By Michael O. Allen, Record Staff Writer | Wednesday, October 23, 1991
The Record (New Jersey) | 6 Star | NEWS | Page B01
They met informally after a talk on drug addiction given by two Bergen County Jail inmates. A handful of Fair Lawn High School students walked onto the stage to meet the prisoners, to ask a question, or make a statement.
One of the students, a 17-year-old senior, felt a special kinship with the pair: He is a recovering cocaine addict.
“It’s true everything they said,” the student said. “You can go to alcohol, and it will bring you right back to drugs.”
The cycle had just been vividly recounted for him and about 270 other Fair Lawn seniors at a forum Tuesday morning in the school auditorium. The program is being offered this month in county schools by the Sheriff’s Department’s “Hit Team.”
The two inmates Michael, 48, and Greg, 28 told of lives disrupted because of addictions, beginning with alcohol and escalating to illegal drugs.
“If you play the game of drugs, you are going to end up one of three ways: addicted, in jail, or dead,” said Michael, who is serving a five-year sentence for possession of cocaine.
Greg said his descent began in the eighth grade, when he tried to use alcohol to mask the pain of mental, physical, and sexual abuse by his father. It soon escalated to nocturnal walks in New York City, looking for crack.
“You have to understand that these little six-packs and cases of beer you drink at victory parties . . . I don’t know, does it really make the music sound all that better? I don’t think so,” Greg said.
“It just doesn’t happen overnight. It started at a young age. It started with drinking. It started as fun. All my friends did it. So I did it, too.”
Michael said he was from Washington and once had a well-paying job and a family. But his addiction put him in the wrong place at the wrong time in a car when police busted the driver with a kilo of cocaine.
Joelynn Lisa, 17, said the two men’s stories were powerful. “It makes you think twice about doing drugs,” she said.
The Hit Team is two inmates, a corrections officer, a deputy sheriff, and an undersheriff or Sheriff Jack Terhune.
Student at Fair Lawn High School fires a pistol in class.
Keywords: FAIR LAWN; SCHOOL; STUDENT; MEETING; BERGEN COUNTY; PRISON; DRUG; ABUSE
Caption: COLOR PHOTO – BOB BRUSH / THE RECORD – Fair Lawn High School seniors listening to Bergen County Jail inmates Greg and Michael tell the stories of their addictions.
ID: 17358824 | Copyright © 1991, The Record (New Jersey)
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