Addicts can have Christian backgrounds, families but be on wrong path

Men who sell the stoves out of their houses to buy drugs, eat crust crumbs off toast thinking it is dope or spend $17,000 in 10 days on crack cocaine don’t always come from hardened street lives. The fact is many of them have sat regularly in church pews.
   
“In 10 days I spent $17,000 on crack cocaine and caught nine felonies,” said Jason Schweizer of Millbrook.
   
“I grew up in a Christian atmosphere and in church. I mean my parents were Baptist. I even went to a Christian Academy (Calvary Christian Academy in Montgomery) for my first six years of school. But somewhere around age 14 I got going in the wrong direction. I fathered a child when I was 15 and another one when I was 17, and I started heavy drugs and drinking,” he said.
   
He slipped into a life of addiction after he moved from a Christian school to public school in the seventh grade. Boredom from academics being far behind that of his previous school and peers he associated with contributed to his drug and alcohol use, he said.
   
Schweizer and others undergoing addiction recovery at New Hope Ministries crossed the line of addiction — a passage most of them thought they would never return from.
   
After Schweizer’s 10 days of felonies, he spent two weeks in county jail and was released, only to be out doing drugs again, he said.
   
“You can bare-knuckle it (let go of the drugs), but when you let go if you don’t have God as a platform to catch you, you’re going to just go right back down there where you were,” he said.
   
“I’ve been running from the Lord a long time,” said Scott Pugh, a plumber from Auburn. “If it weren’t for Joel Griffin and this place, I would have been dead, and somebody would have probably been dead with me.
   
“I’d be using drugs and reading the Bible and I’d be smoking crack and watching the Gaithers,” he said. “I feel like I had a ‘relationship’ with God, even when I was using. I’d go to church on occasion when I was drugging, and I’d get that warm feeling when the preacher gave the invitation. I think He’s (Jesus) been there, but I’ve just ignored Him.”
   
“Sin, especially in the form of addiction, does not discriminate,” said Nathan Reid, who attends The Church at Brook Hills in Birmingham. Reid said most people know someone facing an addiction.
    
These men attend church on Sunday and Wednesday nights. They go home to productive recovery at New Hope and also help with the upkeep of the facility.