From Crisis to Career: Joe Turner’s Story
(This series is a collaboration between the Leviza Lazer and Addiction Recovery Care to profile men and women’s struggles as they went from active-addiction to abundant recovery. With half of its 400+ employees in recovery from substance use disorder, Addiction Recovery Care (ARC), Inc. is leading the way in Appalachia when it comes to combining drug treatment and vocational training resulting in second chance employment. One third of ARC employees are graduates of an ARC treatment program. ARC believes that the solution to the nation’s workforce issues is lying dormant in the lives of those who are struggling with addiction or alcoholism.)
###
Joe Turner has been on the front lines of addiction and treatment in central KY for decades and he’s amazed by what’s being done to offer treatment in eastern Kentucky. “You are light years ahead of us!”, Turner says.
For decades, eastern Kentucky’s population has been used to driving to Lexington and other parts of the bluegrass for their medical treatment. UK, Central Baptist, Saint Joseph Hospital… they’re iconic names when it comes to getting high-level health-care for people in rural Kentucky. With addiction, the script is being flipped. Thanks to a decades long focus on addiction, battling from what has arguably been the epicenter of America’s opioid epidemic, eastern Kentucky has developed some world-class treatment infrastructure. Organizations like UNITE, political leaders like Congressman Hal Rogers, and treatment companies like Louisa-based Addiction Recovery Care, Inc. have created networks and mechanisms that are capable of fighting addiction in ways that have yet to be effectively implemented in central Kentucky.
Enter Joe Turner, a newly hired Outreach Coordinator for Addiction Recovery Care and one of the change-agents ARC has hired to help take rehab-services to wherever the need arises. “Outreach is about getting ARC’s services out of the four walls of a rehab center,” says Megan Coldiron, the Director of Outreach Services. ARC plans to tap networks such as Joe’s to bring their work to new Kentucky communities.
Joe is 37 years old and is from Paris, KY. He knows addiction from bitter personal experience. He spent nearly 20 years in active-addiction, beginning in his teenage years. It started when he was 8; both his parents were alcoholics and Joe started stealing swigs of his dad’s Old Forester whenever he’d passed out. His mom, also an addict, would eventually divorce his father, only to marry a drug dealer. Joe spent many of the formative years of his life being dragged to and from a local Lexington bar named “The Curb”.
As he grew up, he grew up using drugs. It was all he knew, and he gradually sank deeper and deeper into despair. “There’s no deeper darkness than self-misery… hating yourself to such a degree that you don’t know how to cope without putting something in you.”
By 2013, Joe’s lifestyle had ruined him. He’d always told his family- and himself- that he’d never make his kids go through what he’d experienced with parents in addiction. Then, on October 17 of that year, during a family visit at the jail where Joe was being held after his latest arrest, he felt the power of a hug; or rather the lack of one.
“My son broke me. He had seen me being arrested a few days earlier, and when he came to the jail and saw me, all he wanted to do was give me a hug… but he couldn’t because of the glass and steel. I always said I would never do this to my son, but lo and behold I was.”
After that, Joe began going to AA, he started attending church, he did residential rehab, and he successfully completed drug court.
“God granted me a great job working at an industrial greenhouse as industrial maintenance. Something in me pushed me to give back and I started recovery warriors.” He began getting people into treatment and became a nationally certified Interventionist and Recovery Coach.
Over the years, he’s had some great experiences leading people to recovery. He once did an intervention in Northern California where the entire family was in active addiction. By the end the year, the entire family was going to treatment. Joe beams with joy when he tells about getting a Christmas card from that family the following year. They had their kids back and the card was adorned with the first family photo they’d cared enough to take in nearly a decade.
Like most ARC employees, Joe has more than one “mission” activity. His side-gig remains Recovery Warriors, a Non-profit based in bourbon county. The group began with a focus on addiction-recovery and community-outreach in Bourbon County. Now it has chapters in 16 states. It also sells “Recovery Coffee”, the proceeds of which go to help people in addiction get treatment.
Joe says the thing he’s most excited about with ARC is a chance to roll out their Mobile Crisis Intervention- “No matter where you are, we will come to you. Under a bridge, in a jail, homeless shelter, street corner.”
Joe says he’s living the dream and just can’t ever see himself doing anything different. He wants people to know, no matter how far into addiction someone may fall, that “there’s always hope… I believe that with all my heart.” He adds, with confidence, “that’s why they call me the hope dealer. I love the fact that we’re providing a service that’s never been provided in central KY.”
Addiction Recovery Care’s motto is simple: From Crisis to Career. #FromCrisistoCareer
#####
ARC is a substance use disorder treatment company based in Louisa. It has outpatient and in-patient facilities around Kentucky. It gives select clients with 60 days of residential treatment the option to become an intern and to simultaneously continue with their treatment and learn the ins and outs of operating a treatment center. ARC is currently piloting a program called Outreach Services, which will take “rehab” support outside of licensed facilities and into the places its desperately needed, such as courtrooms, homeless shelters and sober living homes.
ARC believes supporting a client’s discovery of a sense of purpose combined with employment is a critical factor in long-term recovery, and it prides itself on helping clients first achieve sobriety and then helping them discover their God-given destiny.
If you or a loved one is struggling with addiction, please call Addiction Recovery Care 24 hours a day, 7 days a week at 606.638.0938 or visit them on the web at www.arccenters.com.