A lifetime of addiction, prison and treatment programs; today Calvin Kelly mentors and helps those who are going through what he’s already been through.
Kelly is a Certified Addiction Recovery Empowerment Specialist, working with offenders being released from prison who continue to struggle with addiction. Kelly’s path to being an asset instead of a burden took decades.
He spoke to the Parole Board about his journey in February of 2016.
“Marijuana was acceptable,” he says. “Mom smoked a little weed, others smoked, my other family smoked, so it wasn’t a big thing. To me that was normal, that was just like, my right of passage. I always knew when I got a certain age that I was going to smoke. I figured everybody smoked,” he says. “I started smoking when I was nine years old. I was getting high at nine.”
Kelly says he doesn’t make excuses or blame his mother, who was 18 when he was born and she raised him as a single parent, doing the best she could, working two jobs, 16 hours a day.
“I smoked my complete high school; most of my elementary school years. I don’t remember a day not being high, I don’t remember a day not going to school that I wasn’t under some substance, and I started drinking also. I was trying to stop drinking by 18, most people are just starting,” he stated.
Despite his drug use, Kelly says he excelled in athletics and everybody had high hopes for his future, but no one really knew him. Kelly explained that drugs were a way to escape reality and the pressure to perform.
“Getting high was a way to get away mentally from people. I felt people only wanted to know me for what I could do, nobody really wanted to know me,” he says.
Although highly touted as an athlete, he says, “I wanted to go somewhere (college) where nobody knew me.”
Kelly enrolled in a small college where he says he was introduced to cocaine for the first time.
“I took to it like a fish to water.”
He soon dropped out of school and his use of cocaine rose to another level.
"Free-basing put me in a place where nothing mattered. I’ve got an addictive personality; I’m either all in or all out. I didn’t want to feel anything,” states Kelly.
Despite his addiction and use, he married at 24, hiding his addiction from his wife. The birth of their first child followed but after several months as a new father his addiction took over.
lifetime of addiction, prison and treatment programs; today Calvin Kelly mentors and helps those who are going through what he’s already been through.
Kelly is a Certified Addiction Recovery Empowerment Specialist, working with offenders being released from prison who continue to struggle with addiction. Kelly’s path to being an asset instead of a burden took decades.
He spoke to the Parole Board about his journey in February.
“Marijuana was acceptable,” in his home he says. “Mom smoked a little weed, others smoked, my other family smoked, so it wasn’t a big thing. To me that was normal, that was just like, my right of passage.”
“I always knew when I got a certain age that I was going to smoke. I figured everybody smoked,” he says. “I started smoking when I was nine years old. I was getting high at nine.”
Parole Success!!
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