for nearly half his adult life. His childhood in Illinois was turbulent. By the time he was 12, his mother was “out of the picture.” The next year, his father went to prison on drug charges, so he was sent to live with his grandmother. “She was older and didn’t really want the hassle of raising another child,” Ryan says. “I was her responsibility as far as legal decisions, but as far as anything else, I was pretty much on my own.”

At 13, Ryan had little adult supervision and was abusing alcohol “to the point of blacking out.” He started selling pot at 16, dropped out of school a year later and began using meth and cocaine. He worked part-time jobs but also sold cocaine “just to pay for my own habit.” At 18, Ryan was arrested for assaulting a police officer and damaging a cruiser during a drinking binge. Nine months in prison did nothing to prod him off his destructive course and, shortly after he got out, he began cooking meth. He set his apartment on fire and was sent to federal prison to serve a five-year term for manufacturing drugs. Within nine months of his release, Ryan failed a drug test while on probation and was back behind bars for another 18 months.

In prison, Ryan finally decided that if he was ever going to turn his life around, he had to leave Illinois. He wrote to his aunt in Pasadena and asked if he could live with her after his release. She consented and he landed a local job as a warehouse manager, steering clear of drugs but continuing to drink heavily. After testing positive for alcohol use — another violation of his parole — he had two choices: Either go to Impact for treatment or face more jail time. “By the time I got to Impact, I was so sick of the cycle that I was in — getting into trouble, getting out — that I was willing to abide by whatever rules to get through the program,” he says.

Ryan credits the strict program of daily chores, counseling and group meetings with instilling in him the discipline he needed to face his problems without resorting to drugs. “Impact, through its wise ways, has figured out the thing that we need most is to learn to do the things that we don’t want to do and to deal with the things we don’t want to deal with.”

Since completing treatment, Ryan has returned to his job as a warehouse manager. Continuing to strive for a better life, Ryan seems to be well on his way: Six months ago, he started his own online business, and he’s engaged to be married next year.

Janet

Janet had a drug problem so severe that she actually slept through one of the worst disasters in U.S. history — Hurricane Katrina. “From corner office to crack-pipe whore,” the 42-year-old says now, describing her descent into drug abuse.

As an ambitious and attractive younger woman, Janet worked her way up to a branch manager position at a telecommunications company in Dallas, despite her steady use of alcohol and cocaine. But after a company merger, she was laid off. Around the same time, she and her boyfriend of three years broke up. Janet secured a sales management job at another company but lost it after her drug use escalated. “I was demoted and later asked to resign or I was going to be fired. So I resigned,” she says. “It was all due to my addiction.”

Janet retreated to her parents’ home on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast for nine months before taking a sales job in New Orleans. She had stopped using cocaine, but she replaced it with binge drinking. “I wouldn’t say I was drinking 24/7, but it was pretty close,” she says. After losing another job, Janet turned back to cocaine, and in the course of trying to score some powder, she met a man who introduced her to crack. She was quickly addicted and resorted to working as a prostitute — offering her services as an escort on Craigslist — to support her habit. “My life revolved around getting it, using and finding ways and means to get more,” she says.

During Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Janet again fled New Orleans for her parents’ home. And even though the Gulf Coast was also devastated, she slept through the storm — she’d been up for five days straight. She then moved to Atlanta for a brief stay with a cousin before disappearing completely. Warrants had been issued for her arrest after she failed to appear in court on charges of DUI and escorting without a license. A private investigator hired by her relatives found her hiding in a hotel. Her family begged her to get help.

Janet’s sister in California learned about Impact though a chance encounter, and her family flew her to L.A. in March 2006. During the 10 months she spent at the center, Janet confronted her lifelong feelings of guilt and low self-esteem, drawing inspiration from others who had conquered their own addictions. “I was finally hearing thoughts from people that were the same thoughts that I’d had my entire life,” she recalls.

Now living in North Hollywood, Janet works as a successful corporate account executive and continues to lend a hand at Impact. She sponsors three recovering addicts and is helping to put together an upcoming convention for the center. Applying the same principles that she used to quit drugs, she has even lost 42 pounds. “I still have a lot of work to do, but I don’t walk around with that shame and guilt anymore,” Janet says. “Ninety percent of the time, I’m at pure peace. I’ve never been happier — I’ve never been more grateful.”