About Me
download my professional resume
I am a Bay Area native, who left home at 16 and began my journey as an SF street kid. In 2000 I began working at a non-profit called Youth Industry, which employed homeless kids. I have remained working with individuals in this field to overcome the challenges of surviving without stable housing,(or housing at all), chaotic drug use, trauma, negotiating the criminal justice system, etc. I was a published journalist by my late teens and focused my articles on various social issues I saw affecting myself, my peers, and the city around me. I worked as an editor on a literary journal entitled The Freedom Manual, documenting the lives of street kids in the city. We located resources for travelers and homeless folks in major cities across the country.
When I was 19, I moved to Philadelphia and started working my first shelter job, and also caught my first real heroin habit.
I have been on Methadone and Suboxone at different times respectively, and though I was able to taper down to minute doses of both, I was never able to fully disengage from it, until my second Ibogaine treatment.I have engaged and disengaged several more times since then, as is the nature of these relationships.I have come to grips with the knowledge that this is a lifelong practice. I no longer have such a rigid view of what success looks like in this regard, other than it looks like me maintaining my autonomy with my drug use. I do not currently work a 12-step program. I have in the past. I did, however, create a working balance and regiment for myself, which includes therapy, exercise, creativity, and volunteer work.
I am a graduate of both the Prop 36 program and Options Recovery Program in Berkeley, so I am very familiar with traditional treatment modalities, and the ways in which they are helpful, and the ways in which they fall short. For several years I have facilitated a radical substance use support group for people in any and all stages of our relationships with the substances we use. I do not believe there is any one way to deal with drug use and the ways it can effect our lives as users in this puritanical and punitive society.
However, I do think we all need support of some kind if we are attempting to change the way we use, what we use, or that we use. I am not of the mindset that everyone who is using should aspire to abstinence. I firmly believe in Harm Reduction, and working with people where they are at, to achieve the safest, healthiest, and least harmful ways to use, if that is what they want to continue doing.
I spent several years in court mandated drug treatment (6 consecutively), and have many thoughts on that process as well. I have done a lot of MAT counseling and have some seemingly unpopular, or at least controversial ideas on that. I feel entirely entitled to these opinions because, like many of us I have been medicated since my childhood. I was mandated onto the max dosage of methadone at age 18 or 19, causing me not only a bunch of health problems but a monster habit. I participated in the original studies conducted in SF to get Buprenorphine approved by the FDA for treatment in addiction medicine, also as a teen and was on it at one point steady for 6 years. It is still too soon to know what the long term effects of that could be?…I think MAT therapy definitely has its place, I just take issue with the way it appears to be handed out to anyone who so much thinks about maybe trying to stop.I have battled with mental health issues like depression (suicide) and anxiety for most of my life. I share the common experiences of others dealing with drug addiction, incarceration, homelessness, dual- diagnosis, chronic debilitating health conditions (Hep C), and court mandated (or coerced) recovery. I have overcome the various obstacles in my life to find myself in a position to hopefully help others. I have always enjoyed working with people from my community who are struggling with the same issues I have struggled with.
My work has included a ton of street outreach, including relatively large unsponsored or un-sanctioned outreaches I started and bottom lined in my own neighborhoods when it was apparent to me that the need was there. My friends and I did this using mostly donated supplies (and some stolen) from much larger, well established and better funded programs in the area.
I helped to establish the first needle exchange (after the original was wiped out) following Hurricane Katrina in NOLA with a couple other friends, which was run by bicycle delivery on burner phones, again with huge amounts of donated supplies, and some help from community members who happened to be driving from one coast to the other in a large U-Haul anyway. We had to be creative due to the illegality of exchange programs in the state of Louisiana. That project was started in 2011, it’s called Trystereo and is still running.
I have been a heroin (or otherwise opiate-dependent person) on and off but mostly on since I was 17.I am 40 now. I spent several years providing underground ibogaine treatments in the states and eventually in a clinic I co-founded and ran with my partner at the time, Ally KF, and with support from my long time best friend (who was my running partner throughout the majority of my most challenging years on opiates, and various other substances) and is now a certified nurse. All 3 of us have 20+ years experience as heavy drug users and as frontline workers, as well as experience being unhoused, facing some pretty intense mental health challenges and figuring out (or continuing to work on figuring out) how to harmoniously manage those.
I am very proud of my people and the community I come from and I hope to have found myself in a place where I can do more actual healing work counseling people remotely, or in limited personal capacity whenever that is possible, rather than the triage of frontline and case management or outreach work within the confines of a system designed to fail us and keep us down.
