It wasn’t easy, but this N.L. couple made it out of addiction alive

If we never left St. John's, we'd still be on drugs. Or dead. We've been through everything together. Rehabs. Rehabs. Jail. Yeah, prison. Homelessness. Homelessness. Living in a Jeep. Everything. We've been through everything together. We were both on the Muskrat Falls Project in 2018. I was working on the cranes as a mobile crane apprentice. And Mark was a signalman, so basically we worked together hand in hand, and we both dabbled and dabbled in cocaine and beating the trades and stuff and having to pass drug tests for work. Marijuana is like something, you can't smoke weed, even though it's legal now, you can't smoke weed because you need to pass the drug test. And weed is out of your system in 30 days, as opposed to cocaine, which is... three days so a lot of trades people do use coke for that reason because drug tests wise and stuff. After Muskrat Falls me and Mark both went to rehab. We tried to go to the same rehab but they knew Mark from previous and we went to a private funded rehab Thank you so much for having me. because it's impossible to get into a government-funded rehab. You're on the waiting list for three to six months. That time we got sober for just over a year. And then COVID hit. A friend said, why don't you do this coke, Sarah? And after that hit of coke, full-blown relapse. And that relapse, that priority lasted from 2019 up until 2024. We were living $20 to $20, pretty much. Next fix to the next fix. So we ended up homeless after we relapsed. With drugs, your family's cut you off because you're asking for too much money. You're not working because of your drug problems, so then you start racking up charges with stealing. I first got incarcerated during COVID, and I thought it was the end of the world. The longest time that I've ever done, I've done a 15-month sentence, which would end up being, I served 11 straight. How long was it for you? Six months was the longest straight. I did four separate incarcerations. It's called correctional institutions. There's no correcting there. When you get released from jail, if you don't have somewhere to go afterwards, they put you into a shelter. And there's not usually, you don't have options. It's one place, they'll tell you you gotta go there. If you don't like it, tough luck. I've been to almost every shelter in St. John's. Safe Haven, Gathering Place, Naomi Center, that was probably one of the best ones. Wiseman Center. Wiseman Center is okay too. You're fed meals a day. They keep you alive, basically, but it's misery, and there's no, if you want to go to rehab, you can't go to rehab because there's a waiting list, and then there's a process of getting a doctor that's going to refer you and stuff like that. It's not easily accessible. The drug use is that bad that Mark found something on the ground there, and he thought it was cocaine. He's an addict, so obviously he's going to do it. Anyway. He done it, and it wasn't cocaine, it was fentanyl. They had to shock his heart back, to bring him back. I was blue. There wasn't a pulse, there wasn't a breath. I remember when I woke up, my eyes waking up, I couldn't remember, I couldn't talk because they had the tube out of my throat. Was this a wake-up call? That was a wake-up call then, yeah. We got sober in Safe Haven for about a month. Every time an ambulance would go by or show up there, I would run and go take off running to make sure America's in pain. Very traumatic. And that was a nightly occurrence there. So I called my mother one night and I told her I was screeching and told her that if she didn't get us out of St. John's, we'd be dead. She'd be burying us. And that's the truth of it all. I have a list, I have a list of people's names that I have lost that I've known in the last decade who have lost and died to drugs and it's about three or four pages long and counting and it's, there's this epidemic in Newfoundland and Labrador when it comes down to drugs and the government is doing nothing for it, nothing about it, nothing because we couldn't get into rehabs or we couldn't even get away from a drug filled shelter. Like we were told if we don't stay there we're on the streets. So people that want to change, there's no help for them. Being a drug addict, like, people, places, and things are a big thing. So I could walk down the street here and there's nobody saying, hey, Sarah, I want to go do a hit. There's no temptation here, so it was that much more easier for us to start over. It's nobody's dream to be a drug addict. Sitting on the side of the gathering place with no money to your name, all messed up and stuff. Nobody wants to live like that, but a lot of people. I think they do it to escape the problems that they have. There is a way out. There's light at the end of that tunnel. It's not going to be easy, but it's going to be worth it.