Recovery From a Sickness Within

“I’m what you would have referred to as a garbage can. I’d have taken just about anything.”

Liquor, pot, downers, uppers, acid, coke, heroin--you name it, Candy Smyers was game.

At first it was barbiturates. She’d get so zonked that she was expelled from Birmingham High. Her first arrest came at age 18. There were a variety of charges, including drug offenses and forgery. The judge offered her state prison or a rehab program at Camarillo State Hospital. She chose rehab.

After 18 months, Candy came out, believing that her problems were over. But after her grandfather’s funeral, she found his medication. That’s when Candy discovered she’d still try just about anything.

Even so, Candy figured she could “maintain” on pot and booze without getting hooked on pills or hard drugs. Then she met Ike. He was deep into heroin. Candy, barely 20, thought she could rescue him.

They got a place together. “I did,” she says, “the relationship thing.”

Candy tells her story in an office at I-ADARP, the common name for the Inter-Agency Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation Program. Candy, now 39, works as a counselor at this Van Nuys-based outpatient program.

“The relationship thing.” The syndrome is familiar in her line of work. For people hooked on drugs or alcohol, it’s a pattern, she explains. Substance abuse is a common foundation for human relationship. Also a weak one.

“I had that idealism,” she recalls, referring to her desire to save Ike from himself.

They were together about two years. By the end, Candy was into heroin herself.

Ike disappeared from her life. Candy managed to kick heroin on her own, without entering treatment. For years she avoided “hard stuff,” using only marijuana and alcohol. She used them even while she had her first formal job as a drug counselor.

Candy figured her problem was under control. She got a job in auto sales and did well enough to buy a home. She was maintaining--doing so well that she figured it would be OK to do a line of cocaine now and then.

At first she did it about once or twice a month. In time, Candy was spending $1,500 a week on coke.

She had stopped smoking pot. “It was making me more paranoid,” she explained. But cocaine made her thirsty, so she was drinking more and more.

“It had me so trapped. . . . “

Candy was a wreck. Cocaine’s cost goes beyond the price. She lost her home and had to leave her job. In February, 1990, she entered a residential rehab program for women in Pasadena.

“I needed support. I needed to be in safe places, instead of bars.”

By April, when she left that program, Candy had put pills, heroin, pot and cocaine behind her.

But, “after I got out, I thought I could still drink. That’s the nature of the beast.”

Before long she realized there was that last dragon to slay. Candy entered Alcoholics Anonymous. And she started to visit I-ADARP to find moral support.

Liquor turned out to be the hardest habit to break. Her relationship with it was a long one. And as she explains: “Alcohol is legal. It’s acceptable. It’s always going to be there.”

On Christmas Day, 1990, she had her last drink. Friends sometimes ask her why she didn’t at least wait to toast in the new year. Candy says she finally decided that enough was enough.

Candy picked an unusual time to quit. But for I-ADARP and other drug and alcohol programs, January and February tend to be very busy. People tend to binge over the holidays, then resolve to better themselves after the new year.

And as with personal calamities, natural disasters such as earthquakes are another reason people look to drugs and alcohol. According to some reports, Valium sales have climbed since the Jan. 17 earthquake.

“Oh sure,” Candy says. “There’s a lot of people that are maybe borderline in recreational use who were indulging and getting into trouble with coping at all.”

As Candy would attest, dependency on narcotics can be a catastrophe in itself. That’s what I-ADARP and other drug programs are here for.

On the afternoon of Feb. 16, I-ADARP will host an open house to mark its 20th anniversary. They are expecting politicians to hand out plaques and proclamations. And they are expecting some of the thousands of clients who’ve been helped over the years. The office is at 7400 Van Nuys Blvd., Suite 207. If you’re a prospective client, they hope you drop by.

Candy, who’s been clean and sober for more than three years, says she’ll be there.

And--who knows?--her old boyfriend Ike may be there as well.

He showed up at I-ADARP a couple of years ago, after hearing that Candy was working there.

“He called before he showed up, so I wouldn’t have a heart attack,” Candy says. “Our last encounter wasn’t friendly.

“I really did believe he wasn’t on the planet. He could have been dead for all I knew.”

Instead, Ike, who had seemed beyond hope, had entered a residential rehab program. He’d been clean for six months when he called Candy.

“He wanted to reconnect with somebody he knew from those days, who was still around and alive and clean and sober.”

Last summer, Ike’s Narcotics Anonymous group gave him a cake to mark his first anniversary of clean living. This is a common practice, a token of recognition.

It’s sort of like a birthday party, Candy explains, because your life begins anew.

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays.