Bobcats in recovery

The honest process

When Matthew Zacharias started chewing tobacco with his high school hockey team, he never expected the habit would turn into an addiction that would take five years to break.

Zacharias spent two years playing junior hockey before going to college. He went from casually chewing to going through two tins of “rub” a day. Hockey was his only priority, and being surrounded by players with the same dip habit escalated his use of the addictive, nicotine-laced substance.

When Zacharias came to OHIO in 2011 to major in mechanical engineering, he noticed that smoking cigarettes was more socially acceptable than chewing tobacco among students. When he saw his gums receding in the dorm room mirror, he devised a plan to replace “dipping” with smoking before weaning himself off of tobacco entirely.

Zacharias limited himself to one cigarette a day, and then quit. But after three weeks, he started smoking again.

Two years later, Zacharias and his parents, both smokers, received news that changed the way they felt about their daily cigarettes. Zacharias’s aunt passed away from lung cancer. She was a lifelong smoker.

Soon after she died, Zacharias received a campus-wide email about OHIO’s free tobacco cessation classes and decided to sign up. He started meeting with recovery specialist Ann Addington, BSS ’09, once a week.

It took them two months to complete the tobacco cessation program. Zacharias said using a booklet to log his goals, actions, and feedback was essential.

After two months, Addington and Zacharias agreed he was ready to continue the quitting process on his own. The program offers free nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) gum, patches, or lozenges to students who complete the program. Putting the coupon in his wallet, Zacharias resolved never to have to use it.

“Matthew was delightful to work with as he was committed to quitting from day one,” Addington said. “I later received a thank you from him stating that OHIO provided the necessary resources for him to quit. I know how hard it was for him and I am so happy that this attempt was most likely his last!”

The “honest process,” as Zacharias called it — from his first meeting with Addington to when he could say he wasn’t addicted to cigarettes — took nine months. And while he’s had a few setbacks — exam time, social smoking — his desire to be independent from tobacco pulls him back every time.

“You just kind of have to remember all of the reasons you quit in the first place,” Zacharias said. “Because it’s really easy to tell yourself it’s okay to have one because you’re not a ‘habitual smoker’ anymore.”

Since he stopped smoking, Zacharias’s social and academic life has improved: He no longer leaves his friends or work for smoke breaks. He enjoys playing hockey without getting short of breath. And, he said, he just feels better about himself.

But more than anything else, Zacharias is proud he kept the promise he made to his aunt before she died.

“It was a really emotional experience for me. Both of my parents had been smoking for 20-some years and they both quit too for her,” he said. “It had a really big impact on our family.”

Tobacco usage on the Athens campus continues to decrease but it hasn’t quite disappeared. Zacharias encourages students to try the tobacco cessation classes. The program surrounds you with others who support the decision to stop smoking, he said. He wants other students to be able to look back on their addiction to tobacco and realize it doesn’t control their lives anymore.

Since Zacharias is free of tobacco’s hold, he threw away the free NRT coupon long ago. He doesn’t need it.

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Breaking free

Shelby Delp woke up on the couch in her parents’ home one summer morning after an alcohol-fueled trip to the Ohio State Fair. When she saw their worried faces, she knew she had hit bottom.

Delp, who was about to enter her senior year at OHIO, saw their concerned looks and realized how three years of consistent drinking and partying had hurt every aspect of her life. She had been in denial and had yet to take responsibility for her actions.

“I could never look at myself and what I was doing,” Delp said. “I was just blaming everyone else.”

She started drinking alcohol in high school. When she came to Athens in 2010, her plan was to live up to the University’s “party school” reputation. She made friends with other students who wanted to go out and drink as often as she did. By May, her freshman year had blurred into one big party.

Delp lived in an off-campus sorority house her second year and spent even more time partying than studying than she had her freshman year. Her sorority suspended her for not meeting the mandatory grade requirement. But she didn’t see drinking as a factor to her sinking GPA.

Junior year, Delp lived on Palmer Street, an off-campus street made infamous by its annual Palmer Fest during spring semester. She said this and the consistent availability of alcohol and parties found on the street influenced her to drink on a daily basis.

“After every day of that, you just get burnt out,” Delp said. “My grades weren’t great, and I didn’t see myself graduating in four years or at all.”

But then Delp began to make some connections.

“When I woke up on my parents’ couch that [summer] morning, the looks on their faces forced me to finally look at myself,” Delp said. “I had hit my breaking point.”

Delp sought help when she returned to OHIO for her senior year. Counseling and Psychological Services referred her to the Collegiate Recovery Program (CRP). When CRP was established in 2011, only students who had been clean and sober for at least three months could use the service. The effort was renamed in 2014 to Recovery to Inspire, Share, and Empower, or R.I.S.E., and became more inclusive toward students seeking sobriety.

Delp battled nerves the first time she visited Baker 321.

“I was terrified, I didn’t feel good, my anxiety was off the charts,” Delp said. “Ann [Addington] was there when I first came in, and she knew I needed help.”

Addington refused to turn her away even though Delp didn’t meet the former requirements.

“When Shelby came to her first meeting, she looked frail and pale,” Addington said. “She shared her story and I assured her that we, the OHIO community, would do everything we could to support her during the recovery process.”

The program motivated Delp to follow a sober path by making new and healthier lifestyle choices. She spent more time with students who chose to remain sober. She combated the party scene that surrounded her house on Palmer Street by learning to say no to offers to drink.

“I just didn’t want to go back to feeling awful. I felt like I had been in one big hangover for an entire year,” she said. “I didn’t want to let my family down, and I wanted to graduate and actually do something with my life.”

Delp graduated in May 2014 with a bachelor’s degree in business economics. Taking her life in a new direction opened up a professional world she’d never considered. She wanted to continue working with the program that had helped turn her life around.

“Since I got so much help here, I thought it was important for me to be here to show other kids that there’s someone else at OHIO that did it too,” Delp said.

She is enrolled in the graduate degree program of college student personnel, learning how to help others overcome addiction. She spends 20 hours each week talking with students during their personal crises, facilitating R.I.S.E. and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and planning events for the Sober Bobcats organization.

“Students often come into the office wanting to talk to Shelby because they are thinking about quitting alcohol or drugs,” Addington said. “Shelby is a familiar name in the recovery community, both within the University and the Athens community,” Addington said. “She listens to their stories, assures them that there is help available, and in her soft but assertive voice tells them that it requires a lot of work.”

Looking back on her addiction, Delp said the hardest lesson to learn was that it is okay not to drink. R.I.S.E. helped her own that lesson and become the successful college student she always wanted to be.“I’m thankful that I always had a safe place I could come to,” Delp said. “No matter what was going on in my day, I knew I always had people behind me.”

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From incarceration to the classroom

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When Jerry Thomas moved to Ironton, Ohio, in 1996, he couldn’t find any opportunities to make the kind of money he wanted. He had worked a door-to-door job selling magazines, but soon saw only one sales trade that would help him achieve the economic status he desired—dealing drugs.

Thomas and his immediate family used and dealt drugs throughout Ironton for more than a decade. Thomas said he grew up in this culture.

“I jumped right in with both feet and started selling,” Thomas said. “I didn’t really have any ambitions at the time other than to make money and have a sense of power and accomplishment.”

But in 2007, his days of using and dealing came to an end.

Thomas and several members of his family were imprisoned after a drug task force shut down their multistate operation. Thomas didn’t care about making any lifestyle changes until he arrived at the Chillicothe Correctional Institute.

“I began to see the culture that I had come to accept as normal for what it really was,” he said. “At that point in time, I decided I wanted to change my life.”

Thomas volunteered to participate in a residential drug program while serving his sentence and was transferred to the STAR Community Justice Center in Franklin Furnace. A local alternative to prison, the program strives to rehabilitate nonviolent felony offenders. He completed the program in February 2010.

Thomas’s younger sister encouraged him to reinvent himself further, this time by enrolling at OHIO’s Southern Campus. Nothing could have been further from his mind.

“I had always thought college was a waste of someone else’s money and my time,” Thomas said. “She made it clear to me that going to school would get me back on my feet and keep me from falling back into old patterns.”

The University held a hearing to determine whether or not to admit Thomas due to his criminal background. Thomas said his view of the higher education system changed drastically after the University gave him the chance to restart his life.

Thomas, AAS ’15, BSS ’15, admits that his first year as a psychology student at the Southern Campus was a struggle. Adjusting to a structured schedule that included classes and studying was difficult. But with encouragement from his professors, Thomas said he saw his grades improve significantly.

Thomas’ psychology professor Ronald Sims, AB ’70, MA ’73, encouraged him to continue his education when Thomas was close to earning his associate’s degree. Thomas, unafraid of challenges, immediately began working toward a bachelor’s degree in psychology. He graduated with a 3.317 GPA.

The most rewarding aspect of being a Southern Campus student was the friendships he made with professors.

Thomas’ ultimate goal is to earn a doctoral degree in counseling or clinical psychology so he can help others struggling with addiction and substance abuse. He is pursuing his master’s degree in general psychology through an online program at the University of the Rockies while working as a counselor at Spectrum Outreach Services in Ironton.

His experience with drugs, addiction, and reinvention has come full circle.

“Right now, I’m working in the same community that I took from for so long,” he said. “I’m helping people with the same problem that I had, and I’m just getting started but I’m hoping to be impactful to some of these people’s lives,” Thomas said.

Listen to an interview with Thomas on WOUB Public Media’s “Conversations from Studio B

Kaitlyn Pacheco is a student writer at Advancement Communication and Marketing and the managing editor of Backdrop Magazine , a student-produced publication on the Athens Campus.