Volunteers hit streets to reach addicts and preach sobriety
When the man asked Jamihla Young if he looked like a drug addict, Young wasn’t flustered or put off.
“I’m a recovering alcoholic,” she replied. “I used to struggle with a lot of binge drinking ... We’re not going to treat you any differently.”
Young and her friend Jessie Coe, a social worker, were on a mission as they walked down Sullivant Avenue on the West Side one day last week with lollipops in their backpacks and fliers in their hands.
The women talked to the man, and many others, about getting help to recover from addiction of all kinds.
Some of the people they encountered were receptive; others weren’t ready to hear what they had to say. But Young and Coe remained undeterred.
“The key to everything to me is just talking,” Young said. “People feel so much more comfortable when they realize ‘you’re just like me.’”
Young is a paramedic at OhioHealth Riverside Methodist Hospital, and she and Coe volunteer with Musicians and Artists Addiction Recovery Thru Salvation, called MAARS for short. The Christian network of former addicts seeks out people hoping to get clean and heal their mind, body and soul.
The group does it by canvassing neighborhoods, such as the one near Mount Carmel where Young and Coe talked with people recently. It also reaches people with video testimonies on its website — www.maarsalive.org — where people such as Young bare their souls and share the details of their often long, hard road to recovery.
For Young, 31, of the East Side, the journey to recovery was marked by God trying to reach her, she said, and her stubbornness initially to ignore all the signs and keep drinking. Young did so, she said, until she couldn’t deny God’s role for her any longer.
“I felt like I could have taken a gun and tried to shoot myself, and the bullet would have jammed because that wasn’t God’s plan,” said Young, about a time right after she left the scene of her second alcohol-related car accident with barely a scratch. “I heard a voice saying, ‘I’ll take you out of this life before I let you go back to that lifestyle.’”
The voice, which Young believes was that of God, was referring to the “party-like-arock-star” manner in which she was living: binge-drinking every night and weekend.
“When you’re the life of the party, everybody thinks you’re great,” Young said. “That’s one of the reasons MAARS was started.”
Though Young doesn’t have the music or art background that many in MAARS do, her friend Drew Collins, the director and founder of the group, thought she could help.
Collins, a 50-year-old rock musician, started MAARS with a fellow musician early last year at the behest of his wife, Grace.
“A lot of people in music and arts in general are looked up to by young people,” said Collins, noting the culture of alcohol and drugs inherent in the industry. “We try to show the side of how being addiction-free is cool.”
Collins, a pastor and a recovering addict himself, sees MAARS as a tool people can use to talk to someone nonthreatening through email, over the phone or in person. It’s not a recovery or counseling center, he said.
That approach can appeal to some, said Joe Gay, a clinical psychologist and retired executive director of Health Recovery Services, an Athens County-based addiction and mental-illness treatment agency.
“A lot of people flirt with recovery before they get into it,” Gay said. Looking at a website “would be much easier than going to a treatment center. It would be much easier than even going to a meeting,” he said.
At first, the idea of making a video testimony felt strange to Young. But Young said she realized, “If God could take me and bring me through all that, then how much could he do for everyone else?”
Other people realized Young’s new calling, even before she did, she said.
After she ran her car into a sign while going 90 mph and ended up wedged under the dashboard, the engine through her seat, without a scratch at 19 years old, people started saying there was a reason she survived. Yet Young brushed it off. “I didn’t think I had a problem,” she said.
She said she cut back on her drinking to be a better example to her younger brother but didn’t stop entirely. Around the same time, she made a new friend who asked her to church. Young said she wasn’t very interested, but slowly started building a personal relationship with God.
But after a hard day at work and a friend’s invitation to a party, she was back to binge-drinking a few weeks later and crashed her car again on the way home.
It took this second life-threatening crash from which she walked away to clarify her new purpose, she said. Shortly afterward, Young said she gave her life to God and was baptized.
That was six years ago. Today, Young helps others move toward recovery.