Coroner identifies June 11 shooting victims on State Road

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RIP.... just sad....FORCED TO CHANGE: Program helping mother fight addiction

BY JAMES BURGER Californian staff writer jburger@bakersfield.com Nov 23, 2013 0

Substance abuse counselor Graciela Salazar, right, works with Melissa McCutcheon in the Kern County Hispanic Commission office.

Casey Christie / The Californian Substance abuse counselor Graciela Salazar talks with Melissa McCutcheon at the Kern County Hispanic Commission about recovery.

Casey Christie / The Californian Melissa McCutcheon remembers the first time she realized she could stay clean.

She'd gotten out of jail late this past summer after her final drug violation in July, wearing an electronic monitor strapped to her ankle, She was staying in a sober living home.

Every day she visited the Kern County Hispanic Commission, an outpatient drug treatment program teaching Matrix programs as part of Kern County's new push to keep repeat drug offenders like McCutcheon out of jail.

She was scared to be free, nervous to be walking down the street from her house to the bus stop to catch a GET ride downtown to her meeting.

A man in a wheelchair rolled up behind her.

"He said, 'You want a smoke?'" McCutcheon recently recalled.

Marijuana was her first drug, a staple in her stable of addictions since third grade.

"I said, 'I'm in a sober living home. I don't use drugs anymore,'" McCutcheon said.

The man accepted the response and rolled past her. Then he tossed another land mine over his shoulder.

"So I guess you don't want any of this vodka and gatorade," he said.

"I was like, 'Really? Really?'" McCutcheon said.

Vodka was another old, familiar friend.

She turned down the drink, too. And then the shock hit.

She'd done it.

OLD PLACES

By the time McCutcheon, 35, hit rock bottom, no amount of meth could get her high.

So she started mixing the drug with heroin. She knew what that would do to her.

"I remember sitting in a hotel room, crying because I didn't want to do this shot of dope," McCutcheon said.

But she couldn't see a way out of her life. She did the shot any way.

After two years of running, after skipping out on probation following a 2011 jail stint for felony drug possession, she turned herself in this past April.

Her ex-husband had died and her teenage son, Dylan, needed her, McCutcheon said.

She went to jail and, when she was released in March, was sent to treatment at the Kern County Hispanic Commission.

She lasted two weeks.

"Every class I came high," she said.

McCutcheon was re-arrested in July and sent back to Lerdo Jail.

She remembers thinking, "If I don't stop, I'm going to go back out there and I'll probably be dead."

A couple of other inmates started her on the right road.

"I was drug to church by two of the girls that were in my barracks," McCutcheon said. "I went to church. I got saved."

She did her 30-day sentence, asked to stay a few more days so she could get out on an ankle monitor -- which means her treatment is paid for -- and walked out of the jail and right in a county Matrix treatment program.

She's been sober since.

ROUND TWO

Sitting in Kern County Hispanic Commission counselor Graciela Salazar's office in the plain home on 20th Street in downtown Bakersfield, McCutcheon laughs about being sent back to the same treatment program she'd flunked out of.

"I told them, 'Oh, no! You can't send me back there,'" McCutcheon said. "They hate me there."

Jon Casida, executive director of the program, said her story is painfully common.

"Long gone is the idea that it takes one trip to rehab," Casida said.

Both he and Salazar, recovering addicts themselves, lived that pattern.

Casida didn't want to get clean. But he didn't want to go back to prison.

"I went into a six-month program. I took six months to see things and move to change," he said.

Often, time is a critical ingredient for success,

In his experience, once a client makes it past 30 days of treatment, 75 percent will complete the whole six months.

"You take away the drug and you have to figure out what the real problem is," Salazar said.

But even failure is progress, Casida said.

"Even if they don't make it, something has been planted deep in your soul," he said.

The second time around, McCutcheon was ready to succeed.

Staying clean, a few fragile months into sobriety, is work for McCutcheon.

But she enjoys good, honest fatigue that tells her her body is working -- even if it means she falls asleep on the bus ride to treatment sometimes.

She's learned not to beat herself up, to schedule her days so she doesn't have dangerous down time, avoid the people and places that caused her problems in the past and be protective of her success.

"Nothing is more important than my recovery," she said.

But there is someone she hopes she can prove herself to -- the middle school-aged son who lives with her brother and his wife.

She wants to be his mother again, but he's made it clear she has to prove she's clean.

"He's tired of hearing it. He wants to see it," she said.

So she does her meetings, ponders a career helping other addicts and rides the bus downtown every day to get her Matrix counseling in group and one-on-one sessions.

"No matter how I feel, I get up, suit up and show up," she said.