‘Worth it’: Young man graduates from drug court | Wyoming News

Jonathan Gallardo Gillette News Record Via Wyoming News Exchange

GILLETTE – On Wednesday afternoon, January 5, Josiah Brown celebrated 215 consecutive days of sobriety. It was the longest period of voluntary sobriety since he was a teenager.

“That’s the longest time I’ve been sober, wanting to be sober,” he said.

Brown, now 18, was 11 or 12 when he had his first drink. He was at a party with his family, and everyone was drinking, and he ended up drinking with them.

At 14, he started smoking weed. It became a habit, and a few years later he started trying other drugs.

In early 2020, he was placed on probation. He started experimenting with different drugs, and it all “went downhill from there”. It was then that he tried “almost anything”, from LSD to cocaine to heroin.

The worst of his addiction was to over-the-counter painkillers and pills.

“It was when I was at my lowest, of course,” he said.

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He used drugs to cope with the things life threw at him, as well as to deal with his depression and other mental issues, “to fill that feeling of emptiness inside of me.”

“A lot of it stemmed from abuse when I was younger and not wanting to have those feelings,” he said.

After getting a DUI, he appeared in circuit court before Judge Paul Phillips, who gave him a choice: he could spend six months in jail, or he could enter the juvenile and family drug court program. of Campbell County.

He went with the latter. He didn’t like the idea of ​​sitting in a jail cell for months without doing anything productive.

Brown graduated from the program last week after nearly 10 months in the program and less than two years from its low point.

The Juvenile and Family Drug Court is a voluntary program where participants must attend weekly court sessions, individual mental health counseling, and group and individual drug treatment. They are on intensive supervised probation and must undergo frequent and random testing.

There are immediate penalties for violations and incentives for successes.

The program didn’t click for Brown right away. Two months into the program, he relapsed.

“I wasn’t completely honest and open with everyone,” he said. “I had been booking for five days, and I didn’t appreciate it. I was like, I’d do anything as long as I never go back to jail.

The program’s probation officer, JR Bailey, admitted he had doubts about Brown when he started.

“We didn’t know you could make it on this program, and to be fair, neither did you,” Bailey said. “But we thought you deserved the opportunity, the chance to succeed.”

Bailey recalled that there was a time when the switch flipped for Brown, and “part of that was realizing you deserved better.”

“For too long you had convinced yourself that you didn’t deserve to be healthy, that you didn’t deserve to be successful, and all those things that happened one way or another were your destiny. “, did he declare.

As Brown watched the other participants progress through the program and achieve success, he began to believe he could follow in their footsteps.

“I’m a monkey see, a monkey do some kind of person, I realized they can graduate, why can’t I?” he said. “I learned from the experience of others what not to do and what to do.”

Bailey called Brown one of the kindest, most caring people he’s had on the show.

“You could have easily been the most angry person in the world, just being a jerk to everyone because the world has been a jerk to you so many times,” he said.

“By working on myself through this program, I learned how to deal with problems, deal with them, without using drugs or alcohol,” Brown said.

In addition to learning how to live a drug-free life, Brown also learned other skills, such as time management and money budgeting.

“I can pay my bills and be broke and I’ll be fine,” he said. “Being broke and still having to pay bills is the worst feeling ever.”

One of the hardest things for Brown was learning to be vulnerable and not be afraid to express her feelings.

“I would hate to show emotion, but now I’m fine with it,” he said. “I realized it was healthy. Just bottling it doesn’t work so well, from what I’ve learned.

He realized that it was vital for him to heal.

“You have to be vulnerable and open for the healing process to begin,” he said.

Brown will move to Spokane, Washington in February. He is looking forward to making new friends and building a new support team.

If there’s one piece of advice he could give himself when he started the program in March 2021, it’s that “there’s a light at the end of the tunnel”.

“Yeah, it looks like it’s gonna suck right now, you think you’re gonna stay here for a year, but you’re finally gonna get out, you’ll be a better person afterwards. It’s worth it.”


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