Pubdate: Tue, 27 Feb 2007 Source: Santa Barbara News-Press (CA) Copyright: 2007 Santa Barbara News-Press Contact: http://www.newspress.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/393 Author: Bethany Hopkins, News-Press Staff Writer METH LESSONS From the outside, 1999 looked like a great year for then-sociology professor Wayne Martin Mellinger. He was making $85,000 a year. He had secured three different teaching jobs. He had just bought a house in Ventura. But inside, Dr. Mellinger had a secret: At night, he was getting high on methamphetamine. "No one knew I was getting high," he said. "I led a double life." That secret life lead to the loss of his jobs, his house and eventually to his arrest in 2005 for dealing meth. "It was a real wake-up call," he said. "I knew I needed to change my life." Today, Dr. Mellinger, now 48, has done just that. On Feb. 10, he graduated from the Santa Barbara Rescue Mission's year-long residential recovery program. Two weeks ago, he started working at New Beginnings as a homeless outreach case worker, and last week, he was offered a job teaching a class at Antioch University in Santa Barbara. Turning his life around didn't come easy. The story of Dr. Mellinger's descent into addiction and his subsequent journey of recovery is one that he said he hopes to share with others - -- through teaching, drug counseling, and through the sociological memoir he is writing about his experience. He may not fit the stereotype of a recovering drug addict but he said he hopes what he's learned from his experience can help teach others. Dr. Mellinger grew up in Massachusetts in a family with no drug or alcohol problems. He graduated from University of Massachusetts at Amherst with a bachelor's degree in business, although he said that part of him wished that he could pursue a less practical career in the arts. He moved to San Francisco in 1981, to become a California resident and pursue graduate work in sociology. "Sociology is about understanding the world and what's wrong with it, educating people and hoping to change it," he said -- it fit him better than business did. In 1983, he moved to Santa Barbara to pursue his doctorate in sociology at UCSB. Dr. Mellinger had begun to experiment with drugs such as mushrooms and acid for the first time in San Francisco. By the time he received his doctorate in 1990, he was smoking only marijuana, but heavily. "Getting stoned every day seemed like a normal part of my life," he explained. His next two years were spent as a visiting professor at UC Santa Cruz, but when that job was followed by a year and a half of unemployment, his alcohol use increased. By 1995, however, things were looking up again: back in Santa Barbara, Dr. Mellinger had landed teaching jobs at the Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara and Ventura College. "Everything is looking great," he said. But things started to fall apart in 1999, when his drug use increased. After his long term relationship of 19 years came to a bad end, Dr. Mellinger began to use crack cocaine heavily. He started losing his jobs. He entered rehab programs three times that year -- but after only a week of treatment, each time, he would go back to using. "I wanted to get clean so badly, but I couldn't," he said. Instead, he switched to using methamphetamine, a stimulant often synthesized from over-the-counter medicines that has garnered attention in recent years due to its increasing popularity. Dr. Mellinger began dealing meth in 2003 to support his own habit. As he describes it, he didn't fit the media image of the meth addict -- he wasn't a dope fiend like those portrayed in the government propaganda film "Tell Your Children," (1936) commonly known as "Reefer Madness." He wasn't shooting people or feeling bugs crawl under his skin. A "functional user," as he calls it, he didn't notice what was happening to him. "You don't wake up and think, 'Oh, I'm going to become a methamphetamine dealer, using everyday non-stop.' You slowly drift over time, maybe each day taking one baby step, but getting deeper and deeper into a world that you can't believe you're in." His double life came to an end on April 23, 2005, when he was arrested for selling methamphetamine. He recalls taking off on his bicycle while police chased him on foot through Ventura's Mission Park. He was caught when the squad cars were able to block him from turning down a street. "The feelings I felt at that moment were the most horrible feelings I'd ever had in my life," he recalled. "I knew that I had ruined my whole life." In June 2005, six weeks after that arrest, Dr. Mellinger came to back to Santa Barbara, hoping to finally rid himself of drugs and start a new life. "I knew that there was a good recovery community here," he said. But there was also a problem: "I had no insurance, I was broke, had lost my job. I needed free treatment and it's hard to find." However, he was able to find resources to help him on his way. He detoxed at Project Recovery at Casa Esperanza, then stayed at Salvation Army's Hospitality House. Finally, he entered the Rescue Mission's program in July 2005. It was at the the Rescue Mission, a state-certified spiritual-based recovery program, that Dr. Mellinger was able to find the treatment he needed -- even though he couldn't pay. " I'm really thankful for that," he said. He stayed sober, started to work through his personal issues with therapy, and though he did not share in the beliefs of the Christian-based organization, he found his own path to faith and joined the Unitarian Society. "They gave me room to find my own spirituality," he said of the mission. "Steve Farugie was very understanding -- he was my moral support, he's been a mentor for me through the whole process." Mr. Farugie, then director of the men's program, watched Dr. Mellinger as he progressed. "He came in really, really broken ... but he was very open to change," Mr. Farugie said. "He's a sharp guy, but sometimes that could be difficult -- when you're in your head too much in recovery, it can be a hard place. So we had to move things from his head to his heart." Dr. Mellinger wasn't able to complete the recovery program all at once though. After putting off his court date for a year, he was sentenced to eight months in Ventura County Jail in April 2006. But while he was in jail, another person from the Rescue Mission offered emotional support -- Leni Fe Bland, one of the mission's benefactors. "She's a person who doesn't just write a check -- she really cares," Dr. Mellinger said of Ms. Fe Bland, who regularly comes to the mission to meet new people in the program and offers to take them to the theater, the ballet or the symphony. She called him during his jail time to let him know she cared about him. "He's really quite a hero in my mind," Ms. Fe Bland said of Dr. Mellinger. "He has really had to fight very hard against addiction, and he seems to have really won though ... I'm proud to be friends with him." Dr. Mellinger came back to the Rescue Mission after serving six month of his sentence. Now that he has finished the recovery program, Dr. Mellinger is focusing his energy on two of his passions. He has come back to his desire to do art, painting portraits of people he has met in recovery as well as locations around town. And he is using his sociological background to write a book, tentatively titled "Dancing with Dinoysus," where he discusses his own experiences in the context of the history of drug use and abuse. "I think that you can't understand drug use in our culture unless you compare it with other cultures and look at it through human history . I'm trying to understand where these urges come from. I'm trying to figure out: 'Why do people do drugs?' '' This year, he's also taking those questions back to the classroom, enrolling in classes in Santa Barbara City College's Alcohol and Drug Counseling program. He expects to earn a post professional award at the semester's end. "I want to teach drug and alcohol studies," he explained. "I love teaching. I had a great life before. I want my life back." Dr. Mellinger said he hopes to get others to rethink their ideas about what addiction and recovery can look like. "I think people have this image that meth is so powerful that there's no way to escape that life," he said. "Recovery is possible. It's not easy and it doesn't happen most of the time -- many people fall down again and again. But it is possible." - --- MAP posted-by: Steve Heath