‘Pain Is What People Are Trying to Escape’ : Abundance of Liquor Stores Makes It All Too Easy to Find Solace in Substance Abuse, Ex-Addict Says

Four years ago I weighed 128 pounds, I had been wearing the same jeans for a month and a half, my teeth were crumbling and my skin was ashy gray. I looked like a dead person.

I had totally given up. I had worked for the Los Angeles County Fire Department as a fire suppression aide and I had made it into the academy hoping to be a firefighter.

Then I had a knee injury and I washed out of the academy.

That really destroyed me. The self-esteem that I had was totally devastated.

I was already an alcoholic and I continued to drink heavily, but finally alcohol was not strong enough to kill the pain. I became involved in cocaine.

After five years, I had lost everything to cocaine. My house was foreclosed on, I was kicked off my property.

On Easter Sunday, 1990, I was on Skid Row and a church group was there feeding the homeless and hungry. There were gospel singers. I had what was really a spiritual experience.

I looked up to the sky and I said, “I know you’re there and I know you hear me.” And I said, “I don’t want to go on living anymore. Just take me off this earth.”

Then a strange feeling came over me and I just started crying and crying.

A couple weeks later I met the executive director of the Community Coalition and she directed me to a halfway house where I spent 14 months in a rehabilitation program learning about substance abuse and examining myself and what caused me to want to escape reality.

I realized that painful experiences in my childhood and adult life, the negative effects of racism and alcoholism in my family all contributed to my feeling that I was less than other people.

And that loss of self-esteem made me want to medicate my pain and led to my own abuse problems.

That’s why I feel it is really dangerous to have an abundance of liquor stores in an area that is economically depressed, where people’s self-esteem is lowered on a continual basis.

All the ways that people can live in pain and misery--they all exist in the inner city. Pain is what people are trying to escape. People are not taught the skills to cope with those emotions.

The alcohol industry knows exactly what it’s doing and what it’s perpetuating. They are ensuring that they will have a future market by flooding the black community with alcohol and making it look so tempting.

Young kids walk by those liquor stores and they see advertisements for 40 ounces of Olde English 800 malt liquor, what they call an 8-Ball.

I believe your environment plays a key factor in what you become in the future.

If everywhere you turn there are liquor stores, billboards and ads for liquor and everyone drinking is shown to be having a good time and finding happiness, then you’re setting up the next generation to be alcoholics.

The rappers, who are supposed to be successful images of the black community, are part of the problem.

They are shown on all the advertisements for liquor. To me, they are the worst traitors. They are not interested in how this stuff affects the black community.

I went through so much personal pain, I don’t want to see other people have to repeat what I went though. I had to travel a rough, rough way and I wouldn’t trade my recovery for anything.

I started drinking when I was 15 years old, hanging out and trying to fit in and be accepted. It was viewed as a normal thing for us kids to save money from our lunches and buy beer after school. The stigma of alcoholism never even dawned on us.

For me, most of the dealing for cocaine and other drugs that I did took place at liquor stores, using the phones on their property.

Once I went through recovery, I realized that alcoholism kept me backward in my social skills. I had arrested development from the time I was 15 because I turned to alcohol and I just stopped maturing emotionally and socially.

When you take that kind of immaturity and couple it with the pain in the inner city and add in an abundance of alcohol, you’re asking for dynamite.

I do have sympathy for the liquor store owners. I can understand that anyone who establishes a business in this country has to struggle to keep it.

But if there were an overabundance of liquor stores in the Korean American community, I would be just as angry about that.

I think sometimes we tend to worship the almighty dollar and put profit ahead of people and values.

Making a profit, to me, is not worth the pain and misery that causes alcoholism, the rise in health damages caused by alcohol, and the contribution alcohol makes to drive-by shootings, auto accidents and other hazardous situations.

Liquor store owners might be making a profit, but just look at the cost in the long run to humanity.

To me, human life is a lot more important than money.