“You can’t beat being sober”

Part 2 of 2 Part 1: “Bucksport sergeant helps best friend kick drugs”
(Part one of my story: https://www.ellsworthamerican.com/maine-news/cant-beat-sober/)

“You can’t beat being sober,” said Jared Zimmerman (left), who has been sober for four years and now works at the Shaw House in Bangor. He has been supported along the way by his best friend, David Winchester (right). DAVID WINCHESTER PHOTO

BUCKSPORT — Jared Zimmerman and David Winchester grew up in Bucksport together, but Winchester became a detective sergeant in the Bucksport Police Department while Zimmerman became a drug addict in Florida.

Zimmerman sobered up while in prison after he was arrested for drug trafficking, which reassured his friends and family in Bucksport. But it wasn’t to last …

Homecoming, part I

Zimmerman was released after about seven months in prison but, like many addicts, he soon started using drugs again. According to the National Association of Drug Court Professionals, approximately 95 percent of drug abusers in prison return to drug abuse after being released.

Winchester has seen that sort of thing happen too many times in his work.

“Every addict we come across, we can arrest them all. It doesn’t solve the problem,” he said. “You’re not going to solve their addiction in the short amount of time that they’re incarcerated. The first thing they’re going to want to do when they get out is go back to it.”

Zimmerman also detected a darker presence at work within him.

“The deeper I went into drugs and alcohol I would hear things, see shadows flitting across the room. My cat would freak out,” said Zimmerman, who had a lifelong interest in spirits and demons. “I heard a lot of voices, weird images, things being moved, seeing demonic stuff through a camera.”

After a year of this, Zimmerman decided he needed out of Florida. Plus, Winchester’s father had passed away in Bucksport and Zimmerman had missed the service.

“I know he felt really bad about not being around for that,” Winchester said. “So we talked about that a lot and I think he finally got to that point where he decided to come home.”

Zimmerman didn’t look so good coming off the plane in Portland in September, 2012. Winchester said the last time he had seen Zimmerman he was in great shape and weighed about 225 pounds. Addiction had whittled him down to 170. But despite all that had happened, the two were still best buddies.

“When I saw him get off the plane in Portland he was probably 170 pounds,” said Winchester, who said Zimmerman weighed 220 pounds when he had last seen him 11 years before. “I just remember thinking ‘My God.’”
DAVID WINCHESTER PHOTO

“Us being best friends was still there, it was just like clockwork,” Zimmerman said. “But it was weird being in his house and he’s married and I missed all of that and I just came out of a life of drugs.”

Both Winchester and his wife would work during the day and leave Zimmerman alone at home, sometimes with the police officer’s young son. But Winchester trusted his old friend.

“I knew that nothing was going to come up missing,” he said. “My only concern was that he was going to use there. And he told me he wouldn’t, and I believed him.”

“And I didn’t, didn’t at all,” Zimmerman said.

That is, until he went back to Florida two weeks later.

The desire was gone

Without the presence of Winchester and the structure of a good routine, the next few months were more of the same for Zimmerman. The drugs and demons came back, until finally Zimmerman reached a breaking point.

“I wanted to be sober,” he said. “I got on my knees and I said ‘I believe in you, I know you’re real, I know you’ve died for my sins. Forgive me for my sins. I want to live for you. Show me you’re real.’”

Like a switch turning off, Zimmerman said that suddenly the desire to do drugs was gone.

“I felt a weight lifted off of me, I don’t know how to explain it,” he said. “It’s like you have a desire to eat and you pray and all of a sudden your desire to eat is gone.”

Zimmerman said he had that experience on a Monday, and that Wednesday he started going to church. Winchester was skeptical at first.

“When I hear this my thought is ‘It’s just another progression of addiction,’” he said. “Now he’s using religion as his battle.”

“Right, because I was into Hinduism, Buddhism, this, that. I always had something spiritual going on,” Zimmerman said.

“But like he said, whatever it was or whatever he did, it changed,” said Winchester. “The conversations got normal, the conversations were positive. His direction was positive and it was just different.”

Religion and recovery from addiction have long been intertwined: a key tenant of the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step process is to accept a higher power. Zimmerman said many former addicts he knows either experienced a sudden switch like his or maintain their sobriety by constantly attending AA meetings.

“They ask me ‘How can you stay sober without going to an AA meeting?’ For them it was a foreign idea,” Zimmerman said. Still, he said that religion doesn’t work for everybody. “Some people use their structure or willpower.”

Homecoming, Part II

In April of 2013, Zimmerman returned to Maine for good. At first he did carpentry work for a friend, but within a few months he took a job doing maintenance work at the Shaw House in Bangor, where he found plenty in common with the homeless or at-risk youth there.

“I see that defiance in them: the pride, the rebellion, the ignorance,” he said. “I talk to them about anything and everything that I can. Some of them talk about parties or their family situation and some will talk about spiritual aspects of life. I’ve experienced so much I’m basically everything for everyone.”

Zimmerman is in a much better place now than he has been for years. He has an apartment, a vehicle, a license and a job. But he also knows how much he’s missed in life. His father, John, died of pancreatic cancer last year, and Zimmerman thinks he has some responsibility for that.

“I know I took some years off, as far as the stress he endured. I know he was so upset and worried,” Zimmerman said. “I know David suffered, I know my dad suffered a lot, my brother suffered, my mother suffered, my sisters suffered from that process. There’s only so many people who stick by you going through that trip.”

But the fact that they did stick by him, Zimmerman said, helped him finally recover.

“David was there for me when I didn’t hear from other friends,” he said. “So him and my family were the huge support that brought me to the point of how I got to be sober. God was responsible for healing me from that.”

“The fact that he’s been able to come back and clean and hold down a job for this long is amazing,” Winchester said. “He’s a totally different person then what I knew from high school.”

“You can’t beat being sober,” Zimmerman said.

As Winchester said, Zimmerman’s story is an exception. Over 50,000 Americans died of a drug overdose in 2015, according to the Centers for Disease Control. There were 378 overdose deaths in Maine alone in 2016.

For Part I of this story, see “Bucksport sergeant helps best friend kick drugs“
(https://www.ellsworthamerican.com/maine-news/bucksport-sergeant-helps-best-friend-kick-drugs/)