Breaking the cycle of addiction
Erik Kenyon credits consistent, positive presence of officer with helping him escape life of drugs and prison
Sometimes Erik Kenyon feels like the world is conspiring against him.
“I feel like every time I tried to do something, it just wasn’t going to plan,” he said. “My mom wanted to name me Murphy, for Murphy’s law ... I just feel like I couldn’t catch a break.”
The 25-year-old Hamilton man has been through a lot in his life. Brain surgery, being shot and stabbed. He’s overdosed, seen friends shot and saved people from overdosing.
Kenyon is one of only a few who are court-ordered to be part of the social navigator program. Yet through it, he’s found support to keep going, even when he falls off track.
He sees Sgt. Pete Wiesner almost as a father figure. Weisner and Kenyon’s ex-girlfriend — who is still in his life — have stood by him for years, he said.
As a teen, Kenyon says he was on track to be drafted to the Ontario Hockey League, when he needed brain surgery. It turned out to be a lesion on his brain he says was caused by hits to the head on the ice. With a metal plate in his head, he couldn’t play hockey anymore.
The brain injury affects his memory. It is hard to keep dates straight. If he gets upset, he has trouble thinking before acting.
School fell apart, he started hanging out with a girl who offered him drugs. He thought it was cocaine, but it was heroin. He slept for two days and vomited.
“I woke up and I said I want more,” he said.
That was the beginning of his opiate addiction.
“It’s like you put an infinite string around you and the other end of it is ... like a winding wheel, pulling you in,” Kenyon said.
He had a job roofing, but stopped showing up. He left home. He destroyed relationships.
When he was 20, Kenyon was homeless. He would sleep in stairwells, but usually couch-surfed. He would hide his bag in the bushes behind the A&W on King Street West, near Hess Village. He would go out with friends at night at Hess. Often he’d meet a girl, who would bring him home.
“Not my proudest moment,” he says now.
Then he met his girlfriend. She helped him, setting him up in a hotel with clothes and food.
But by that point, he had drug
charges. He had been part of the social navigator program for about a year when Wiesner took over and things changed.
“I’ve got good news and bad news for you,” Kenyon recalls Wiesner telling him.
The bad news was he was going to jail, for 56 days. But he was going to get clean and, when he got out, Wiesner would be waiting. It was Kenyon’s first time at the Barton jail (Hamilton-Wentworth Detention Centre) and he was scared. But it was also a kick in the pants.
When he got out, Wiesner was there. He had an apartment lined up and a job at a local club.
For a time, things were good, but Kenyon started taking crystal meth as a way to stay up and feel alert at work.
He often felt tired and sluggish from his past opiate use, but on crystal meth, Kenyon convinced himself it made him feel normal. But it soon caught up with him. He started missing work.
Kenyon is a bike fanatic and would spend all day riding around the city. He ran with a dangerous crowd, carrying a zip gun — a homemade, single-shot gun made from a small pipe. This is how he got shot, fleeing from a fight in Hess Village. It fell and went off, and went through his leg.
He forgot the zip gun was in his pocket one day when he went to sign in for probation. He was arrested and charged.
He was looking at possible prison time, but when the gun wouldn’t fire during ballistics tests the charges were reduced. He spent about six months in Barton that time — he got out a little over a year ago.
During that stay, he got off methadone and decided: “I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to live like this.”
And when he got out, Wiesner was there for him again.
Wiesner said he could see Kenyon had matured.
Now, the 25-year-old is back in the apartment building he lived in before. And Wiesner is still there for him.
It’s the small things, like knowing his Tim Hortons order: chocolate milk, not coffee. Bringing groceries.
Just checking in.
Kenyon knows he needs to keep focused. But more important, he knows he’s not alone.