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In this article:
Jerry Ortega and members of his weekly Truth About Drugs class.
After over a decade of heroin addiction and horror, Jerry Ortega gets clean and finds purpose with the Truth About Drugs.
Jerry Ortega’s father left when he was 15, and he dove into gang life, drowning his sorrow in drugs. Pretty soon, he was selling meth. And a move to Utah led to a heroin habit and to consuming three grams a day.
“I turned into someone who has little regard for anyone or anything,” says Ortega, who spent more than a decade hooked on the hardest drugs known to man.
“It consumes you. Before it was over, I had allowed my ex-wife to begin selling herself as a prostitute,” he says. “We did whatever we had to, to get heroin.”
Ortega tells of pushing away his mother, once his best friend, because he was ashamed of what he had become—a man who stole until he ran out of places to rob, a man who was arrested, jailed and overdosed twice within three days of his release. A man who, Ortega realized, was either going to die using or end up in prison the rest of his life.
So when his child was taken away at birth by protective services, that was the end of it. He and his wife checked themselves into a rehab center. Today, seven months later, they have their baby back.
“Our son has never had to see us high,” Ortega says. “I don’t have to worry if we will have to sleep in an alley, or if we will have money for diapers that I take for heroin.”
Please click here to read more: http://www.drugfreeworld.org/newsletter/2017-08-truth-about-drugs-class.html
