Journey To Recovery
A former addict tells his story of using drugs, finding God and being a help to others
May 5, 2019 at 11:37 p.m.
Journey To Recovery
By David [email protected]
Marijuana. Oxycotin. Methadone. Cocaine. Heroin. The now-26-year-old had done them all, beginning at about age 13.
Then he found the missing component in all his previous attempts to get clean – prayer – and now he’s celebrating 13 months of sobriety. He’s also an outreach coordinator at the Indiana Center for Recovery, Bloomington.
Popular But Unhappy
Growing up, Streeter was athletic, popular and charismatic. The 2011 Warsaw Community High School graduate played football until he was suspended his sophomore year for failing a drug test.
“That was my life when I grew up, playing sports. And then the first time I ever got high was when I was 13, and that first time ... a switch just went off in my brain, and it was like, ‘This is what we’re going to do,’” Streeter said.
He smoked pot with his brother and some of his friends. By the time he was 14-15, Streeter said he’d do anything to get high.
“I was still playing sports all through high school. When I played sports, I was always high. I’d get high before school. I wouldn’t go to school if I couldn’t get high. ... That was what my life revolved around,” he said.
When weed wasn’t enough, Street graduated to pills, mainly painkillers.
In 10th grade he dislocated his sciatic joint playing football. A doctor prescribed Darvocet, a narcotic painkiller.
All 30 pills were gone in three days.
“I had done pills before, but that was when it started to get bad,” he said.
Physically dependent on them, he’d get sick without the pills. He went out into the streets looking for them, and ended up buying methadone.
Streeter says that some people develop addictions over time, but for him, “I believe that I was born with this disease. ... That first time I ever got high, something changed in my brain and it just took over immediately,” he said.
Contributing to the problem was that no matter how many people liked Streeter, he struggled with low self-esteem. His childhood couldn’t be “any better than it was,” but he couldn’t live and enjoy life.
By his senior year, he was dependent on pills and surrounded himself by other people who were getting high.
At his co-op job, Streeter worked with another guy who did a lot of drugs. One day he gave Streeter some Oxycotin.
“When I did that, it was that same thing in my head again, like ‘this is what I want to do now,” he said. “So it went from the weed to opiates in general to Oxycotin and methadone. I couldn’t be at work without it.”
At 19, Streeter got a job at an orthopedic company. He was making good money, but every dollar went to drugs. His girlfriend also had a good job and was an addict. If he didn’t have drugs, she did.
“This whole time, my mom and dad had no idea what was going on. They didn’t have a clue. They knew I smoked pot, but that was it. ... They had no idea about the pills. By that time, I had done cocaine, acid, mushrooms and everything,” he said.
He was arrested the first time in February 2014 when he got pulled over and had 30 grams of marijuana with him. He ended up only pleading to a charge of possession of paraphernalia.
Streeter tried to stop taking drugs multiple times. He failed every time.
A Bad Joint
Some time later, a guy Streeter got methadone from ended up in jail. He asked a friend for methadone or Oxycotin, but the friend offered him heroin instead. Knowing snorting heroin wouldn’t get him high, Streeter stuck a needle in his arm for the first time. He kept shooting it up until June, when his dad confronted him over his behavior and appearance.
“I was like, ‘I have a drug problem.’ I told him it was pills. I didn’t want to tell him I was doing heroin,” Streeter said.
They decided not to tell his mom until they found a place for him to go, and his dad helped him figure out where. They found a place in Goshen called A New Day. The woman who owned it let the men staying there do what they wanted without any counseling.
On visiting day, Father’s Day, June 16, 2014, Streeter and a friend got someone to bring them a 3-gram bag of heroin and 10-pack of needles. They both did heroin in the bathroom and overdosed. Someone heard Streeter fall and hit the wall.
His dad broke the door down and they found Streeter on the ground not breathing. They called 911, paramedics arrived and told Streeter’s mom that he was dead. At the hospital, he “somehow woke up.”
“I had a lot of shame and guilt from the things that I’d done, and that is one of the main things, was putting my mom and dad through that,” he said.
The hospital wanted to send Streeter home, but his mom didn’t want them to because they didn’t know how to deal with him. He went home with his parents for two days before returning to A New Day because he wanted to get clean.
To get into the treatment center cost $12,000 upfront with no insurance. In the nine days Streeter was there, no rules were enforced. A new guy arrived with needles and heroin. Streeter called his dad the next day, told him what was going on and said he needed to come get him.
His mom filed a complaint with the state about A New Day. It was raided and shut down.
Streeter returned to his parents’ home for about three months. He continued smoking pot because it was the “lesser of the two evils.” He got some trust and freedom back from his parents, but it didn’t take long before he was doing other drugs again – acid and cocaine. He didn’t do heroin because he thought it was the problem, not the other drugs.
RV Living
In about a year, he got a job at a Warsaw factory. He was sitting in a friend’s car when the friend pulled out some instant-release Oxycodone, and Streeter didn’t hesitate. Within a week or two, he was back to heroin.
He got caught a couple of months later, and his parents kicked him out. He slept in his car for a couple of weeks, sneaking into a girl’s home at night. His boss had an RV behind the business so Streeter lived in that RV for a few months.
In 2016 he’d go into where he worked and steal everyone else’s food in the refrigerator because he didn’t have money for food. Making $16-$17 an hour, it all went to heroin.
He’d get money for bills and food from his boss and boss’s boss, but used it for drugs. After his father let him move back home, Streeter used his last paycheck for drugs, quit his job and within a week stole his mom’s debit card to buy drugs.
No Full Commitment
Streeter got kicked out and ended up homeless again. About a week later, he went back to his parents’ home and asked for help. His mom took him to Fairbanks Alcohol & Drug Treatment Center in Indianapolis, where he went through detox and the residential treatment program. After being discharged, he went to Fairbanks’ sober living program. He completed a variety of programs, but says a part of him didn’t fully commit.
At 89 days sober, he and a couple of buddies shot up cocaine and, the next day, heroin.
They ended up getting an apartment together. In about 45 days, Streeter overdosed three times and each of his two roommates overdosed twice. “It was bad, it got really bad. We were all dying,” he said.
He went to see his parents, and as soon as he walked through the door, his father could tell he was using again. The next day he gave Streeter two options: leave or go back to Fairbanks.
Streeter chose Fairbanks, and was there about three weeks and finished the program. Instead of staying in Indianapolis, he came home. He did everything he was supposed to do, but was smoking weed again.
“About a month into being home, I saw my ex-girlfriend and got high with her that night. Did heroin with her that night. That started all over again,” he said.
For a month, Streeter got away with it. Then he got caught and returned to Fairbanks. Came home again, and the pattern just repeated.
Russian Roulette
The last time Streeter returned home from Fairbanks, he went to South Bend with someone to get as much drugs as they could. He stole money from his parents and others, robbed drug dealers in South Bend and broke into homes to steal whatever he could sell. By this time – early in 2018 – he was living in his car again. He overdosed two nights in a row.
“I don’t want to live anymore, but I also don’t want to take my own life, but I’m basically trying to,” Streeter said, comparing it to Russian roulette with a needle. “One night I overdose, I wake up the next morning, I was mad when I woke up.”
He thought if he died he wouldn’t be miserable anymore. “My life was so bad, that was better than continuing what I was doing,” he said.
He said his mother, who had been diagnosed with MS in 2012, had found peace in the fact that he was going to die because she knew how much suffering he was going through.
“Addiction is a family disease, and my family is suffering just as much as I am, if not more, because while I’m doing all the tripping I’m doing, I’m getting high and ignoring it. They can’t ignore it. They’re the ones that have to deal with it, they’re the ones that have to watch it,” Streeter said.
One day he decides to do enough heroin to kill himself. He passed out at around 9 p.m., waking up at noon the next day. He was disoriented, could hardly breathe and couldn’t stand up. He lay there two days without moving because his body had just shut down. His hands have permanent nerve damage because they didn’t have circulation for so long.
Finding God
He finally got up, called his mom and asks if he can come home and take a shower. His parents offered him one more chance to go to rehab. The next day, April 1, 2018, he returned to Fairbanks. That’s now his “sober date.”
He was at Fairbanks four days to detox, then went to Hickory House in Greenfield. In group sessions, Streeter said he’d always volunteer and answer and ask questions.
“That turned me into leading some of the groups in treatment,” he said.
“I got all this positive feedback from leading these groups, and it made me feel good about myself. For the first time in my life, I felt good about myself for something that I had done that didn’t involve drugs,” Streeter said.
He stayed at Hickory House 17 days, when his insurance ran out. He went and stayed with a friend in Indianapolis who also was doing well after treatment.
Streeter’s therapist told him he could work in the rehabilitation field because others responded so well to him.
“Every time I’d gone to rehab before this, I always heard you needed to build a relationship with a higher power, and I was like, ‘Nope, not doing that, can’t do that.’
“... I was mad at God, partly because of how bad my life was. I?blamed God. And because of my mom being sick, I blamed God for that, also. I was very angry at God,” Streeter said. “But that night I went back to Fairbanks, for the last time, I get back to my room and I was so mentally and spiritually broken, and physically broken, I was just done. And I fell down in my room, and pulled myself up on my bed so my knees were on the ground and I’m leaning on the bed, and I’m like, ‘I’m already on my knees, I might as well start praying.’ So I did, and that was the first time I had ever prayed and meant it.”
Streeter asked God for help because he couldn’t do it on his own. He didn’t want to be a heroin addict anymore.
“The next day, it was like I felt different. I felt better. I don’t know how to explain it, but I?had a spiritual awakening that night.”
That continues to play a part with his success.
“That relationship that I finally found with God, that was the one component that I never had before.”
New Hope
Streeter works with A Bridge To Hope in Warsaw, and its executive director asked if he wanted to do recovery coach training. He’s now a certified peer addiction recovery coach.
At seven months sober, Hickory House offered Streeter a job as a recovery coach created just for him. He worked there from November 2018 to March 2019. Then the Indiana Center for Recovery in Bloomington offered him a job as a recovery coach. Streeter turned it down, but when the Center offered him a job as outreach coordinator, he couldn’t say no.
“Indiana Center for Recovery is really amazing, all the things that they do for people. So the fact that I get to be a part of that, it’s just great.
“From where my life was at when I was homeless, shooting heroin in the park because I had no place to go and starving ... to where I’m at now. I’ve got my own apartment, I’ve got a car. A job. I can pay my bills. I’ve got money saved, like I’m actually happy now and I did not think I’d ever be happy. And it’s because I reached out and asked for help and did what I was told to do.
“I always thought I knew what was best for me, but then I found out I didn’t have a clue.”
To contact Streeter about recovery or services the Center offers, call 812-822-2510 or 574-253-3189; or email [email protected]. Visit the website at www.treatmentindiana.com.
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Marijuana. Oxycotin. Methadone. Cocaine. Heroin. The now-26-year-old had done them all, beginning at about age 13.
Then he found the missing component in all his previous attempts to get clean – prayer – and now he’s celebrating 13 months of sobriety. He’s also an outreach coordinator at the Indiana Center for Recovery, Bloomington.
Popular But Unhappy
Growing up, Streeter was athletic, popular and charismatic. The 2011 Warsaw Community High School graduate played football until he was suspended his sophomore year for failing a drug test.
“That was my life when I grew up, playing sports. And then the first time I ever got high was when I was 13, and that first time ... a switch just went off in my brain, and it was like, ‘This is what we’re going to do,’” Streeter said.
He smoked pot with his brother and some of his friends. By the time he was 14-15, Streeter said he’d do anything to get high.
“I was still playing sports all through high school. When I played sports, I was always high. I’d get high before school. I wouldn’t go to school if I couldn’t get high. ... That was what my life revolved around,” he said.
When weed wasn’t enough, Street graduated to pills, mainly painkillers.
In 10th grade he dislocated his sciatic joint playing football. A doctor prescribed Darvocet, a narcotic painkiller.
All 30 pills were gone in three days.
“I had done pills before, but that was when it started to get bad,” he said.
Physically dependent on them, he’d get sick without the pills. He went out into the streets looking for them, and ended up buying methadone.
Streeter says that some people develop addictions over time, but for him, “I believe that I was born with this disease. ... That first time I ever got high, something changed in my brain and it just took over immediately,” he said.
Contributing to the problem was that no matter how many people liked Streeter, he struggled with low self-esteem. His childhood couldn’t be “any better than it was,” but he couldn’t live and enjoy life.
By his senior year, he was dependent on pills and surrounded himself by other people who were getting high.
At his co-op job, Streeter worked with another guy who did a lot of drugs. One day he gave Streeter some Oxycotin.
“When I did that, it was that same thing in my head again, like ‘this is what I want to do now,” he said. “So it went from the weed to opiates in general to Oxycotin and methadone. I couldn’t be at work without it.”
At 19, Streeter got a job at an orthopedic company. He was making good money, but every dollar went to drugs. His girlfriend also had a good job and was an addict. If he didn’t have drugs, she did.
“This whole time, my mom and dad had no idea what was going on. They didn’t have a clue. They knew I smoked pot, but that was it. ... They had no idea about the pills. By that time, I had done cocaine, acid, mushrooms and everything,” he said.
He was arrested the first time in February 2014 when he got pulled over and had 30 grams of marijuana with him. He ended up only pleading to a charge of possession of paraphernalia.
Streeter tried to stop taking drugs multiple times. He failed every time.
A Bad Joint
Some time later, a guy Streeter got methadone from ended up in jail. He asked a friend for methadone or Oxycotin, but the friend offered him heroin instead. Knowing snorting heroin wouldn’t get him high, Streeter stuck a needle in his arm for the first time. He kept shooting it up until June, when his dad confronted him over his behavior and appearance.
“I was like, ‘I have a drug problem.’ I told him it was pills. I didn’t want to tell him I was doing heroin,” Streeter said.
They decided not to tell his mom until they found a place for him to go, and his dad helped him figure out where. They found a place in Goshen called A New Day. The woman who owned it let the men staying there do what they wanted without any counseling.
On visiting day, Father’s Day, June 16, 2014, Streeter and a friend got someone to bring them a 3-gram bag of heroin and 10-pack of needles. They both did heroin in the bathroom and overdosed. Someone heard Streeter fall and hit the wall.
His dad broke the door down and they found Streeter on the ground not breathing. They called 911, paramedics arrived and told Streeter’s mom that he was dead. At the hospital, he “somehow woke up.”
“I had a lot of shame and guilt from the things that I’d done, and that is one of the main things, was putting my mom and dad through that,” he said.
The hospital wanted to send Streeter home, but his mom didn’t want them to because they didn’t know how to deal with him. He went home with his parents for two days before returning to A New Day because he wanted to get clean.
To get into the treatment center cost $12,000 upfront with no insurance. In the nine days Streeter was there, no rules were enforced. A new guy arrived with needles and heroin. Streeter called his dad the next day, told him what was going on and said he needed to come get him.
His mom filed a complaint with the state about A New Day. It was raided and shut down.
Streeter returned to his parents’ home for about three months. He continued smoking pot because it was the “lesser of the two evils.” He got some trust and freedom back from his parents, but it didn’t take long before he was doing other drugs again – acid and cocaine. He didn’t do heroin because he thought it was the problem, not the other drugs.
RV Living
In about a year, he got a job at a Warsaw factory. He was sitting in a friend’s car when the friend pulled out some instant-release Oxycodone, and Streeter didn’t hesitate. Within a week or two, he was back to heroin.
He got caught a couple of months later, and his parents kicked him out. He slept in his car for a couple of weeks, sneaking into a girl’s home at night. His boss had an RV behind the business so Streeter lived in that RV for a few months.
In 2016 he’d go into where he worked and steal everyone else’s food in the refrigerator because he didn’t have money for food. Making $16-$17 an hour, it all went to heroin.
He’d get money for bills and food from his boss and boss’s boss, but used it for drugs. After his father let him move back home, Streeter used his last paycheck for drugs, quit his job and within a week stole his mom’s debit card to buy drugs.
No Full Commitment
Streeter got kicked out and ended up homeless again. About a week later, he went back to his parents’ home and asked for help. His mom took him to Fairbanks Alcohol & Drug Treatment Center in Indianapolis, where he went through detox and the residential treatment program. After being discharged, he went to Fairbanks’ sober living program. He completed a variety of programs, but says a part of him didn’t fully commit.
At 89 days sober, he and a couple of buddies shot up cocaine and, the next day, heroin.
They ended up getting an apartment together. In about 45 days, Streeter overdosed three times and each of his two roommates overdosed twice. “It was bad, it got really bad. We were all dying,” he said.
He went to see his parents, and as soon as he walked through the door, his father could tell he was using again. The next day he gave Streeter two options: leave or go back to Fairbanks.
Streeter chose Fairbanks, and was there about three weeks and finished the program. Instead of staying in Indianapolis, he came home. He did everything he was supposed to do, but was smoking weed again.
“About a month into being home, I saw my ex-girlfriend and got high with her that night. Did heroin with her that night. That started all over again,” he said.
For a month, Streeter got away with it. Then he got caught and returned to Fairbanks. Came home again, and the pattern just repeated.
Russian Roulette
The last time Streeter returned home from Fairbanks, he went to South Bend with someone to get as much drugs as they could. He stole money from his parents and others, robbed drug dealers in South Bend and broke into homes to steal whatever he could sell. By this time – early in 2018 – he was living in his car again. He overdosed two nights in a row.
“I don’t want to live anymore, but I also don’t want to take my own life, but I’m basically trying to,” Streeter said, comparing it to Russian roulette with a needle. “One night I overdose, I wake up the next morning, I was mad when I woke up.”
He thought if he died he wouldn’t be miserable anymore. “My life was so bad, that was better than continuing what I was doing,” he said.
He said his mother, who had been diagnosed with MS in 2012, had found peace in the fact that he was going to die because she knew how much suffering he was going through.
“Addiction is a family disease, and my family is suffering just as much as I am, if not more, because while I’m doing all the tripping I’m doing, I’m getting high and ignoring it. They can’t ignore it. They’re the ones that have to deal with it, they’re the ones that have to watch it,” Streeter said.
One day he decides to do enough heroin to kill himself. He passed out at around 9 p.m., waking up at noon the next day. He was disoriented, could hardly breathe and couldn’t stand up. He lay there two days without moving because his body had just shut down. His hands have permanent nerve damage because they didn’t have circulation for so long.
Finding God
He finally got up, called his mom and asks if he can come home and take a shower. His parents offered him one more chance to go to rehab. The next day, April 1, 2018, he returned to Fairbanks. That’s now his “sober date.”
He was at Fairbanks four days to detox, then went to Hickory House in Greenfield. In group sessions, Streeter said he’d always volunteer and answer and ask questions.
“That turned me into leading some of the groups in treatment,” he said.
“I got all this positive feedback from leading these groups, and it made me feel good about myself. For the first time in my life, I felt good about myself for something that I had done that didn’t involve drugs,” Streeter said.
He stayed at Hickory House 17 days, when his insurance ran out. He went and stayed with a friend in Indianapolis who also was doing well after treatment.
Streeter’s therapist told him he could work in the rehabilitation field because others responded so well to him.
“Every time I’d gone to rehab before this, I always heard you needed to build a relationship with a higher power, and I was like, ‘Nope, not doing that, can’t do that.’
“... I was mad at God, partly because of how bad my life was. I?blamed God. And because of my mom being sick, I blamed God for that, also. I was very angry at God,” Streeter said. “But that night I went back to Fairbanks, for the last time, I get back to my room and I was so mentally and spiritually broken, and physically broken, I was just done. And I fell down in my room, and pulled myself up on my bed so my knees were on the ground and I’m leaning on the bed, and I’m like, ‘I’m already on my knees, I might as well start praying.’ So I did, and that was the first time I had ever prayed and meant it.”
Streeter asked God for help because he couldn’t do it on his own. He didn’t want to be a heroin addict anymore.
“The next day, it was like I felt different. I felt better. I don’t know how to explain it, but I?had a spiritual awakening that night.”
That continues to play a part with his success.
“That relationship that I finally found with God, that was the one component that I never had before.”
New Hope
Streeter works with A Bridge To Hope in Warsaw, and its executive director asked if he wanted to do recovery coach training. He’s now a certified peer addiction recovery coach.
At seven months sober, Hickory House offered Streeter a job as a recovery coach created just for him. He worked there from November 2018 to March 2019. Then the Indiana Center for Recovery in Bloomington offered him a job as a recovery coach. Streeter turned it down, but when the Center offered him a job as outreach coordinator, he couldn’t say no.
“Indiana Center for Recovery is really amazing, all the things that they do for people. So the fact that I get to be a part of that, it’s just great.
“From where my life was at when I was homeless, shooting heroin in the park because I had no place to go and starving ... to where I’m at now. I’ve got my own apartment, I’ve got a car. A job. I can pay my bills. I’ve got money saved, like I’m actually happy now and I did not think I’d ever be happy. And it’s because I reached out and asked for help and did what I was told to do.
“I always thought I knew what was best for me, but then I found out I didn’t have a clue.”
To contact Streeter about recovery or services the Center offers, call 812-822-2510 or 574-253-3189; or email [email protected]. Visit the website at www.treatmentindiana.com.
Have a news tip? Email [email protected] or Call/Text 360-922-3092