AN ADDICTION COUNSELOR'S PATH TO THE BRINK AND BACK

Wendy Croze started abusing heroin and alcohol in her teens. She used
the substances so much, in fact, that substance abuse came to define
her life -- first as a user and later as a counselor who helps others
kick the habit.

Croze grew up in a comfortable family in the Lansing area and she
hopes people understand that children of affluent families are just as
susceptible to drug abuse as anyone else.

"What is less well known, but it's pretty well documented, is more
middle class and upper middle class people early on get into heroin
than you would think," said Croze, the residential program director
for Addiction Treatment Services in Traverse City.

Croze plunged into drugs one year when her father, an upper level
manager who had a good year, was invited with his family for a Florida
vacation with his boss. It was the executive's daughter who introduced
then-15-year-old Crose to heroin in the early 1970s.

"And that was it," Croze said. "It was enjoyable for a very long
time." She loved the way heroin made her feel.

"It releases dopamine in your brain and dopamine is the feel good
chemical," she said.

Croze eventually got on a methadone program and shifted her addiction
to alcohol.

"I used heroin any opportunity I got," Croze said. "What that meant
for me is I pretty much stopped developing social skills. I tried
school and that didn't work for me."

ROCK BOTTOM

Croze finally reached her limit.

"I hit and stayed on it for quite a few years, really," Croze
said.

It became harder and harder to keep bar-tending jobs, she said,
because she liked to drink while she worked and she was prone to
disappear for a few days at a time.

"It just got harder and harder to maintain myself and I was blacking
out when I was drinking and I was acting poorly," she said.

She got pulled over a lot in the early 1980s, but cops would often
just let her go.

Finally Croze was pulled over, arrested and jailed.

"Alcohol is a depressant and opiates are a depressant and the fact
that you're ruining your life is a depressant ... and when my friend
came to bail me out of jail and she said, 'Oh, you're so crazy,' I
really felt like I was crazy."

That was the first part of the turning point that would eventually
lead to sobriety for Croze.

She attempted to drink herself into oblivion after she was released
but found she couldn't get drunk enough.

"For the next few days I could not drink or drug away the crazy,"
Croze said.

What she at first thought was craziness, though, she later realized
was caused by drugs and alcohol.

SUICIDE

Croze decided her only way out was to take her own
life.

She made a plan and she thought about it for a few days. She would
inject herself with ammonia.

Fate intervened, however.

She woke up one morning to a television. A rerun of the 1970s
television show Marcus Welby, M.D., about a kindly family doctor, was
on. The doctor was talking to a patient about getting treatment for
alcohol abuse.

Something clicked.

"I called a hotline," Croze said. "I don't even know what I said,
honestly, and they said you can come in two weeks and luckily they
asked if I was suicidal and luckily I said yes."

Croze was enrolled into a six-month to one-year stint at a treatment
center. Within several years, she was studying to become an addiction
counselor.

Since then Croze has worked at Eric Clapton's Crossroads Centre
Antigua and the Betty Ford Center and other places before she came to
Northern Michigan.