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Recovery in the News
Making most of second chance
Tona Kunz
The Daily Herald
May 13, 2007
Sunday spotlight
A long look at local newsmakers
Sean Cook risked his life to offer cover fire to a medevac group trying to rescue American soldiers injured in a convoy ambushed on a dusty road near Baghdad.
That earned him a recommendation for the Bronze Star.
But six years ago, Cook didn’t stand out as a guy who would step up into the role of hero.
He was on the road to being one of society’s castaways as a self-centered drug addict with little direction other than searching out the latest party.
Today, Cook, just weeks out of the Army, says he thinks a lot about other people. He thinks about his parents whom he let down while he was in high school. He thinks about the people he saw in Iraq while providing convoy security, training the Iraqi Army and setting up polling sites for the country’s first modern election in 2005. He also thinks about the people who helped him find the drive to give up drugs and those trying now to follow in his footsteps.
“I remember people who had been addicts for years who came and talked about recovery. That had a big impact on me,” Cook said.
Now he does the same.
“You have got to give back,” he shrugs.
Cook’s addiction wasn’t as long or deep as many. He never stole to feed his habit. He never dealt outside a small circle of friends.
But his story of redemption does offer hope that few former addicts can provide.
Cook serves as a shining example that graduates of the Kane County drug court program can do more than just get by.
He also gives hope that the lessons learned in drug court will stick. National and Kane County statistics show drug court recidivism is far below that of other criminals.
Within one year, 13 percent to 15 percent of Kane County drug court graduates are back in trouble, compared to a 16.4 percent average recidivism rate at drug courts nationally.
That compares to about 45 percent of other criminals who commit a crime again within a year of being released, according to a U.S. Department of Justice estimate. Those convicted of drug offenses have a 58.6 percent recidivism rate, according to a 2003 National Drug Control Study.
And people in drug court are less likely to fail random drug and alcohol tests: 2 percent fail, compared to 25 percent for other defendants on probation, said Tom Scott, drug court treatment director.
Yet it’s tough to know how program graduates fare long-term because it’s difficult to track them more than five years, especially if they move or change their names after marriage.
But Cook is one such example. He has been clean for six years.
“He is a wonderful inspiration of just how far we can go once we have completed this program and gone on with our lives,” said Mylinda Benjamin. As a public defender, she represents 104 of the 251 active drug court participants.
A wake-up call
Cook, who spoke last month to Kane County’s 28 graduating drug court participants, drew his inspiration from two places: drug court and his military service.
He started using alcohol and pot regularly at 14 and had a cocaine habit by 17 when he was arrested. The choice was jail or the county’s treatment-based drug court, which had started a year earlier in 2000.
Cook chose the mix of counseling and random drug tests that made up the drug court.
At first he thought he could charm his way through it without much effort. He was wrong.
And he couldn’t be happier about that.
Cook calls the night he was arrested and started on the path to drug court the best thing that ever happened to him.
“What I have learned is sometimes you don’t know who you are,” he said. “Sometimes you have to look at others to find out who you are.”
Cook’s first few months in drug court surrounded by middle-aged addicts with dead-end jobs and severed family ties showed him who he did not want to become.
He spent the next two years working to change the path of his life.
Unlike many teenagers in the program, Cook didn’t relapse. He credits former Kane County Judge James Doyle’s tough but fair attitude with keeping him on the straight and narrow.
The rules and chain of command in the courtroom were much like the military, so Cook seized the suggestion he join the service after drug court. He earned money for college and used the time to bring up his grades to so he could get into a four-year college when he got out.
Cook’s former probation officers from the drug court say he has gone further than even they suspected and they see no end to his success in sight.
Judge James Mueller, who succeeded Doyle in running the drug court, told drug court participants that Cook is proof that the typical two years of trials and tribulations it takes to graduate from drug court are “worth sweating for.”
“Thank you very much for what you have done for your country and what you have done for yourself,” he told Cook.
Service examples
Cook traveled to eight countries in his four years in the service. He racked up medals for national defense service, Korean defense service, humanitarianism, the Iraqi campaign and the global war on terror. He earned accommodations for convoy security in Iraq and logistics at Fort Bragg stateside. He brought home the Iraq combat action badge.
He also brought home a new outlook on life that he shares with others.
“I have a lot of admiration and respect for the Iraqi National Guard. Even when there were bombings at the police stations and the training stations, the next day there would be double the recruits,” he said. “Failure was not an option for them. Their position in life gets harder and harder, but they keep going.”
Cook kept that in mind.
He saw the horrors of war that have pushed many before him into drug and alcohol use as an escape. He watched a friend die. He saw many others scream in pain after bullets or shrapnel tore through them. Fear sometimes overwhelmed him. Yet he never fell back on old habits.
That as much as the medals he now wears make others’ excuses of why they started using and can’t stop seem feeble, he said.
“You can’t keep looking back at your skeletons,” he told a drug court graduation class last month. “That is less time you can spend looking forward.”
Focus on what you can do, not what you can’t, he says.
It was the attitude he saw among the Iraqi children when he handed out food, candy and school supplies to them.
“It would be amazing how much these kids appreciated us being there,” he said. “Stateside it is things kids would have blown off. They would not be appreciative. It makes you realize you shouldn’t sweat the small stuff. There are a lot of people who are worse off.”
Addicts more than most people have a shot at success, he said. They already have all the inner skills needed to succeed. Only the most passionate, dedicated and resourceful drug users are able to maintain and grow a habit into a full-fledged addiction. They must find ways to get the drugs, to hide their use or to charm others into helping them enable their habit, he said.
Those same skills can be channeled into building a life after addiction.
“Change takes time, and you will see ups and downs, but addicts find ways to get around roadblocks,” he told the graduates.
Cook barely graduated from East Aurora High School in 2002 because his energy was poured into friends and drugs. Since he has re-channeled his energy, he has earned 57 college credit hours while holding down a full-time military job. His grade point average is 3.75. He plans to finish college here and get a finance degree.
He has apologized and reconciled with his family, who stood by his side after the recent drug court graduation talk.
Now he risks his reputation to tell others about his past drug use. He does it because he was asked to do so.
He doesn’t see his role in the war or his talks to addicts as anything special.
But others do.
“All of this wouldn’t be possible if you yourself didn’t look in the mirror and make the right choices,” Kane County Sheriff Pat Perez told Cook and those who graduated drug court. “You are such an inspiration to all of us because some people get a second chance and a third chance and a fourth chance and never take it.”
© 2006 Daily Herald, Paddock Publications, Inc.