DON’T LOCK ME UP, HELP ME CLEAN UP
Fulbright scholar seeking rehab, not jail, for addicts
Scholar. Activist. Addict. Convict. Jonas Caballero had it all — then he had nothing.
Now inmate No. 18A3369, doing three years after pleading guilty to selling methamphetamine to an undercover cop to fund his raging addictions, Caballero doesn't blame anyone but himself — and doesn't want sympathy.
By telling his story, he hopes for a change in the system so that people like him — drug addicts with no criminal record — get the help they need instead of time behind bars, where his rehab has yet to start and which, he worries, might not sufficiently help him.
“Although I'm sober now, that's a result of my incarceration, rather than rehabilitation,” Caballero, 36, told the Daily News at Greene Correctional Facility upstate. “What's going to prevent me from relapsing when I get out?
“Right now, I feel great,” he added. “I feel wonderful being sober, but what I'm afraid of is that when I'm out I might have that craving again.”
Born in Pittsburgh, he worked as an emergency medical technician after graduating high school.
The Sept. 11 terror attacks, including the downing of Flight 93 in Shanksville, about 80 miles away from him, had a profound impact on Caballero's life.
He developed an interest in U.S. policy in the Middle East and considered joining the Air Force as a medic.
Instead, a speech at Carnegie Mellon University by Diana Buttu, a lawyer who was an adviser to the Palestinian Liberation Organization, inspired him to move to the West Bank.
There, he joined the International Solidarity Movement, a group that is sympathetic to Palestinians and opposes Israel's presence in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.
Caballero, who is Catholic, said he believes in human rights and that the group's members include both Palestinians and Jews. His experience was eye-opening. He said he witnessed more violence, including by the Israeli army against fellow Israelis, than any one person should see.
During one demonstration, Caballero, working as both a medic and a documentarian, was shot in the leg with a rubber bullet fired by an Israeli soldier. “They aimed at me,” he explained. When Caballero returned to the United States he was shell-shocked and depressed. He kept to himself and “never decompressed.”
Instead, he pushed forward with his goals, enrolling at the University of Pittsburgh, from which he graduated summa cum laude in 2010, then attending the University of Cambridge on a Fulbright scholarship and graduating with a master of philosophy in Middle Eastern studies.
In 2012, he moved to New York City, settled in Greenwich Village, but couldn't find the type of work — at the United Nations, at Amnesty International, at Human Rights Watch — to match his passions.
“I tried everywhere,” he said. “I thought going to New York, with Cambridge under my belt, Fulbright under my belt, work experience under my belt, life experience, was like an automatic in.” It wasn't. “My depression set in again,” he said. “I was still grappling with these nightmares and images and my experiences from Palestine.”
He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and adjustment disorder.
Worse, his drug use — which started with marijuana, angel dust and ecstasy in high school — escalated.
Cocaine and alcohol were now on his menu, as were, crystal meth and GHB, the latter two a byproduct of his late-night club-hopping.
“I could still function — like a functioning alcoholic,” he remembers. “I was a functioning addict.”
Eventually, to pay his rent and other bills — and to feed his own drug habit — he started dealing drugs, mostly to a small circle of friends and acquaintances, to supplement the small salary he made as a production assistant.
Slinging drugs was supposed to be temporary, he said, but Caballero, who suffers from various cardiac ailments, didn't stop until about a year later in 2015, when he lapsed into a coma because his heart stopped pumping enough blood for his body.
His drug use certainly hadn't helped, he admitted, but when he emerged from his coma three weeks later, he went right back to using — and dealing.
At some point, he broke from practice, he said, and sold to someone who was referred to him but whom he didn't know.
That person, an undercover NYPD cop, bought narcotics from Caballero six times at his W. 14th St. apartment. When the handcuffs clicked on his wrists, Caballero realized he had hit rock bottom.
He and his lawyer argued in vain for a sentence of treatment over prison, though the prosecutor, Caballero said, wondered somewhat sympathetically how a Fulbright scholar wound up falling so far.
Fellow inmates tell Caballero the same thing.
To Caballero, it's clear: addiction doesn't discriminate, no matter your upbringing, education or job.
And, no, he stressed, he wasn't looking for special consideration because of his background.
In fact, while he believes prison time was the wrong sentence for him, he also feels that if being in a coma didn't force him to change then maybe getting arrested was what he needed.
“I wasn't going to stop,” he said. “I don't blame the NYPD. I don't blame the undercover.
“I was selling drugs and got caught.”