Charlie Huddleson has always been a religious man, but it was one church service in 2013 that cracked him open. “When I hit my knees on that altar, it felt like my whole life had come out my eyes,” he says. “It felt like I had cried away every pain, every heartache, and everything, and that’s the day that my life started changing.”
Huddleson was 53 at the time, and in a court-ordered drug treatment program. He’d spent the previous four decades in and out of prison, battling heroin while watching the drug consume his friends, family, and an ex-wife. “There's a great illness here,” he says. “It's opiates.”
He says he came across drugs after a broken childhood. “My father beat me so intensely when I was 6 years old he gave me brain damage, so they say,” he says. “My head swelled and almost died.”
By the age of 10, he says he was skipping school and getting into trouble. It was only a few years later, in juvenile prison, that he was exposed to the drug that would derail his life. “When you try to get off of it your brain likes being loaded,” he says. “It's just like the devil and God, one on each shoulder. You're battling with addiction and you're battling with these things that you haven't worked through.”
After trying dozens of recovery programs, the calling Huddleson felt on that altar in 2013 was the one that stuck. At 59, Huddleson just celebrated his sixth sobriety anniversary. Now, he’s helping others recover, in a county where thousands of people are hooked on heroin and pain pills and few are in treatment—numbers that don’t even take into account the county’s other rampant drug problem, methamphetamine.
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