Voice of the Recovery Community Award
Connecticut Community for Addiction Recovery (CCAR) is the recipient of The Joel Hernandez Voice of the Recovery Community Award!
Learn more…
Rally for Recovery! 2008
Start planning your 2008 Rally for Recovery! event. This year's Rally for Recovery will take place on September 20, 2008! Learn more...
Event: Rally for Recovery 2006
Recovery Walk raises awareness about beating addiction
JM Brown
Vallejo Times
September 17, 2006
Even though she's been clean for five months, it's going to take a while before Tonya Blount of Vallejo can convince loved ones that she's done with drugs.
"My life was devoted to these streets right here," Blount said Saturday, as she marched downtown to raise awareness for addiction recovery. "I've done so much damage and burned so many bridges."
After recovering addicts graduate from treatment, they say they face mistrust from family and friends, as well as employers and authorities, as they try to reclaim their lives. The stigma of addiction keeps the public from understanding that former substance abusers can re-integrate into society, they say.
To help reverse those misconceptions, around 60 recovering addicts marched on Vallejo Saturday for the fifth annual Recovery Walk sponsored by RAFT, a Vallejo organization that advocates treatment and counseling over incarceration. The event was timed with several dozen walks nationwide in celebration of September's designation as "Recovery Month."
Donning "Walk Your Talk" T-shirts, the diverse column of marchers - whose recovery spanned four days to 23 years - solicited countless honks of support from passing vehicles. But even in Vallejo, which has long been plagued by widespread drug use, it isn't easy convincing everyone that recovery can be a permanent.
"People out there don't know about recovery," Recovering Addicts For Treatment founder Jeannie Villarreal said, citing a recent poll that reported 65 percent of those surveyed believe recovery was the same as treatment.
"Until we find our voice and put a face on recovery, people are going to think we are in and out (of substance use) and never get well," she added.
"Recovery is possible for anybody, anytime, anywhere if they want to seek it," said Roger Maryatt, chair of Unity Hall, a Fairfield group pursuing grants to create a social services hot spot for recovering addicts.
The center's concept will be a "Starbucks kind of environment" - not a shelter or treatment program -where clients can learn about clean-and-sober activities and meet other recovering addicts for support, Maryatt said. Still, there's been resistance.
"It's hard to find people who will back something that has to do with drugs and alcohol," Maryatt said. "We're running into that stigma."
Christopher Williams joined Saturday's march to show that even long-term users seek recovery.
Growing up in the Country Club Crest, the 41-year-old said he started using drugs in his late teens, entering the cycle of use and incarceration. But when jail kept him from his cancer-stricken sister's funeral, he decided to conquer his true enemy - himself - rather than giving into it, like always.
"I got tired of doing the same thing over and over again and getting the same results," said Williams, who has been clean for three months since seeking treatment at Vallejo's Genesis House. "In my addiction, I was scared to confront fears that I masked by using drugs and alcohol."
He said some relatives and friends have expressed doubts about his recovery efforts, but he intends to prove them wrong. So does Blount, a Genesis House resident who said she stole from loved ones to support her habit - a demon that stole her dreams of hairstyling professionally and owning a home by age 30.
With five months clean, she said she hopes "maybe they'll give me another chance."
After 16 stints in prison, Sherby Davis Jr. said proving he can stay off drugs will be difficult.
"Tired of causing hurt" to his family, the 36-year-old said he entered Genesis House just five days ago to get a handle on his life. He said he immediately responded to the center's intense regimen of self-reflection, learning how to quit "stuffing all my pain inside me" and putting his needs before others'.
"This is the exact place I need to be," he said. "If I can't fix me, I can't fix anything else."
For too long, recovering addicts were "a silent community," embarrassed by their addiction, Villarreal told marchers. "Be proud of who you are and what you're doing."
E-mail J.M. Brown at jmbrown@thnewsnet.com or call 553-6834.
For more information about RAFT, visit call Fighting Back Partnership at 648-5320. For Unity Hall, visit www.unityhall.org or call 421-2792.
TimesHeraldOnline.com is a Copyright © 2006 product of The Times-Herald, Vallejo, California, 94590