AN EARLY START ON ADDICTION

BREWTON -- Maybe it was the beer he used to sneak from his father's cooler
on fishing trips. Maybe it was the failing grades in junior high.

Whatever the cause, 42-year-old Richard Allen Faulkner's life was on a
downward slide by the time he was in his early teens.

"It started with me drinking, then smoking pot," Faulkner said in the
spring, just after starting in Escambia County's Drug Court.

Drug courts are a fast-growing type of community-based alternative
sentencing. They allow people whose addictions led them into nonviolent
offenses to plead guilty, then follow closely supervised drug treatment for
a year.

Faulkner was keeping busy in late May, just after officials accepted him
into the program. He talked to the Register in his mother's back yard as he
worked around the house, tinkering on his nephew's car.

"My dad was a hunter and he liked beer. We would ride the dirt roads.
That's where he taught me to drive. Sometimes, I would sneak a beer from
his cooler. I was 13 when I started drinking. I was 14 when I started
smoking pot."

He got as far as the eighth grade, then dropped out.

His dad got him a job working at a local car dealership, oiling cars,
greasing chassis, spraying undercoats, doing minor mechanic jobs. Just as
he was about to turn 18, an oil field crew came through looking for
workers. The money was good, so he took the job and left town. He never
imagined how that decision would cost him, he said.

With extra money in his pocket and no friends or family nearby, Faulkner
started doing harder drugs.

"I did cocaine, experimented with acid, PCP and heroin," Faulkner said,
looking at the ground for a second, nervous with an earnest expression.

"I never cared much about those highs, but the cocaine stuck with me a
little bit. I started smoking crack when I was 29 or 30. It really drug my
life down."

Faulkner married when he was 22. Eleven years later, he and his wife
divorced. They never had children. Faulkner said he drank heavily, stayed
out all night, but could straighten himself out for about six months at a
time. But things got worse. Soon, he could stay sober for only a couple of
months.

"Then I would go off the deep end again. I was an industrial electrician,
and I was good at it. They liked my work, but they couldn't count on me
being there when I was drinking and on crack. I'd spend $300 or $400 on
crack in a weekend. I was bringing home $800 a week, but I'd spend just
about all of it on crack in a few days.

"My wife left me. We tried to get back together three times. She came home
for Christmas in 1996 or 1997, but left again. I haven't seen her since."

He pulled out an oil rag and wiped a wrench, then recalled the trouble
crack brought to his family when it had a choke hold on him.

"I sold everything I ever owned. I put my family through a lot of pain and
agony. I got to where I couldn't do my work properly. I got fired."

Faulkner's money ran out. He lost his pickup the same week he got fired. He
moved in with his mother. With no job, little education and nothing left to
try, he agreed to get into a drug rehabilitation program.

"One night, I was just sitting around, waiting to go into rehab," Faulkner
said. "I went and got my mother's purse. I took $300. I went out and did
all the money in crack in one hour. It ain't the thing to do. My mother
asked me about it, and I admitted it. She called the police. It hurt her to
turn me in and put me in jail -- but it was the best thing for me."

That was March 25. Faulkner went straight from six weeks in jail into the
intensive therapy and monitoring of Drug Court. In the first few months of
drug treatment, Faulkner, who stands nearly 6 feet tall, went from a gaunt
140 pounds to 180 pounds. His physical condition improved dramatically. His
mother went from believing her son would never recover to hoping it can
happen, she said.

"My son lost his family, all his money, his job. I want his story told so
others can learn," said Pat Faulkner. "I wouldn't wish this on any parent."

She keeps a close eye on her son, she said, and months after he started in
the program, she is beginning to believe it will save his life. When he had
a relapse -- most recovering addicts do -- she didn't give up.

"I thought, 'not again' -- but we had a long talk," she said. "I know
addiction is hard on anyone. I have a tough time with coffee and food
myself, but Allen has low self-esteem. We're working on that. He left home
so young, at 17 or 18 to work the oil rigs. I was dumb to drugs and crack
cocaine. I have four children, and he's the only one who took that up. He
just left home so young. This program is helping him fight his addiction.
He has to win."

For Faulkner, the battles sneak up when problems or emotional challenges arise.

"Sometimes, you think you have a hold on it, then it comes back into your
mind," he said. "Sometimes, I still wake up at night thinking of it. I have
to find something to do. In the daytime, I'm at meetings, going to class
three times a week, looking for work. It's the only way I can make it."

In the first months of the yearlong program, Faulkner did odd jobs for his
family to earn money to pay for Drug Court.

"I get to feeling down sometimes," he said in May. "I'll be glad when I can
go back to work, when I can trust myself with money and how I'll spend it.
I want people who are struggling to know they can make it. I know I can
make it. I've been in car wrecks, had guns held to my head -- all over
drugs and alcohol. It's been four months since I used. It takes a lot of
work, but it's worth working for."

After months in intensive treatment, Faulkner seemed to be on track, but
suddenly had a relapse in July. He had gone to visit a friend in the
hospital -- a friend who had terminal cancer.

"I was down and out," Faulkner said. "My friend passed away from cancer,
and it took me back to losing my father with cancer a while back, in 2000.
I shouldn't have let it pull me down."

Faulkner's mother called police when she saw him wired. He spent the
weekend in jail and had to start over in Drug Court. Relapses are an
expected part of the process for recovering addicts, counselors said. Jail
time gives people in treatment a chance to learn, time to distance
themselves from the drug's effects.

"It gave me time to think about what I was doing," Faulkner said. "There is
no need to do foolish things. My counselor gave me extra things to do, and
I can call if I need help."

Two weeks later, Faulkner found a temporary construction job remodeling
rental houses. It could lead to permanent employment, he told the judge. He
did well enough in therapy that he moved into Phase II of the program in
mid-September, meaning a little less supervision and more responsibility
managing his life. Maybe it was too soon for him.

About two weeks after advancing, he tested positive for cocaine. He's been
struggling to get straightened out again ever since. Thursday, he was in
the county jail, just starting up to a month's sentence for using and lying
to the judge about it. The hardest part, he said, was dealing with the
shame and embarrassment of another failure in a long string of them.

"It's pretty rough right now," Faulkner said, sitting in an orange jumpsuit
and flipflops at a table in the jail's visitation room. "It's like my mind
has totally gone away from me. There are a hundred thousand things going
through my mind and I can't focus, I can't concentrate and I can't control it."

Faulkner, jittery with several days' growth of stubble glinting on his
chin, says crack has been a "nightmare" for him, the only drug he has not
been able to quit.

"Sometimes I get depressed, thinking of all I have been through, losing my
wife, my job, my new truck," he said. "Then sometimes I can taste and smell
crack -- even though I may not have used in weeks. It gets stronger every
time you use it -- the pull it has on you."

He said he dreads looking at the judge and others in the treatment program,
dreads talking to his family.

"I have let them all down so many times," he said. "I'm a lost person. It's
like I went hunting and never came back out of the woods. I didn't want to
admit I used right there in front of everybody. I didn't want to be there
admitting I have failed again just like I have all these years. In my head
I can hear people saying, 'See what you've done again? We knew you couldn't
make it.' I have let so many people down."

He said it feels like his life is a complicated test, and he has none of
the answers. His mind races from one thought to the next, never quite
answering one question before it leaps ahead, or back. Smoking crack quiets
all that -- but only for a few minutes.

"I know I put myself there," Faulkner said. "I'm not blaming anyone. I just
thought I could handle it -- keep my job, do crack -- and my mama would
never know. But it all came down. I haven't had a real peaceful night of
sleep in many years. I wish I could figure my brain out. It's hard to know
what sober is when you've been doing drugs as long as I have. It's all
catching up with me now.

"If I could tell people one thing," he said, "it would be to never do
crack. It will never let you go."