CHRISTMAS FUND
Recovery centre helps addicts
The night Jason Carriere’s friend offered to help him check into an addiction recovery centre, he knew it was the turning point he’d been desperately looking for.
“I literally went downstairs and slept by the front door, so I’d be ready,” says Carriere, 42.
In the morning, he woke up and threw back a drink before heading out the door with her.
“That was at 7:35 a.m., July 5, 2017, the last drink of alcohol I’ve had.”
Divorced, Carriere had been living in a filthy, blacked-out room surrounded by booze bottles and living with people whose only purpose was getting drunk or high. “I got to the point where I didn’t want to live anymore. I just wanted to go to sleep and not wake up. I felt I needed help, but I didn’t know who to ask.”
The deadly overdose of one of his roommates finally convinced him to take his friend up on the offer of finding help. “That could have been me,” he remembers thinking.
Sixteen months into sobriety, Carriere’s life has taken a 180-degree turn from those dark days. After going through two previous rehab programs, he has been a resident of Oxford House since January 2018.
Oxford, with recovery homes in Calgary, Edmonton and Drumheller, takes a different approach from many other recovery centres. It has no stipulated end date, removing the pressure of leaving by a prescribed time. That appealed to Carriere, who feels he is not ready to be out on his own.
Getting clean, he says, was the most difficult thing he’s ever had to do. It took “five days of hell” to get off alcohol and cocaine. These days, he’s slimmer and eats healthier. He has structure and meaning, and he got his job back as a salesman for Tower Chrysler, after having been fired for drinking on the job.
“(At Oxford), I’m learning life skills; I’m cooking, keeping a budget. I’m going to work every day. I was top salesman in October,” said Carrier, who played pro hockey for several years in his 20s.
When he was an addict — in the depths of his addiction, he was consuming 40 ounces of vodka and 12 beers a day, plus cocaine — he says his relationships were “selfish.” All he could think about when he visited family was angling for his next drink or cocaine hit.
“In those days, I went from my bed to my car to the bar and to another bar. This was my life every single day.”
Oxford House has communitybased, peer-support recovery homes for both men and women. Residents share a house in a neighbourhood with three or four other recovering adults of the same gender. Residents hold each other accountable, and everyone in the program learns how to have difficult conversations and interact with people in more meaningful ways, says Carriere.
Residents hold weekly meetings to ensure everyone is doing their share of household chores, checking each other on annoying or unacceptable habits, such as sleeping on the couch, not picking up clothes or helping with the dishes. Support workers, all alumni of Oxford House, are on call 24/7 to help residents or make repairs.
Zero tolerance of drugs and alcohol is strictly enforced. If a resident is found using, the other housemates take a vote on whether to evict him, something Carriere and his roommates recently did.
Residents must have a sponsor and be in a 12-step recovery program. They are responsible for buying their own groceries and pay 70 per cent of the rent, the remainder subsidized by thirdparty donations to Oxford House.
“We really feel like we’re addressing one section of the addiction niche,” says Diana Schwenk, development co-ordinator for Oxford House.
Schwenk says the success of the program, established in 1996, comes from the clients living together and holding each other accountable.