CHESAPEAKE, Ohio — From drug addiction to a stint in prison, recovery to becoming a chemical dependency counselor assistant (CDCA) and receiving his peer recovery support license, Logan-born and raised Jeffrey Patrick reached out to the Logan Daily News with a message: “Change is possible.”
Patrick’s road to self-betterment has been a long and arduous one, fraught with setbacks, but it’s a path that now has him speaking at the same places he once sought out for help.
One of those places is STAR Community Justice Center, where he attended a Narcotics Anonymous (NA) meeting after leaving prison in 2021, and received an invaluable bit of advice:
“It’s a simple choice, to never return to that life of robbing, use of drugs, and total unmanageability… I took that and ran with it,” he told the Logan Daily.
After that, he successfully received his high school diploma and the licenses necessary to help others looking to enter recovery.
For the last two years, the energetic and dedicated Patrick has worked full-time with the Southern Hope Recovery Center in Chesapeake, along the southern Ohio border with West Virginia. There, he works primarily with people just getting out of prison.
“Southern Hope is a great place for people struggling, feeling stuck in the conditions they are in — there are places out there that really care about them, where they can find people also on the path to recovery,” he said.
He is also a team leader with Worthy Ambition, a construction company that “invests in and empowers individuals in recovery” by teaching them a trade, in a quest to get their career and life on track.
Patrick recalled his many years in and out of jail, as a severely overweight, “heavily depressed drug addict,” before “something changed in me, and I kicked into gear.”
He spent much of his adolescence and adulthood under Logan probation officer Kasey Jones, “who never quit trying, and did all they could to save my life.”
Perhaps the lowest point in Patrick’s journey came in his August 2018 arrest, after which he spent three years in prison. But the experience “gave me a chance for the fog to lift, and I realized I had a desire to live to be drug-free.”
Though he is now stationed in Chesapeake, it’s Patrick’s wish to someday return to Logan “to share the news that people can change.” He still has family in the area, including his brother, 12 years his junior, who has also run the gamut of drug addiction and come out the other side, ready to support his peers in recovery.
It was “heartbreaking to watch him go down the same road,” Patrick admitted, though he expressed pride in his younger brother’s journey, following his own example.
These days, Patrick said he surrounds himself only with people who are similarly dedicated to recovery. One of the earlier recovering addicts he bonded with was Nelsonville resident Ryan Horrocks, himself the subject of a Logan Daily feature last year.
Asked if he has any particular advice for those in a bad way and looking for hope, Patrick did not hesitate.
“I would say, they’re not special,” he advised. “Millions of people have struggled through addiction and come clean on the other side of it. Change is absolutely possible with hard work and God. You just have to decide that you’ve had enough. And I think when you hit that breaking point and you’re ready to do something about it — look, everybody prays to God, but you have to get up and work and dig for it.”
Email at rmorris@logandaily.com
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