By David Palmer
With her blonde bob and a big smile, recovering drug addict Stephenie Drake, a 35-year old ex GI from Pansy, Ark., looks happy in her sobriety.
Drake has been clean and sober nine years now, she said in a recent interview, and lives in a small trailer with her son, Skyler, while she attends Pulaski Tech. She has six years of college, part of it at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and is close to getting her nursing degree.
Drake began her journey to sobriety in 2002 when Arkansas CARES, a University of Arkansas for Medical Science (UAMS) program, created to treat mothers and children together in a residential setting, accepted her in its Little Rock facility.
Drake and Skyler moved in for six months, and during her stay, she attended daily 12-Step programs at the facility as well as out in the community. At the Wolfe Street center, a nonprofit facility that offers nearly 50 12-Step meetings a week, she found the sponsor who works with her to this day.
Like anyone else, Drake has her bad days, but she regularly goes to five 12-Step meetings a week, sponsors six women, avoids bad company and cultivates a growing faith in God. She credits God for her escape from childhood foster care, her auspicious beginning with Arkansas CARES and the health of her son who escaped the potentially dire consequences of her drug abuse during pregnancy.
These events might be attributed by others to coincidence, Drake says with a smile, but to her “’coincidence’ is God’s way of remaining anonymous.”
Drake’s early life was rough. She was born in August 1976 of a 16-year old alcoholic mother and a missing father she has never seen and knows almost nothing about. Her mother, who still struggles with her addictions, put two-year-old Drake, and later her sister, in foster care. Drake ended up in four different homes and was raped by a 12-year-old boy when she was six.
About a year later. Drake and her young sister caught a break. They were adopted by what she describes as a very loving family, and, packing all their belongings in a small paper bag, they moved into a nice home in a good neighborhood.
Drake, however, did not really appreciate it. Perversely, she says, “All I could think about was getting back to my own family (her mother and brother). I didn’t give my new family a chance.”
Still she stayed on, had six years of a “stable life” and participated in sports and other activities in school. But then her adoptive parents got divorced and on an impulse, in late December of 1993 when she was a junior in high school, she joined the army and was sent to Ft. Jackson, S.C. for basic training.
“I did well in basic training, and was a sharp-shooter and expert in throwing grenades (a skill she learned playing softball).” After basic, the army sent her to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas for Advanced Individual Training (AIT). It was, Drake says, a defining moment marking “the beginning of a seven-year struggle with alcohol and drugs.”
It began when she arrived in Texas.
“I was off base and drinking the first night, and I never stopped. In July of 1995, 18 months after my enlistment, I requested and received an honorable discharge from the military.”
She was still only 18 years old.
After mustering out, Drake stayed in San Antonio for a couple of months with a friend, but didn’t work and mainly drank Jim Beam bourbon and smoked pot before picking up and moving back to Arkansas.
By then she was using and drinking daily, and when she got a call from a former army buddy in Louisiana, she went, intending to stay for a week. Instead, she spent “two of the worst years of my life.” During those years she added cocaine, meth, acid and the date rape drug, GHB, to her list of drugs.
Drake supported herself with bartending/waitressing, cleaning and laying carpets and a variety of other jobs. She usually paid for her drugs with sex, a common arrangement in the drug world.
Returning to Arkansas once again, she almost immediately picked up two DWI arrests which put her in county jails for short periods, but she still managed to hang on to the jazzy Pontiac Firebird that was part of her brand.
As her drug habit increasingly gripped her, Drake had also taken to moving in with complete strangers, most of them meth cooks. One, believing she was a drug enforcement plant, put a gun to her head and threatened to kill her, but “through God’s Grace,” she talked her way out of it.
There was a brief respite when Drake found her little sister in North Little Rock and moved in with her. Her sister helped her find an apartment and a job, and things began to look rosier.
“Then,” says Drake with a wry smile, “I noticed there were people like me living across the street—addicted people. I am addicted to addicted people, and soon, I was drinking every night, and eventually turned back to meth.”
In the middle of all the chaos, she got pregnant, but it didn’t slow down her use of drugs.
“I am deeply ashamed of this today,” she says, “and only share it in the hope that others don’t have to do what I’ve done. The fact is, I used drugs through my entire pregnancy.” And beyond.
When the birth pains came, the father dropped her off at UAMS Hospital and she was on her own.
Skyler’s birth, miraculously, was uneventful, but aside from being hyperactive, he bore no signs of Drake’s heavy use of drugs which continued after Skyler’s birth
“A few months into my son’s life,’ she says, “We were cooking meth in the same house as the baby and doing the dirty drug dishes with his bottles.”
When Skyler was about 10 months old, Drake’s biological mother showed up.
“She moved here,” Drake says, ”and we used drugs together. Then I started using the needle and only stopped because I realized that my son could end up like me in foster care and doomed to a life of unhappiness. But despite this moment of clarity, I still didn’t know how to break out of the hell I was in.
“Then my miracle happened. My adopted dad, now remarried, showed up when I was finally ready to change. He and my step mom, his new wife, found Arkansas CARES for me.”
About her sponsor, Drake says, “She taught me how to be happy, joyous, and free. Those are things I never thought possible. Once I had worked the steps, I had to start living them. I believed that others who had come before me found something that changed their lives and that was enough for me early on, but as time went on I had to believe in something more. That was God for me.
“My sponsor and I also brought meetings into Arkansas CARES North Little Rock campus over a two-year period ending in 2005, and it was an amazing experience.
“I can’t tell you how many women I have sponsored through the years and how many have stayed sober, but I can tell you that giving away what I have has kept me sober.
”About four years ago, I found my brother and talked to him about his own struggles with addictions and problems with the law, and just over a year ago I also made an amends to my little sister, who felt that I had abandoned her. It was painful but also healing for both of us. We cried together, laughed together, and grew closer together.”
As to her future, Drake says, “Every day I turn my thoughts and actions over to God and pray that I may help someone on this amazing journey called life.”
