In one of Ricky Austin’s earliest memories, he wakes up in his family’s Baltimore home and sees the adults in his life using illegal narcotics, “shooting drugs in their neck.”
“I laid back down so nobody could see me,” he recalls.
Ricky, now 53, says he first tried cocaine when he was 13 and “Time went so fast. I look up again, and I was 17 and a full-blown junkie,” he says. “By the time I was 19, all bets were off. I was done. I was strung out. That was it.”
But it wasn’t. Ricky learned about Prevention Point Philadelphia (PPP) when he moved to the city from Baltimore six years ago. First he utilized PPP’s HIV prevention supplies services program. Then he sought out the organization when the weather was frigid and living on the street was unbearable without relief. Then, after a lifetime of addiction, he asked PPP for help getting into recovery.
He became a PPP regular, going to its clinic for “the regimen of medicine that I needed. And they made it so easy.”
“It was a blessing to be able to come down here in the morning, when they open, and someone would be here. Where else do they do that?” he muses. “That’s selflessness, that’s unconditional love that you don’t see everywhere.”
Today Ricky is celebrating four years of sobriety. He has an apartment, a job he enjoys, and much love for the organization that helped him get to where he is now.
“Everybody needs a Prevention Point in their life. Everybody,” Ricky says. “Every city, it should be mandated they have a Prevention Point. It really, really should.”
Ricky had tried to break the cycle of addiction before with the help of other organizations, but those places “are all about the numbers. They just push you through so when it comes to an audit, they can say, ‘We did this,’ and they haven’t provided any real help at all.”
PPP is the complete opposite, he says, offering a “complete wrap-around service component” and hiring a staff of compassionate individuals who do their best to help anyone who asks.
“Nobody could ever tell me that they didn't get any help here. If you came to these doors and you didn't get any help, it's because you didn't want it,” he says. “I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn't for that help.”
Ricky knows some critics maintain that providing people with HIV prevention supplies is “enabling” their substance use disorder. That’s not true, he says. HIV prevention supplies stanch the spread of diseases while also introducing those struggling with addiction to people who care, who will be present for them, and who will connect them to the services they need.
“You don't see that kind of selflessness,” he says. Many who are using narcotics first learn about PPP through the HIV prevention supplies services, then find “there’s a multitude of services that everybody can use.”
PPP employed Ricky as a bathroom attendant when others might not have. When he wanted to find another job, PPP staffers helped him with his resume and cover letter. He found work as a dishwasher in West Philadelphia and is now a cook at the place where he once scraped plates. He loves what he does, he says.
Now Ricky would like to help others as PPP continues to support him.
“I always pay it forward and I don’t forget,” he says. ‘I know there’s going to be somebody who needs my help. There’s going to be somebody who needs me to guide them to Prevention Point. I’d rather be doing this—sharing my story—any given day than anything close to what I was doing before.”