Imagine an addict; he’s a young man in his thirties. He survives with $300 worth of heroin pumping through his veins every day. It is an expensive habit he supports by stealing. He has no permanent address, seeking temporary shelter in abandoned buildings in Camden New Jersey. Close your eyes, and make this man come to life.
Now, open.
The man in front of you wears a white collared shirt, he has a cell phone and a Mercedes. He is a successful business man with a wife and family and a PH.D. Sure, he smokes quite a few Marlboro lights in a day, and he is a little obsessive about the spilled cup of coffee that has made a mess on his floor.
But those quarks are the only throw backs to his former life on the streets. You’d never know to look at him, but this man was once severely addicted to drugs and alcohol. But he did what many think of as unthinkable: he recovered. Now he is a spokesman for the process of recovery through sober.com, the website he founded and owns that has become the number one resource for individuals seeking information on substance abuse recovery products or treatment services. His name is Harold Jonas.
“If you’re not dead, there is hope” he said.
He comes from a family that nurtured an addictive personality. His father drank until the day he died. His mother drank to be closer to his father. His older sister dabbled in drugs and alcohol and took Jonas along for the ride.
Jonas first sampled marijuana at the age of twelve or thirteen.
Then, it was alcohol and cocaine. Jonas was a theater major in college and his peers, as he now recalls, were those who were sleeping with co-eds and using drugs constantly. It was the 1970’s and cocaine was the considered to be the recreational drug.
He graduated from college, married and started a successful business, carrying his affinity for his intoxication past adolescent experimentation and continuing to use a professional, as a husband, as a father.
“I had a store. I worked 6 am in the morning until 11 pm or 12 am at night. I was doing it.” Jonas recalled. “I had two small children and a wife who love me.”
But a steady stream of events was whisking him deeper into the disease of addiction. His wife suffered from manic depression and used drugs as well, Jonas said. She was constantly in and out of hospitals. Jonas lived in a state of perpetual fear, fear for the lives of his children under the care of an unstable mother. He started selling cocaine and marijuana to make ends meet. He “started to actually believe this was my destiny.”
Eventually, he amassed a resume of experimentation that included “whatever is in the book,” and by the age of 28, he was addicted to heroin. His expensive habit led him to steal which inevitable led him to jail. But every time he was arrested, he was quickly released. He’d find his way to his equally addicted girlfriend and start the process all over again, not caring whether he lived or died.
“Heroin makes you feel real good. It feels like a constant orgasm all the time.” Jonas said. “Heroin addicts, their biggest fear is withdrawal.”
But the world in which he found himself was not his ultimate destiny. On a day in 1987, the reappearance of a familiar face prompted Jonas make a long overdue change.
At the time, Jonas had a secured a job as a short order cook, “which was always a good thing to do so you could always eat,” Jonas recalled. “This familiar looking figure approaches [the window of the restaurant]. From the distance, it looked like another old Jewish guy.”
It was Jonas’s father.
Armed with a new Florida address and a new girlfriend who had witnessed her brother’s heroin rehabilitation, the couple presented Jonas with the option to come to Florida and seek treatment. All expenses would be paid out of the pocket of his father. After much convincing, Jonas accepted. He hasn’t used drugs or alcohol since.
“Learning how to do it made sense. I wanted it.” Jonas said about quitting. “The really strong obsession about wanting to use just went away.”
Now, his goals have been reawakened. He re-established contact with his children, even adding another one to his crew with his new wife Dawn, a fellow former addict whom he met in a treatment center. He has made a conscious effort to follow through with the great ideas he has had in his life, and “now I’ m gonna’, really is done.”
He has made a career of his experiences, using them to help change the lives of others suffering the pains of addiction. His vision incarnate has become sober.com, a website that receives 25,000 visitors every month. As an offshoot of this, Jonas has also developed sobersystems.com, which will provide today technology-savvy society with a continuous aftercare program that will monitor a patient’s status even after treatment has been completed. The internet-based program will allow a recovering addict to maintain connections with their initial treatment center and be a part of a network of support through the website, regardless of where they reside post-treatment. In addition to his online recovery initiatives, Jonas also owns several halfway houses in the Delray Beach area. The cost: $150/week. The rules: “stay drug free and pay your rent and get a long.”
Momentarily interrupting the description of his recovery empire, Jonas cell phone rings from a clip on his waist. He flips it open, and a look of disappointment crosses his face.
“Don’t drink, Michael!” he repeats over and over again. “Don’t drink.”
Jonas mutters a few more words and eventually hangs up the phone, the look of disappointment deepening. He begins to tell me the tale of one his tenants in the halfway house. Violating one of the 3 cardinal rules in one of Jonas’s facilities, Michael drank and became so drunk he had an accident and landed himself in the hospital. After undergoing emergency surgery, Michael has recovered medically but he can’t stop drinking. Michael’s wife walks in not long after the phone call. The couple is in the process of getting a divorce, and Jonas said she is trying hard to get her life in order. He pulls her outside his office, and the two discuss the situation out of ear shot. The few audible phrases of those of a wife who has had enough of a man who has allowed alcohol to consume his life.
“This is the culmination of love lost,” Jonas said, upon returning to his office. “But this is what we do.”