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Park Rapids Enterprise, Robin Fish, 1.9.24
Students at the Park Rapids Alternative Learning Center on Thursday, Dec. 21, heard messages about the difficulty and possibility of recovering from addiction from people who would know.
Patricia Bittner with the Leech Lake Tribal Police and Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe drug counselors Curtis Jackson and Toddie Wilson told their stories during the first monthly installment of the new Cultivate Program, presented by YESS.
Equipping kids
Kori Nelson is the founder and executive director of Youth Emergency Shelter and Supports (YESS), established in April 2023. The Park Rapids-based organization’s aim is to open a youth shelter in Hubbard County to address the issue of youth homelessness.
During the summer of 2023, Nelson said, she reached out ALC director Lisa Coborn and discussed holding focus groups with her students. They held one during the summer and another in the fall.
“That’s how the Cultivate Program came about,” she said, “by learning what the students want and what they’re needing.”
Nelson described the Cultivate Program’s mission as “giving the students the resources they need to be thriving community members.”
Specifically, she said, these resources will help them if they come they become homeless or find themselves at risk of being homeless.
For example, in January, the students are going to Vacationaire, where they will cook and serve food and wash dishes. “So, they’re getting some hands-on job skills,” said Nelson. “So, if they’re looking at potentially being homeless, you know, ‘Hey, I did this for a class one day, and I really liked serving, or I really liked cooking’ – that comes in handy when you’re talking to employers.
“It’s really about providing them the necessary tools to succeed.”
Speaking from experience
At the Cultivate Program’s inaugural session, Bittner talked about current drug trends, signs of use and overdose, how to use Narcan to rescue someone who is overdosing – and also that there is hope, and that people can recover and live a better life.
“A lot of times, kids have parents who are drug users, and they think it’s hopeless,” she said. “The three of us helped them to see that people can change if they really want to, and how to seek help, where to seek help.”
Bittner has been making school presentations for about 12 years, emphasizing how easy it is to get addicted, how hard it is to get off drugs, and how and where to get help.
Regarding drug trends, Bittner said there’s a lot of fentanyl floating around. “We are seeing counterfeit oxy(codone) and Percocet M-Box 30 pills,” he said. “They’re sold on the street as oxys and percs, but they’re really a fentanyl pill.
“Any drug dealer can purchase a pill press and make drugs, and people who are addicted to opiates will go on the street and ask to buy an oxy or a Percocet, and they end up buying a pure fentanyl pill and end up overdosing and dying.”
She told a similar story about Xanax, an anxiety medication that is widely abused.
Asked which way the battle is going in the area between sobriety and addiction, Bittner said, “Addiction is way higher than sobriety. We have more people addicted than we have people who are sober.”
And that’s not just on the reservation, she said; it’s everywhere.
What makes it sad and hard, Bittner said, is the difficulty of going through withdrawal from opioids and opiates.
“They don’t want to go through the withdrawals, because they’re so sick that they just say, ‘The hell with it. I’m going to get high,’” she said. “But once they get past that sickness and are able to at least feel a little bit better and maintain, then there’s some hope for them.”
‘Don’t give up’
Meantime, Jackson and Wilson shared their journey of recovery from opioids and methamphetamine, respectively.
Wilson is a youth outpatient program manager and counselor with the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe. He shared what he went through due to methamphetamine addiction – “how I got sober, how hard it is, and how addictive the drug is, and the things you lose with addiction,” he said.
Then he moved onto his success story. Wilson has been sober 18 years and has been counseling adolescents for 17 years.
“Some people have strong wills and do it on their own,” he said. “I had to actually ask for help. I ended up spending six months in a treatment center, inpatient, and then I did six months in a halfway house. It was a hard journey.”
Wilson said it helped to bring three different perspectives on that journey to the students in Park Rapids. “I think it’s great that we can go, educate people.”
Main points he wanted to drive home included, “Don’t give up. Don’t quit trying.”
Wellness Court
“I talked about my struggles with opiate use, my struggles with depression,” said Jackson. “I talked about my homelessness and my ongoing stays with (the Itasca County jail). One of the biggest resources that helped me change my life was Wellness Court in Itasca County.”
Wellness Court is a joint-jurisdictional court between Itasca County and the tribal nation, providing resources to help people with substance use disorder and mental health issues. There are similar specialty courts in Cass, Beltrami, Koochiching, Clay and Becker counties, under different names such as DUI court, substance abuse court and drug court.
Jackson described it as an 18-month program at minimum. It took him 22 months, he said, but it was the first time he never had any sanctions on his probation.
“It all depends on your willingness to move forward in the program,” he said, calling it an intense program. “My weeks were very busy with probation officer meetings, court appearances. Then I had color code that I had to call, and treatment programming that I had to do.”
Besides weekly and later monthly court dates, he also had to pay off all his fines and do 40 hours of volunteer work. But he added, “It did save my life, ultimately.”
Bittner sits on three Wellness Court teams – including a hybrid drug and DUI court in Beltrami and Itasca counties – and said they have a high success rate.
“Anyone who signs up for the program, does what they’re supposed to do, stays compliant with the program, they do really well and it’s a good thing,” she said. “It’s a good way for them to change their life.”
‘Recovery is possible’
Jackson has also served as a counselor with the Leech Lake Band, moving from the adolescent unit to the men’s inpatient program in 2020.
“I basically told my story about how I changed my life around from a kid living in poverty, growing up on the reservation and having limited resources at the beginning,” he said. “But then I found my passion and my purpose, where I wanted to work in this field to help other individuals that struggle with substance use disorder and mental health.”
Jackson called educating teenagers a big step toward stopping the cycle. The key, he said, is letting young people know about the effects long-term use can have on someone’s life, and that there are people out there who are willing to help.
He shared how he fought for custody of his five kids. “I basically told them that anything you want to do in life is achievable. It depends on the amount of work you want to put in.
“I’ve currently had my kids for seven years as a single father,” he said, adding that he’ll mark eight years clean and sober on Feb. 25.
Jackson believes addiction plagues every family in one way or another. “My saying has always been, addiction is a 24-hour disease and recovery is a 24-hour solution,” he said. “Recovery is possible, and living a better life is possible for anybody.”
Attention grabbed
Nelson said a couple of the ALC students talked to her after the session and said they related to Wilson’s and Jackson’s stories.
“They really liked them, and they felt that there is light at the end of the tunnel,” said Nelson. She added that both Coborn and ALC paraprofessional Karen Branstrom told her it was the hardest they’d ever seen their students listen to people who came in to talk.
“Normally, you can tell they’re wandering off, and their brains are somewhere else,” said Nelson, “but the kids were so invested in the conversation. They didn’t ask a lot of questions, but afterwards, a lot of the kids came up and talked to Toddie and Curtis, and they talked to Patty. That was cool to watch.”
Jackson recalled seeing the students respond emotionally to their stories.
“It really resonated with them,” he said. “Some of the kids we spoke to had parents that were going through similar things to what Todd and I went through. They were really thankful and grateful that we were so open.”
“They were really listening,” Wilson agreed. “A couple of them came up and sat closer. One of the kids said his mom was using, and he recognized the stuff I was talking about.”
“The kids were very responsive,” said Bittner. “They were awesome, and they were interested in what we had to say. They were listening to what we had to say, and they heard what we had to say.”
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