Saturday, October 3, 2015

Recovered addicts tell their tales

Recovered addicts tell their tales
 Andrew Mansfield

News staff photo by ANDREW MANSFIELD

State Sen. Jen Flanagan, D-Leominster, speaks at AED’s National Recovery Month event.
Andrew Mansfield


Recovered addicts Michael Donahue and Michael Barros gave a face to the problem of substance abuse by telling their stories to the audience at an awareness event on Wednesday in Gardner.

Mr. Donahue sat beside his parents, Donna and George Donahue, and told the audience at the Assist Educate Defeat Foundation event how growing up he seemed to be an unlikely candidate to become an addict.

“I grew up in a nice house in Lunenburg with a twin sister and younger brother. I had everything I ever wanted. It was not a hard childhood,” he said.

Despite having strong family support, Mr. Donahue said he began experimenting with marijuana as a means to cope with not feeling like he fit in as an adolescent.

Once he was able to drive, his drug use became more habitual, expanded to alcohol and eventually to Percocet pills.

He said at the time he thought he could try just one Percocet and not become addicted.

“When I got high, I thought, ‘If I could feel this way for the rest of my life I’ll be OK.’ I got high because I liked the way it felt, plain and simple,” he said.

As his high school years progressed, he would steal from his parents to support his habit. After high school, he was kicked out of a trade school for robbing someone.

“I was going to my parents’ house and taking everything that wasn’t bolted down,” he said.

His condition continued to worsen as a young adult, to the point that he would shoot up heroin at work and would smoke marijuana every day while in a treatment program.
“Everything was still getting worse. I was walking around wishing I was dead,” he said.

Through his parents’ support and the Alcoholics Anonymous program, he was ultimately able to curb his addiction through a monthlong detox program and receiving peer counseling from other addicts who had achieved recovery.

His mother, Donna Donahue, said that peer counseling helped him not feel ashamed for his condition because he was receiving help from others who had been through the same thing.

“They cleansed themselves through writing and ridding themselves of past experiences,” she said.

“We’re sold on the 12 steps (used in the AA program), but unfortunately insurance doesn’t cover it,” said George Donahue, Michael’s father.

Now sober, Michael Donahue is able to reflect on his past and live a healthier life.

“Before all this I didn’t realize what I put my parents through. Things are going really good right now. I owe it all to the program and my parents for sticking by me,” he said.
Michael Barros spoke about how his family has a history of alcoholism that he eventually became a part of.

He said that he cannot exactly remember when he had his first drink, but after his father died in a construction accident when he was a freshman in high school, he felt “entitled” to drink more.

“I thought I deserved to let out some steam,” he said.

Throughout his high school years in Massachusetts, Mr. Barros still maintained good grades and was a successful athlete. He continued playing football in college.

As a senior in college, he had a shoulder injury that sidelined him, leading him to take prescription painkillers and without the commitment of playing a sport.

“In a matter of months I became a daily user. I had no frame of reference to realize how sick I was,” he said.

He progressed to using heroin, which he initially believed was the only thing he had to stop using in order to recover.

However, he continued to abuse alcohol, which worsened when he acquired a job in London as a bartender.

“Every day I woke up knowing nothing good was coming for me,” he said.

The turning point for Mr. Barros was coming back to the States and receiving a bed at the Pathway House, a sober facility for young men run by the social services organization GAAMHA, in exchange for being sober for two weeks.

Around the same time as being at Pathway House, he was asked to be the godfather for his friend’s daughter. Six days after the daughter’s birth, his friend was involved in a traumatic accident resulting in a brain injury.

“For five months I went to pick up her up to bring her to him. That experience really showed me that the only chance I have to help the people I love is through recovery,” Mr. Barros said.

Mr. Barros cited his experience as an example that addicts need both support from their communities and have a role to play in them.

“People need to see that they have a future,” he said.

Sean Hayden, business director at GAAMHA, said Mr. Barros’s story shows why people cannot give up on addicts.

“Here’s a guy that by all means we should have given up on. Fast forward a few years and now Mike is a general manager for a company with 67 people. Treatment works and it’s always worth it,” he said.

At the end of the AED event, Mr. Donahue was asked what the best part of being in recovery from addiction is.

“Honestly, just being OK. All I’ve ever wanted to be is OK. That’s the best thing,” he said.

4 comments:

  1. I believe Afghanistan is the largest producer of opium at present, so it is not all about the oil. Here is some history of the entry of drugs into our country and who is behind it.


    Celebrating a Golden Anniversary
    50 Years of Drug
    Dealing by the CIA

    PART I. THE HELLWELL DYNASTY
    or HOW BURMA GOT ITS START

    Various News Sources




    It's generally agreed that 1996's biggest news story was Gary Webb's San Jose Mercury scoop that ghetto drug dealers claim none other than the American CIA to be their supplier!

    But Spooks dealing drugs isn't a 90's thing. Our beloved agency busily flew heroin around Asia on the CIA proprietary airline AIR AMERICA during Viet Nam, and refined Hmong and Burmese poppy in Asian soft drink bottling factories, used the U.S. Mafioso MOB to distribute the drugs and banked millions in their own Bank which they later collapsed, stealing the receipts.

    Just revealed: the sixties weren't the start of the CIA dealing poppy to ghettos. Colonel Paul Hellwell of the OSS brought heroin from Burma and sold it in U.S. ghettos as far back as the 40's, so Gary Webb is five decades late with his scoop! We are in a 50 year anniversary of something other than just Roswell aliens! The Hellwell Aliens also were gray men, that being the exact shade of their MORALS!

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  2. The heroin that the OSS dealt was grown in Burma, and refined in Shanghai. The OSS stumbled upon this import when they were in Asia with the Flying Tigers to stop MAO TSE TUNG from getting into power. Tigers were supposedly heroic civilian volunteers --John Wayne even played one in a movie, but this was just a lacquer job. The Tigers were OSS mercenaries paid for with OSS SECRET funds (at first, OLIGARCH money, later drug receipts). ALLEN DULLES was the brains behind the Tigers and the entire agency then. Dulles ran an inner clique at the OSS, what was to become Directorate of Covert Actions. Dulles was also very tight with the super-rich Eastern billionaire families, (read Dulles' biography and read BITTER FRUIT by S. Kinzer which indicates oligarchs paid for dirty tricks). If you read up on it, you'll discover that Dulles ran secret wars out of the White House (not unlike Ollie North) and had a repressive agenda related to every banana republic that had nationalistic or socialist tendencies, which might get in the way of transnationalist corporative agendas.

    The Flying Tigers were in China helping a General named Chiang Kai-Shek (nicknamed 'CASH MY CHECK' as behind our backs, he sold our guns to the Japs). Chiang was used in an attempt to destroy Mao. Of course, it couldn't be done and in 1949 they had to beat a fast retreat to Taiwan. Mao later stopped all poppy-dealing by making death a penalty for it. But before the end, Colonel Paul Hellwell, an Ivy leaguer, rich kid, observed how Chiang sold opium to Chinese addicts to earn revenues for guns and troops. The French saw the same thing going on in Vietnam when it was their colony. Dope and spooks kind of made terrific sense to Dulles. An intelligence service can't pay for underhanded illegal covert ops. Tax payers can't, Congress WON'T. Why should it be left to poor oligarchs to fund the secret fight? You have to think like the OSS. In their heads, the fight was patriotic...it was against nasty nationalists or dirty communists seeking to get nice YANKEE traders out so they could have their OWN industries. Actually nationalists called us Yankee IMPERIALISTS and felt we were out to exploit their banana republics and acted so much like Commies that we felt it was patriotic to rub them out. Why should oligarchs pay for their murder when blacks in U.S. ghettos would empty their pockets for drugs? And boy, did those nickles add up!

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  3. It is hard to believe that the money behind WWI, WWII and all the other wars since the Central Bank was begun in 1913 would stoop so low as to be the money behind our drug culture. Who knew?

    ReplyDelete