43
Warren woman ‘doing well’ after drug-rehab program
By Ed Runyan
DETROIT
For Cincinnati-born and Warren-raised Shandrieka Shavers, it’s been a tough six years.
At age 34, she’s been through a handful of drug-rehabilitation programs in Ohio and Detroit but has had trouble sustaining her sobriety after leaving the programs.
Several months ago, she completed Life Challenge in Detroit, a nine-month Christian-based program where she continues to reside and work as an intern, counseling other addicts. She is sober.
She completed a similar program in Trumbull County in 2010 run by the Warren Family Mission known as Hannah’s House, located in Vienna Township. That’s a 12-month program that attempted to teach her how to live without drugs and alcohol.
She did well, but several months after she left the program in early 2011, Shavers was back on the streets of Warren, abusing drugs.
At that point, Pastor Chris Gilger of Warren Family Mission pulled her back.
Pastor Gilger spotted Shavers on the streets and said, “Shandrieka, you need to come with me,” Gilger said.
Shavers, who at that point had a swollen and infected arm from injecting heroin into it, tried to stall. She asked if she could meet Pastor Gilger somewhere later.
The two of them debated the subject for more than 30 minutes before Shavers agreed to leave.
She spent a week at Hannah’s House, then Pastor Gilger drove her to Teen Challenge in Detroit. It would be her second time there, her first time having been in 2006.
Last week, Shavers talked to a reporter by phone from Detroit, saying she’s “doing well” again, clean and sober and has “a totally different mind-set.”
Pastor Gilger said at the rate she was going last August, she might have been dead in seven months. “She was all skinny. Her veins were popping out,” he said.
It’s been well documented that heroin addiction is killing an increasing number of Trumbull County residents. Deaths from heroin overdose rose from six in 2010 to 19 in 2011, according to Trumbull County Coroner Dr. Humphrey Germaniuk.
Pastor Gilger said he believes Shavers is an example of someone who has to be permanently removed from the place where they became addicted to drugs, who has so many friends and ties to the drug culture, that they can never go back.
“‘Place’ is the trigger for some people,” Pastor Gilger said. “There are ones who are connected too much. They may have a lot of friends who are bad, and they work better if they leave the state.”
In Shavers’ case, she was doing well at Hannah’s House, where she lived among other clients. But during her internship with Warren Family Mission in early 2010, when she was living on her own, she lacked the willpower to stay away from her old friends.
“Being in the city and having free rein to go wherever I wanted, I relapsed in five months,” Shavers said.
Even though Life Challenge is in downtown Detroit, the facility there is “like a college,” Shavers said, so it’s somewhat removed from drug users.
Her religious convictions also have given her greater strength. “I truly know He has something planned for my life,” she said of God.
Gilger said he delivers about 15 to 20 people per year from Warren to either the Life Challenge location in Detroit or a more military-oriented facility in Muskegon, Mich.
“They are people who don’t do well in their area,” Gilger said.
Likewise, Hannah’s House has women in the program from out of Ohio, and it serves the same purpose for some of those women, he said.
One woman from California, for instance, “is permanent” in this area, because she can’t stay away from her old life when she’s in California, Gilger said.
“You can get stamped [with a reputation] also [in your hometown], and when you go to a new place, you can start over. People remember all the negative things you do. They don’t remember the positives. It’s just human nature.”