Becoming a Social Worker by Alex Abramovich & Tasha Blaine

Author:Alex Abramovich & Tasha Blaine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2021-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

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JOHN HAD LONG SINCE stopped misusing opiates. He didn’t think he’d ever use them again. He barely drank anymore. But he did use hallucinogens on occasion, and hallucinogens were the thing that finally led him to social work. Passing through Clackamas County, in Oregon, on the way to another friend’s place in Portland, John was pulled over by a state policeman who had noticed his out-of-state license plates. When the trooper leaned in for a look, he saw a Ziploc bag full of psychedelic mushrooms lying out in the open.

John had had time to cover them up. He could have swept them under the seat. But he’d been on the road for a long time and didn’t think anything of it.

“Can I help you, Officer?” he said.

In retrospect, getting arrested that day was one of the best things that had ever happened to John.

“I decided to become a social worker while I was in jail up in Oregon,” he says. “It was because of the people I had been locked up with. Most of them were ‘frequent flyers’: they’d get arrested for minor drug offenses, spend the night, get released, get arrested again. We were in a cell that was the size of a suburban bedroom and that cell was packed. There were thirty of us, maybe more, standing, sitting, talking a mile a minute. I had my eye on one guy. He wasn’t jittery like the other prisoners. There was something about him. I said, ‘What’s going on, man? You don’t look like someone who just got arrested.’ It turned out, he hadn’t been. He had actually been in for sixty days, for larceny, and was processing out.

“He and his girlfriend had gotten high on meth, gone to a store, and tried to steal a laptop or something equally stupid,” John continues. “But his story was especially sad because he had eight other felonies for dumb things he’d done high on meth. At the same time he’d been clean for close to ten years. Not coincidentally, it had been a decade since he’d last been arrested. What that meant was he was on the verge of having all those old felonies expunged. In the course of those ten years, he and his girlfriend had had a child—a girl, who was now nine years old. She had become a ward of the state, with him and his girlfriend in jail.

“The guy was full of regret. He was also convinced that he could put his life back together, given the chance. I don’t know if he needed advocacy or just encouragement. I don’t know that anyone he had in his life could have filled either role. But I was there then to say, ‘Okay. Here’s what you have to do: you need to get your daughter back. In order to do that, you have to stay sober. And if your girlfriend is using, you do whatever you need to steer clear of her.’

“I learned later on in social work school that you’re not supposed to give advice.

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