Larry Colon was seven years old when he started smoking pot with his family because “they thought it was cute,” the Philadelphia native remembers. Surrounded by encouraging loved ones, he learned to blow smoke out of his nose, thinking it was the coolest thing he’d ever done.
Fast forward seven years. Larry’s mother and brother were behind bars. His father had never been part of his life. His aunt and other extended family members weren’t interested in taking care of him. He was barely a teenager and completely alone.
But he knew how to remedy that.
“I found out very early that as long as I used drugs, there was a whole community (around me),” says Larry, now 27. “It allowed me to be with people, no matter if they’re stealing from me. As long as I used, there’d be somebody next to me who was using.”
Isolation became a big thing. (Using drugs) kept people with me.
Now six months into his sobriety, Larry realizes he doesn’t need to use drugs to feel connected to others. In fact, the opposite is true.
“Prevention Point ended up being my family,” Larry says. “I wouldn’t be here without the support of people like them.”
Larry began experimenting with drugs, particularly K2 (synthetic marijuana), as a pre-teen. He spent his teen years in and out of juvenile detention facilities. When he wasn’t locked up, he was shunned by family members. “It got to the point that I would knock on the door in summer and ask for tap water and they’d slam the door in my face,” he says. “Isolation became a big thing. (Using drugs) kept people with me.”
Larry was 19 the first time he tried in-patient rehab, attracted to the idea of having a consistent place to stay and three meals a day. He followed a girl he’d met there when she moved to New Jersey. During his visit, she started injecting heroin again, and to impress her, he started doing it too. “I didn’t overdose, thank God, but that’s what kickstarted my use of heroin,” Larry recalls.
When he followed his girlfriend once again to live with her father in rural Pennsylvania, Larry discovered that the neighbor made meth. “I snorted it, I smoked it, I hot railed it, I shot it,” Larry says. “I fell in love with speed and started mixing it (with opioids).”
After the couple broke up, Larry returned to Philadelphia where “it was a whole different ball game. Now fentanyl was in the picture.”
The first time Larry overdosed, it was just a couple blocks away from Prevention Point Philadelphia (PPP) and he was revived with Narcan by staff. That was also the first time he’d heard of the organization. When he woke up, the staff told him about PPP’s services and he “fell in love with Prevention Point.” Larry says he has come back every single day in the six years since.
He started by becoming a patient in PPP’s drug treatment clinic. First, he took Suboxone, then moved on to Sublocade. He is now staying sober with the help of methadone. Larry has been diagnosed with hepatitis C, and he’s treating it with the support and guidance of PPP’s staff, including his case manager Moses.
Larry says his life now has so much meaning. He has a job doing food prep for a non-profit that provides daily meals to those in need. (“I don’t look at it as a cooking job. I look at it as helping the less fortunate,” he says.). He’s building a relationship via video visit with his seven-year-old daughter, who he’d last seen when she was a toddler.
My goal is to find out who I am and to grow and love that person.
“She’s so intelligent,” Larry says. “She asked me, ‘Dad, if you come back, are you staying?’ And she said, ‘Dad, no matter what, I love you.’ Now I’m doing so good I talk to her every day.”
Larry’s setting goals for himself. His short-term goal: visiting his daughter in New York. In the longer term, he wants to reexamine his own life and issues so he can move into the future from a place of strength.
“I have a lot of searching to do, have a lot of figuring out to do,” he says. “My goal is to find out who I am and to grow and love that person.”