By Alex Lee
The road to addiction started for Dominick Gladstone at the age of 5. “I remember my parents fighting often. It was very traumatic and scary. At age 9 they divorced, and I was happy about it,” recalls Dominick. “I saw them as two great people who should have never been together.”
His mother turned to drinking. She sought help but was treated for depression, not substance use. After his mother became ill, Dominick was left to deal with issues beyond his age. He lost touch with his peers and became picked on and bullied at school. At age 15, desperate to belong and to appear cool, he was hanging out with the older kids in school. The drinking age at the time was 18 so alcohol was easy to obtain and a big part of the group’s social activities. Dominick’s mother died of alcoholism when he was a senior in high school and his father passed away just two years later. “I was mad at the world, and I spent time in the clubs because I saw those as the only place I knew people to be happy.”
Dominick continues, “I was still drinking when I started college at age 26. Alcoholics are intelligent high functioning people with misdirected energy. I graduated with top honors.” Dominick continued life in the shadow of the addiction. He started and ran a business and met a girl whom he followed to Michigan. Through these years his drinking kept getting worse, the hangovers were more difficult, but he found a way to keep functioning.
“After I broke up with my girlfriend,” says Dominick, “I started spending even more time in the bar. At that point alcoholism, a fatal and progressive disease, won, and I lost all control. The beginning of the climb out, and the hitting of the bottom, occurred while I was celebrating my 40th birthday and was arrested for drunk driving. My clever solution was to give up driving instead of drinking. I started working from home. I isolated myself and continued to drink. I remember seeing myself in the mirror and recognizing only the pain and lack of all hope.” It was December 21, 2004, ironically the shortest and darkest day of the year, that Dominick found himself in tears on the floor clutching the cross that had been placed on his mother’s coffin and asking, “My God, why have you forsaken me?”
The following morning Dominick, not caring if he lived or died, grabbed his keys and headed for the liquor store. But instead of turning into the liquor store, through what he calls an “act of God,” he drove to a 12-step meeting. The people there, seeing his condition, immediately took him to a treatment center. The nurse at the treatment center immediately directed him to the ER with the grim belief that he wasn’t going to make it.
“I did make it,” says Dominick, “and was released on Christmas Eve. I was lucky in getting the help, follow-up and support I needed. Recovery is possible, the help is out there, but we need to continue to make that help available to those who need it.”
Even though the American Medical Association classified addiction as a disease in the 1950s, and numerous genetic studies show addiction to be a predisposed condition, we don’t treat addiction that way, and often the media doesn’t portray it that way.
The 1970s “Just Say No” campaign was a perception nightmare. Imagine telling a cancer patient to “just get better.” Those addicted are unable to stop, just like those medically affected are unable to get better, without help. Despite the realities, addiction continues to be shrouded in a quiet sense of shame. Among the addicted are family members, spouses, friends, neighbors, coworkers, clergy, elected officials and people we pass by on a daily business, and they all need our help.
Addiction costs Americans more than $700 billion a year in increased healthcare costs, crime, and lost productivity. Most program dollars are spent on incarceration, prevention is a close second, and treatment takes only a small portion. Dominick describes Kalamazoo County as resource rich. He points to a recovery coach inside the county jail as, “a huge step in the right direction.” But he adds, “we need more and better-paid recovery coaches, and better access to all the resources available.” Kalamazoo County is also set to receive $14 million from opioid settlements resulting from eight national lawsuits over the next 16 years targeted at addiction. Opioids are an addictive class of drugs that include both prescription medicines and illegal drugs.
Dominick Gladstone’s sobriety date is December 22, 2004. He will celebrate 20 years of sobriety later this year. He runs several successful businesses in Kalamazoo dealing with media messaging, production, and streaming. He is a nationally recognized speaker on the topic of addiction, he’s been appointed as a member to the Kalamazoo Opioid Task Force and as a Community Engagement Team Leader on the State of Michigan Opioid Advisory Commission.
His advice to all of us: “Remove the stigma from addiction, talk about it and treat it like the disease it is, know there are resources and encourage people to seek the help they need. We need more good people doing good things for people to make them better.”
Local Resources
- The Greater Kalamazoo Connection to Alcoholics Anonymous
- 24-hour meeting hotline – (269) 349-4410
- Michigan Narcotics Anonymous Hotline – (800) 230-4085
- SAMHSA National Helpline – (800) 662-HELP (662-4357)