Notable Achievers in Your Community : Former Addict Now Directs Counselors

When Cesar Carreno spoke at a meeting, everyone listened.

“I didn’t know why they were . . . but at that point I didn’t care,” said Ken Castro-Oistad, who met Carreno a year and a half ago when he became head of the Inter-Agency Drug Abuse Recovery Program.

Within six months, Castro-Oistad had made Carreno a program director overseeing 11 other counselors.

“I never dreamed I would get this far,” Carreno said.

His honesty and integrity helped get him the job even though some of the other applicants had college degrees and management experience.

Carreno, 45, also had a quarter-century of experience that uniquely qualified him in the field of drug addiction--his own.

“I think I’ve wasted 25, 26 years,” said Carreno, who admits to spending much of that time either high on heroin or in prison on drug-related charges.

The management job, a home in Lakeview Terrace and grandchildren, all of which he has today, seemed impossible to Carreno 10 years ago.

Then, he was in prison and considering suicide. “I thought of myself as a loser,” Carreno said.

Originally from Texas, Carreno didn’t know who his father was. He was dealing drugs by the age of 13.

“All I remember is streets and dope,” Carreno said. “I never thought I’d be able to overcome drug addiction. There was no light at the end of the tunnel.”

In 1986, while serving yet another prison sentence and seeing many of the same faces around him, Carreno started thinking about his 40s--which were fast approaching--and families he had seen destroyed by drugs.

Rosemary, his wife of 23 years, had stuck with him, helping him decide to turn his life around. She had also saved his two sons, Cesar Jr., now 23, and Rudy, 19, who, Carreno said, “were raised in a world of gangs and violence, espoused by their father.” Now a proud grandfather, Carreno also has two younger daughters.

In prison, Carreno finally joined support groups and studied the Bible.

“I thought my only problem was heroin,” said Carreno, who discovered after getting out of prison and off drugs that he had no job skills. He got a degree as a substance-abuse counselor while working in a warehouse and as a roofer.

“I had no experience, even answering the phones,” Carreno said. After getting the job with the recovery program, he practiced his telephone skills in his car on the way to work.

The program that Carreno runs counsels about 250 teen-agers a year in a camp run by the Los Angeles County Department of Probation at Lake Hughes.

For many of the youths, the camp is a last chance to straighten out their lives. After graduating from the 15-week program, they have six months of probation in which counselors try to help them stay clean and sober during the transition back into the community.

“I haven’t seen one kid yet who ever said to me, ‘I don’t want to change,’ ” Carreno said.

The program has had many success stories, including those of teen-agers who have been able to return to regular high school.

Carreno takes no comfort in the notion that saving one life is enough. “If you can save one, then you have the potential to save 100 in my eyes,” he said.

And there are the failures, as well. One 15-year-old boy called Carreno late one night, saying, “There’s no way out.” That boy was later killed in a fight.

Carreno often pushes the counselors, also ex-convicts and former addicts, not to let up on the youths. As counselors in some of Los Angeles County’s toughest neighborhoods, they may benefit from their street experience. But what is more important to Carreno is that they see beyond the baggy pants and gang attire.

“You got to break through the stereotypes,” Carreno said. “You’ve got to see a human being. If you can’t see that, go back to roofing.”

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