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134 Chapter 7 The Revolving Door Treatment, Recovery, and Relapse Bev Referred to our study by a sponsor in twelve-step, Bev was in former-user status when I first met her. At age forty she was living with her mother, who had helped to raise her child. Bev had more mainstream social capital than many of the women I interviewed. She came to the interview dressed in a crisp white blazer with her hair stylishly cut. She might have been dressed to go to church or work. I learned she had performed semiprofessional work all her life, often while using methamphetamine. The long sleeves she wore to the interview covered track marks from years of injection. The conservative-looking middle-class woman sitting before me recounted her years of running drugs between the city and wealthy clients in the suburbs. Her high bridging social capital provided the resources she needed in both her conventional and unconventional roles. Bev had spent the last ten years in and out of treatment or jail. Other than her drug-dealing work, she had been employed in offices of local businesses and professionals. Her acumen and good business sense made her valuable in both roles, and she was eager to have a job in the conventional world. She explained why she was currently unemployed: If you have a drug felony, nobody will hire you. You can’t get any kind of help . . . you can’t go back to school . . . food stamps. You can’t do anything. And it’s like they just want you to go back to selling drugs. . . . I mean if you can rape somebody, you can kill somebody, you can still get food stamps. You can do anything you want to do. But you do some drugs and they don’t give you a second chance. It’s making you want to go out and do it more. I mean, it does. It makes you want to relapse because you can’t get a job, you can’t do this. I mean, I can’t work at the Dollar Store . . . I can’t work at a bar. If you have a drug felony you cannot get a serving license. And I’ve never had an alcohol problem in my Treatment, Recovery, and Relapse 135 life. I think I’ve maybe been, even what you would consider drunk, maybe three times in my life and I’m forty. Bev expressed what most women with a felony charge on their record told me—that it was almost impossible to be legally employed. Some of the women eventually took a service job off the books, as Bev did when friends of her mother offered her work cleaning houses. For her last offense, she served one year in prison and still had five more years on probation. She took methamphetamine on her first day out. “It makes me numb,” she said. Given her bleak prospects as a felon, I could understand her feelings. During her time in treatment programs and twelve-step fellowships, Bev learned that she was codependent on men. Although she was legally married, her estranged husband lived in another state; Bev currently was seeing a man she called her boyfriend. Bev reached her rock-bottom period a few years ago. Estranged from her family, she was covered with track marks, bruises, and sores from months of bingeing and a general lack of personal hygiene. Bev described the place where she picked up her methamphetamine during that time as Deliverance. She stayed there when she was homeless, and another time when she ran away from a treatment program. “You ever [see] the movie Deliverance?” she asked. “That’s what they [dealers] were . . . honey, they live in a shack—or a trailer . . . it’s down a gravel road.” Deliverance, I learned, was near the library where we met in the suburbs, not in a remote rural location. Bev’s husband was in jail, and she was about to be evicted from her home, when one of her neighbors called her parents to let them know their daughter had come to their house asking for food. Bev described what she remembered when she answered the door that day: I had been up for five or six days and I had bruises, and I had, you know, been shooting. And now my mother had never seen me like that. And [clears her throat] she showed up at my house. And when she showed— I wouldn’t...

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