WestCare

Cuts put dreams of new lives at risk

By Bill McEwen
The Fresno Bee
August 4, 2008

He tried alcohol and marijuana in grade school and was dealing cocaine for the Mexican Mafia at age 19.

Shawn Jenkins wasn't a poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks. His family had money. He raced around on minibikes and motorcycles as a kid in Northern California, and his parents gave him a Mazda RX-7 sports car before he even had a driver's license.

But the gifts didn't fill the emotional chasm between Jenkins and his parents. Only drugs did and then only temporarily. The high school football captain tried college for a semester and left to be a serious drug dealer.

During the next five years, the glamour and thrill of selling drugs gave way to the despair of being both dealer and user. Home had become a car or a camper shell pitched behind a diesel-repair shop.

Jenkins owed money to dangerous people. And in the six hours before he made the 3 a.m. phone call that saved his life in the summer of 1988, a paranoid Jenkins smoked and snorted 9 grams of cocaine.

"I was getting to the end of my rope," says Jenkins, who called his mom from a pay phone and told her he wanted help. Jenkins expected to go into drug treatment in Phoenix, where she lived.

But his life, as miserable as it was, held a surprise: His stepfather, a crop-duster, was doing a job near Yuba City, no more than a mile or two from where Jenkins was calling. They met up, and Jenkins' stepdad took him to Fresno because a relative there had told him about a really good program called The Third Floor.

Twenty years later: Jenkins still is in Fresno. He's married, the father of two boys, ages 12 and 7. And he's chief operating officer of WestCare, a nonprofit health and human services company with 1,200 employees.

WestCare's good work is evident throughout California, six other states and the Virgin Islands. In July, the company opened a much-needed adolescent drug-treatment program in Hanford.

When I interviewed him last week, Jenkins was trying to save the jobs of WestCare drug counselors in state prisons. Their jobs were slashed by Gov. Schwarzenegger because of the state budget crisis.

"It's not just our employees I'm worried about," Jenkins says. "It's the effectiveness of the programs. One day the service just stops. What impact will that have?"

Jenkins' job is fast-paced and demanding and not anything like what he -- or anyone else -- would've envisioned for him back in the late 1980s when cocaine had turned him into a walking skeleton.

"I kept telling myself that I was going to make [a lot of money selling drugs] and get out," Jenkins says. "But tomorrow never comes, and it keeps getting worse and worse. I finally realized I was headed to a long stretch in prison or being dead."

Jenkins' recovery didn't unfold in a straight line. Four months into treatment, he called home and told his parents that he wanted out. Their smart, tough-love answer: leave and you're on your own. He stayed.

Six months later, Jenkins went to Arizona on a 72-hour pass. He got drunk and high and rekindled his Mexican Mafia connections.

"That undid everything," Jenkins says, "but I had made a 10-month investment in myself and I had a lot better awareness of who I was. I decided to go back into the program."

Jenkins went from patient to volunteer to counselor to maintenance guy to one of the top executives at WestCare, which merged with The Third Floor in the 1990s. Now that he's chief operating officer, he's working on a college degree to supplement what he learned on the way up and from the school of hard knocks.

And he's telling his story -- not to call attention to himself, but to offer hope to anyone battling drugs or alcohol. Things can get better. People do turn their lives around. He's living proof.

"If you really want help," Jenkins says, "you can get it."

The columnist can be reached at bmcewen@fresnobee.com or (559) 441-6632. Check out his blog at fresnobeehive.com/news.

WestCare is a 501(c)(3) Tax Exempt Organization