For those of us who have never suffered it, the dedication and resolve it takes to knock a drug addiction is unfathomable. I sat down with a childhood friend of mine last week it took several hours and two interviews for him to explain what I would call his ‘revolving door recovery’.Stix, not his real name, is 50. When I spoke with him last week he had been clean for seven months. He said it feels great, that it always feels great and that he does not want to be an addict.But it’s a daily battle for Stix, who started using drugs when he was nine years old.“I smoked marijuana first and not long after that I started drinking alcohol,” he said.As a teenager he regularly got high with friends and one of his teachers. At 18, he was imprisoned for driving while disqualified.In prison he listened intently to the braggadocio; stories by inmates whose criminal lifestyles included hard drugs. When he was released he started snorting heroin. A few years later, peer pressure led him to take the drug intravenously.“Because of my addiction I became homeless. My father kicked me out of the house,” he said.He turned to crime to feed his habit, doing most all the exploits inmates had bragged about when he was first incarcerated.“I robbed, stole, did breaking and entering, forged cheques, shot drugs,” he said.He was often caught and spent much time in prison.“I was a recidivist prisoner,” he said, explaining he spent most of the 1980s behind bars.“In 1985 I was out of prison for the longest time, just under two years, but I went back in 1987,” he said.It was during that time out of prison, in 1986, that he first sought help for his addiction.“My mother told me she thought I needed professional help,” he said. “That’s how I got involved in my first 12-step programme.”The three-week programme was held at Montrose Substance Abuse Centre. Sessions took place five days a week from 9.30am to 4.30pm. Clients were also advised to attend Alcoholics or Narcotics Anonymous meetings every evening, and to get a sponsor.“They suggested we attend 90 meetings in 90 days,” Stix said. “I didn’t do what was suggested and started using again. I stopped going to meetings shortly after I finished treatment and I didn’t get a sponsor because I didn’t think I needed one.“It felt good being clean and because it felt good I thought I could maintain it on my own.”About two months later he started using again.“I didn’t have the full understanding of addiction and recovery and what was going on with me,” he said. “With all the years of drug abuse I couldn’t think clearly.“Something spiritual happened in the rooms when we had meetings. My obsession and compulsion for drugs was lifted and after the three weeks I was able to get back out into society and be a productive member.“Once I stopped going to the meetings the spiritual aspect slowly died and one day I thought I could have just one snort,” he said.Of course he couldn’t and fell deep into addiction and crime again.Stix was stacking up a long criminal record when in 1994 a judge sentenced him to treatment in a bid to stop the cycle and make him a productive citizen.“The judge said he wanted to try something different and sentenced me to Harbour Light for treatment,” said Stix.The programme at the residential treatment facility was three months long. Stix said it worked well for him. Daily Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings were mandatory and he lived at the facility.“But I was not on lock-down,” he said.Towards the end of the 90 days, when he was in the reintegration phase and working in the community, he was led astray.“I gave a ride to a prisoner I saw. He said he’d give me money for gas but when I dropped him at his cousin’s, he had no money and so he paid me with some cocaine,” said Stix.He said he debated whether to sell it or use it and decided on the latter.“But there’s no such thing as just one and 1000 is never enough,” he said.He spent the entire night away from Harbour Light and when he returned the next day, he convinced the director he had remained clean.“I used someone else’s urine so I passed the drug test,” he said.When he succumbed to temptation a second time before the programme ended, he confessed everything and was kicked out.He said he remembers feeling a great sense of failure.“I was upset with myself. It was such a good feeling to feel free of drug addiction,” he said.“I went back to using, to drinking and drugging. And I spent all those years looking for God. I spent countless hours on my knees asking to be relieved from alcohol and drug addiction, waiting for something outside myself to come and save me.”He attended church every week as a child, the minister often preached that God knew everything each of us did, and that God had made it so.“I grew up believing that everything was predestined and that I could not change it. When I became involved in drugs I thought it was what God determined should happen to me and that I was powerless to change it,” he said.In 1999 Stix said his ‘God concept’ changed. Through studying ancient Egyptian philosophy he came to understand God as a life force in every living thing.“The spirit cannot be separated from the life force,” he said. “ I learned I had control of my thoughts and actions and that there were consequences or benefits to my behaviours. I realised I had control of my destiny,” he said.Coming to this realisation proved a major turning point in his recovery.In 2002 he was sentenced to Harbour Light again and, on the very last day, kicked out of the programme and sent to Camp Spirit, formerly a six-month residential programme for men on Darrell’s Island.Stix heralds it a great success. Although he lapsed after going through it, he still draws on the skills, awareness and knowledge he gained by being in the programme.“Unlike the other programmes it was confrontational,” he said. “I learned so much. It was the best treatment programme I have ever been in. It taught me how to be responsible, how to humble myself, how to deal with challenges.”He managed to stay clean for almost two years after the programme but then stopped attending meetings and soon found himself using drugs again.“I attended the World Conference of Narcotics Anonymous in Barcelona, Spain during that time I was clean and in stark contrast, a year later I was in the Caribbean packaging drugs for export.”Stix checked himself into a programme at the Men’s Treatment Centre earlier this year the first time he’s been in a programme of his own volition.“I have the foundation from all the programmes so I feel well-grounded,” he said.He has since established himself as a small business owner and finds the work fulfilling.“Over all the years I was incarcerated I had dreams of having my own business, travelling, having cars. I didn’t know all I had to do was stop using and stick to the 12-step programme to implement that in my life,” said Stix.“My higher power, treatment, my meetings and my sponsor those four things keep me clean. I don’t care what I go through within a day I don’t use. That’s the only thing I do perfectly every day. Other than that, I am nowhere near perfect.“I have the full understanding that those who keep coming to meetings regularly stay clean, that’s why I do five, six, sometimes seven meetings a week.“Today I worked half the day, played golf the other half. I called my sponsor and I’m going to a meeting tonight. I am loving the life I live.”