Taking a Long Trip From Addiction to Achievement

Beverly Hur’s credentials at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa are impressive: former president of the debate team, past member of the student government board, honors night award winner, 3.8 grade average. She’s scheduled to get her associate of arts degree in May and plans to go on to USC.

To understand what these accomplishments mean to Hur, you have to reach down and take a look at the depths she once reached. Her hellish existence is one most of us know only through some fiction writer’s imagination.

Hur, now 32, was raised in Garden Grove and graduated from its Bolsa Grande High School. Rebellion came at an early age. By her early teens, she’d already broken every window in her home, smashed every piece of furniture she could.

There was fighting at home, but she’s reluctant to say more about it for fear of hurting her parents today.

“I hated them, and I hated myself,” she says now. Her parents had to call the police numerous times just to keep her from destroying the house, or herself.

By her first year of high school, Hur was a prime candidate for any illicit offerings available on her campus: alcohol, PCP, cocaine, marijuana, hallucinogens.

With my own 13-year-old son in mind, I asked Hur if it was really that easy for young people to get drugs. She laughed: “You can get it when you’re 7.”

Hur made it through high school, but just barely.

“I hated school,” she says. “I had no friends. I lived in fear every day that nobody liked me. My life was total crap.”

*

Somehow she made it into Golden West College in Huntington Beach, but that lasted only a few months.

“I got married,” she says. “As soon as he and I discovered each other, we both quit.”

He was deep into drugs, of course, as was Hur. It was their one common bond. The marriage was annulled after a few months. For Hur, things only got worse.

“I existed by leeching off my parents, or leeching off a boyfriend. Or I’d live with a drug dealer just to be closer to the drugs. I’d lie, cheat or steal for drugs. I’d commit murder for cocaine if I had to.”

If Hur worked at all, it was in a bar, where she was mainly a waitress, and would get men to buy her the alcohol she needed to dull the pain of her life. She’d also make more contacts there for drugs. But bar work didn’t pay enough to feed her expensive habit, so she became a stripper. Stripping improved her income, but not her lifestyle.

“I’d work for two days, then I’d get loaded the rest of the week. Even days I worked, we’d snort a few lines in the bathroom in the back of the club.”

*

What’s astonishing is how long she kept at it, year after year. Beverly Hur was a serious drug user from age 15 to age 29. I asked Hur how often she’d take drugs.

“Every day. I never missed a day. Listen, I was an addict. I didn’t take drugs to get high with friends. I did it just sitting alone at whatever place I was living. I was miserable. But I just assumed that’s the way you were supposed to live if you were addicted.”

With the drugs came seizures, and heart problems. She got down to 85 pounds from her usual 125. Her hair started falling out, her skin turned yellow. She’d go days without eating, sleeping very little.

“I was killing myself, and didn’t care. I just thought that’s how addicts were supposed to die.”

Getting arrested on drug-related charges, and sometimes worse, was common. Hur tried the U.S. Army once, but the military didn’t want someone with her arrest record.

*

Then one day another stripper told her about being in a drug recovery program.

“It was the first time in my life that I even knew such places existed. I didn’t know a drug addict could be helped.”

Hur tried it, but failed. Her parents got their hopes up, only to be disappointed when, she says, “I went back to getting loaded.”

Now she had no family to turn to. She had no money saved. No home of her own. The bottom came when her heart stopped beating in some squalid apartment. Paramedics worked furiously just to get a pulse.

“I woke up with all these people around me. I assumed they were cops, because I had nine warrants out in four different counties. I just figured they’d caught up with me.”

One of the paramedics told her: “I don’t know what you’re on, but if you don’t stop it, you’re going to die.”

The message, coming right after a close brush with death, made an impact: “I just hurt so bad, and I was so tired, and so lonely.”

*

So she decided to try a recovery program one more time. She can’t say which one, to keep from breaking the vow of anonymity it requires. But this time she was determined to stick it out.

“I took all my drugs and dumped them in a dumpster next to the Garden Grove Police Department,” she says. “I figured it was the only place where I wouldn’t go back and dig them out.”

This time, recovery went better: “They welcomed me with open arms. They cared about me.”

Not that all went smoothly. “I can remember one time wanting drugs so bad that it took five of the other girls in the recovery house, literally sitting on my lap, to hold me back.” Slowly, her obsession with drugs loosened its grip. One of the program’s steps involved someone sponsoring the women recovering.

Hur’s sponsor wanted her to try Orange Coast College. Hur laughed that she wasn’t the college type. But her sponsor, who was dyslexic, told her: “If I can make it in college, you can make it.”

And so Hur tried. Her high school record was so blemished that she had to take several courses just to put her at the same level as some of the other students. It wasn’t until her second year that she started feeling comfortable with a full load of classes.

She also discovered the debate team--and found out she was good at it. The Orange Coast team, always nationally ranked among community colleges, made it to the nationals. In her second year, Hur was chosen as its president.

*

Hur says the list of professors at Orange Coast who have helped turn her life around “is as long as your arm.” One she mentioned immediately was Kat Carroll, one of the debate coaches.

Carroll told me she is confident Hur is going to make it in the world, and make it big. “She has such energy, and such passion,” Carroll says. “Absolutely she’s going to be a success.”

This year, Hur has dropped all extracurricular activities, because she’s had to get a job as a physical trainer to help pay her way. But she’s enjoying college life as much as ever--as well as her newly discovered relationship with her parents.

“I remember on honors night, my dad was just busting buttons, he was so happy. For the first time in his life, he got to be the proud father. You have to remember: My parents had to worry whether they’d be burying their daughter.”

Hur has never wavered from her desire to go to USC. She wants to major in either communications or geology, because she loves both. She’s not sure yet where life will take her. But for the first time, she’s not afraid.

“I’m 32 years old and wondering what I’m going to do when I grow up. I can’t wait to find out.”

Wrap-Up: Hur made a promise to me: Five years from now, she’ll call and let me know where she is in life.

“I can’t say for sure that I’ll make it,” she says, meaning staying away from drugs. “But my parents are confident that I will. And I really do think I can.”

And I made a promise to Hur: That I’d be there for her USC graduation. She says she’ll hold me to it.

Jerry Hicks’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Readers may reach Hicks by call-ing The Times Orange County Edition at (714) 966-7823, by fax at (714) 966-7711 or by e-mail at jerry.hicks@latimes.com.