A Second Chance

[Upbeat Guitar Music]

Mike: Welcome, everybody. This is Avoiding the Addiction Affliction brought to you by Westwords Consulting and the Kenosha County Substance Use Disorder Coalition. I'm Mike McGowan.

Mike: As we know, or at least we should know, we better know, substance use disorders do not discriminate. Everyone who's affected has a story and everybody's recovery has its own path.

Mike: The path to recovery of our guest took a look that was not traditional, but is one numerous people have taken over time. Eddie Jones is a native of Western Kentucky. After graduating law school, Eddie served as captain in the United States Army JAG Corps, serving with the service, both the 2nd Infantry Division and the 101st Airborne Division.

Mike: Eddie has practiced law in Western Kentucky since 1994, with a break here and there. He's also in his second term as McCracken County Commissioner. And as we'll find out, we'll hear in a little bit, he spent a little bit of time in Alabama.

Mike: Welcome Eddie.

Eddie: Thank you, Mike.

Mike: I love starting with the positive stuff right off the bat.

Mike: So you're in recovery for a long time now. How long?

Eddie: 23 years.

Mike: Wow, that is...

Eddie: 23 years, February 6th this coming year.

Mike: Wow. So that's the date around the date that this is going to air. So happy anniversary.

Eddie: Okay.

Mike: Well, you were and are an attorney. That's not an easy course of study.

Eddie: Yeah, I was very motivated early in life and you know, read to kill a mockingbird in high school and Atticus Finch is now, his pictures are in my hallway. So that was my... I don't know. It stuck. I wanted to be a lawyer and but in the middle of it I found some problems with addiction.

Mike: Well, okay. So, (chuckle) yeah, where does that, where does that come in? I mean, you're on a road and where does it come in? And when did you become aware that, Uh oh, this may be a problem.

Eddie: Yeah. So very atypical path for me, which I think probably made me more vulnerable once I actually decided to experiment. My drug of choice was cocaine.

Eddie: I didn't have an upbringing or a street sense, if you will, that prepared me for that type of experiment later in my thirties. Raised, my father was a minister kind of an apostle Paul tent making minister. He always had another career as well. My mother was that, you know, a very, she was a prayer warrior.

Eddie: I went to a Christian college. And you know, honestly, this path, you know, when I went this way, it surprised everybody. I mean, I don't think my parents saw this coming and I hit it well for a minute and then I didn't. So I'll bring you forward to that college, law school, army, get back.

Eddie: And I'm practicing law in my small hometown, about 30,000 folks at Henderson, Kentucky. Not doing poorly in the practice of law. But I go through a divorce at 35. And in that process, I had moved downtown and had this cool downtown apartment, lived above it. And you know, which was also probably, not a good setup.

Eddie: I wasn't prepared for that either. Everything was too easy access. Just a block down the street was really a cool bar. And before I knew it, I was trying to work hard because I needed money. And I was trying to stay awake because, you know, this was, you know, a younger person might not understand this, but this was before text messaging, before Facebook.

Eddie: If you wanted to have a social life, you know, it occurred generally between the hours of 7 and 11 at nighttime (laugh) after working, you know, and they're, you know, you didn't have the option to send out 5 text messages and see what happened. You actually had to show up, interact, wink, say something funny and see if it worked. (laugh)

Eddie: But so anyway.

Mike: And cocaine probably helped you stay awake.

Eddie: It helped me stay awake and it it brought a little more of me out than sometimes people wanted but there for a minute, everybody thought I was funny. And then maybe 30 minutes later, I wouldn't be. So my first experiment was, I remember it was a group of friends said, Hey, let's go to Nashville.

Eddie: At that time, there was a second street in Nashville was kind of a new thing. And so we were down to experience that. Went to the University of Kentucky Vanderbilt football game. It was October 1999. We can pull it back to the very date. And I had worked that day. I was a partner in a law firm. It was a Saturday, so I'd worked that morning.

Eddie: We drove down that afternoon. I remember I drove, did a couple of U turns on the way and the guys freaked out. And I'm like, just a U turn guys. What are you, you know, I didn't know we had cocaine with us. (chuckle)

Eddie: So anyway, so we go to the game. I still didn't know we had cocaine and I know I'm, I'm more tired than them. And I, you know, I, I'm not going to make it. And I say, guys, listen, I know I'm gonna hold you back. I'm just going to go to the room and go to bed. And he said, well, we'll walk you back. Which I thought was a little weird at the time.

Eddie: And anyway, I remember going into the restroom in my hotel room. They were still there. I came out. When I went into that restroom, I had never thought of using cocaine. When I came out, it was laid out, lined out, presented, and I had been asking for probably six months, how do you guys stay up so long, you know, and I remember one of them saying, you've been asking, this is the answer.

Eddie: And in that environment, you know, with the reward system of second street in Nashville, I said, all right, I'll try this experiment. And I don't know if you remember the movie Interview With The Vampire.

Mike: Sure.

Eddie: Brad Pitt. Kirsten Dunst, the little girl. Yeah. And Tom Cruise. Kirsten Dunst. Remember, she gets her first taste of blood and she immediately says, I want some more.

Mike: Wow.

Eddie: And it was kind of like that with me. I mean, it wasn't like, I want some more, I want to be a full blown addict. But the first line felt good, and I did feel energy, and I did feel awake and alert, and, you know, it wasn't long before I was like, Hey, who's got the rest of that? And on the way home, I remember thinking and asking you know, thinking about, hey, I'm in the business of billable hours.

Eddie: This type of energy might help me produce more billable hours, which will help me produce more money. And I went down that road and it seemed, (sigh) almost seemed like I had been invited to a secret world that wasn't as illegal as maybe it seemed.

Eddie: Meaning that there were more people, once you kind of got introduced into it, they were like, oh, they used to, they used to, and it's like, well, there was kind of this subset. in that community of successful folks who were using cocaine. And, you know, and I say that sometimes, you know, my daughter who's 22, 23 now.

Eddie: You know, sometimes I have to remind you, this is before the world of Adderall, before Vyvanse, before there was a Starbucks on every corner, before you could buy an energy drink at the 7 Eleven or the, you know, the grocery store. I don't remember there being a, other than methamphetamine came along shortly after, and I think it was kind of on its spin up at that time, but I didn't like that.

Mike: Yeah, it was Mountain Dew or you stepped it up four notches, right?

Eddie: Mountain Dew, ALA, or cocaine. And then, you know, I don't know.

Mike: Well, how long before you got in trouble with it?

Eddie: Yeah, I always say that I'm a terrible addict because by, I use at 35, by 37, I'm indicted by a federal grand jury and I'm in trouble.

Eddie: But because you know, this group of, you know, some other folks got indicted and I was kind of, you know, I suspect it was attractive to include the lawyer in the conspiracy. Turns out I didn't know much and I wasn't involved in the conspiracy other than... I wasn't involved in the conspiracy any more than I am with, you know, the grocery store.

Eddie: I just, I wanted somebody to sell it because I wanted to buy it.

Mike: And I was reading about it and what you were charged with federally was you were overcharged. Can I use that word with a lawyer? Whatever. But then you turned it around and said, thank goodness.

Eddie: Yeah, that's true. So ultimately, I was charged as being part of this conspiracy.

Eddie: Ultimately, they figured out, all right, you weren't quite as clever as we thought. And so I ended up pleading to an E felony, and that's called misprision of a felony, failure to report a felony, and when they actually caught me, I had a small amount of cocaine on me.

Mike: When you got, you then got sentenced to how long?

Eddie: So I think this, the federal sentence called for 22 months. The federal sentence got online. So when you get, you know my charges in the state court probably get probated.

Mike: Right.

Eddie: But in the federal system it was a little more rigid, particularly at that time. It was before some cases called Apprendi and some other cases that gave judges more discretion.

Eddie: It was very rigid for the federal judge at that time. So I got 22 months. I served 10 of those months in Alabama at Montgomery Air Force Base, which I suspect you are familiar with a guy named Chuck Colson. Yes, sure. So I don't know him other than he was in charge of prison fellowship at the time that I'm, you know, figuring out where I'm going to go.

Eddie: And, you know, I told you my parents were in the ministries, so my mother's like, you gotta talk to Colson.

Mike: Well, and for those of you listening who don't know, he was in the Nixon administration, got caught up in the Watergate stuff, and ended up turning to God and turned his life around.

Eddie: Right. And I remember I'd heard him cause I'd been to, there was some things called promise keepers that my brother and dad had gotten to earlier in life.

Eddie: And I remember being really impressed by his sermon and... Email was, it wasn't new. We'd, we'd had email for probably 10 years. So I'd found Chuck Colson's email and I emailed him. And you know, he connected me with some folks and kind of turned out that's where he had been in prison when he went to prison.

Eddie: And yeah, I don't know, maybe you didn't tell that part of the story, but he ended up serving about a year in federal prison and then became just a very effective baptist minister and started a prison fellowship.

Mike: So once you got sentenced, I read that you said the judge probably saved your life, right?

Eddie: Yeah.

Mike: Sentencing you long enough that you could take advantage of the program.

Eddie: Yeah, I think he was actually there was a nine month and I think there still is a nine month program. If you get into the federal system and you're not a violent offender and you're truly an addict, you can't kind of decide you're an addict after the fact.

Eddie: You've got to be truly an addict. They'll give you if you successfully do that nine month program they'll give you a year off of your sentence. So he gave me long enough to give me an incentive to do that nine month program. Took about a month to get in. And it was a really good program. I got to tell you, and, you know, and I know part of your mission is to develop, you know, protocols.

Eddie: So, you know, what, what works for recovery and what doesn't and what the federal government was doing at that time and what I think is still doing while it takes a while. It's a nine month program, right? You got to pay for the incarceration. I can compare it to what I went through on the state system.

Eddie: Cause after the federal system, I got transferred to a halfway house where I also did the state program. Night and day. Federal program.

Mike: Really?

Eddie: Way better. Yeah, way better.

Mike: What, what made it, Eddie, what made it better? I'm really curious about that.

Eddie: So we had a job. So in the morning time, I would do some sort of labor at the prison. I'm O. D. R.'ed, I did the weed eating. Eventually got a pretty cool job in the museum on the Air Force Base. (laugh) Just in time for the winter, by the way. And in the afternoons, it was kind of a small group. Twelve guys. We had a pretty active counselor.

Eddie: So for nine months we spend three hours in the afternoon together. And there's all kinds, you know, there's some real serious addicts in there. There's some folks who were really in some distribution plans, if you will. So they knew a lot about the game and, you know, and then there's me you know, the lawyer who just became an addict late in life.

Eddie: But you know, you got to know each other well. You become friends, you eventually share each other's story and you learn from each other. There was a course description that helped us go through. It was an effective program, really.

Mike: You know, I've always liked groups like that because they hold each other accountable.

Mike: Hard to BS a BSer, right?

Eddie: Right. Yeah. So, you know, we have no contact now, but you're right. In the meetings if somebody said something that didn't sound like truth. There were three guys saying, oh, come on. (laugh)

Mike: Yep. Well, now when you finally get out, but your law license is suspended.

Eddie: Right. So, I get arrested in 2002. I report to prison in the spring of 2003. So, it takes a long time. You've got about 18 months of just pre trial hanging out. Which, that was misery. Misery in, in that you don't know what to do with your life. You know you're about to take a vacation... extended.

Eddie: And, how do you plan around that? My daughter is about a year old, she was six months old when I got arrested. So, I did what I was supposed to do at that time. I bonded with, a little girl, which made prison harder, but made getting out of prison and life thereafter, well, more meaningful, right?

Eddie: So I do a halfway house. So, one of the crazy things about my situation is almost hard to explain. You got to know a little bit about Kentucky geography. My hometown is Henderson, which is about middle of the state. Come on down the river to the skinny part of Kentucky, near the very end, almost to Missouri, and that's the town of Paducah.

Eddie: Well, my indictment came out of Paducah, not Henderson. So, by the time I get to that point, I don't have any money left. So the attorneys won $50,000 and I'm smart enough to know I'm not giving it to them. I'm not letting anybody borrow money. Cause I kind of knew where this was headed, right? (chuckle)

Eddie: So I showed up to a judge I'd never met, in a courtroom I'd never been to and said I'm going to represent myself. Well, the judge didn't like that idea much. And he concluded pretty well that I probably qualified for a appointment of a public defender. And he appointed me to a part time public defender and his name is Rick Walter.

Eddie: So walk up the street, he's just got a brand new office and just ironically, I'm now in that today, 23 years later. And Rick is still in my life. He was just in the kitchen.

Mike: Wow. Wow. He came, so we kind of connected. I mean, I wasn't a bad lawyer. I just, you know, I just needed to be controlled for a minute.

Eddie: And once I was drug testing every week, which is what the federal government did, in the 18 months that I'm talking to you about. And we can come back to that. I think that's really important information. And I don't know why we don't do more of that. Drug testing has to be weekly. In order for an addict to really have that accountability, it's got to be weekly.

Eddie: As a government, we often try to cut the corner and say, well, we're going to do it random. We'll do it once every 30 days. Not good enough. Got to be weekly for a full blown addict. Anyway, so I start working. It works out. I'm in prison in Alabama and I get a call to the visiting room, which most of the time, you know when somebody's coming.

Eddie: And it's a little unnerving when you get called to the visiting room and you don't know who's coming. And so I get called to the visiting room and there's Rick. He's come down and he's just come to see me. And he's like, you know, I think when you get out, you got to move to Paducah and be my law clerk.

Eddie: You know, by that time the bar had suspended me. We knew I wasn't going to be practicing law when I get out. So I didn't know what I was going to do. I just didn't know. And well that worked out. So there was a halfway house in Paducah and transferred to the halfway house and start coming to work from the halfway house.

Eddie: And I'm still here. (laugh)

Mike: How does this go because eventually you get your law license back.

Eddie: Right.

Mike: But you couldn't have seen that on the horizon at Fort Henderson.

Eddie: Yeah, that's right. So, during the 2003/2004, that wasn't even, I mean, I was thinking, well, maybe, you know, what else can I do?

Eddie: I really didn't know. I mean, I figured I'd find something. But when he said move and be my law clerk, he paid just enough for me to make it (laugh) and not enough for me to get in trouble.

Mike: That's not, I was shaking my head. That's not bad.

Eddie: Yeah, I lived a completely different lifestyle. I no longer had the cool apartment, you know a block from the bar.

Eddie: I had a mobile home in a trailer park surrounded by some really nice neighbors. And we made that work. And so by about 2006, the Bar Association let me back in. I went to AA, NA every day. And on the weekends I was traveling back to Henderson. It's about two hours between Paducah and Henderson.

Eddie: So I would travel back. On the weekend, stay with my parents and I would co parent my daughter.

Mike: We were talking before we started this, and I love what you said about the AA meetings, that your sponsor told you.

Eddie: Yeah. So I remember kind of complaining because sometimes you go to, well, often you can go to an AA meeting and you leave there and you're like, that was a complete waste of time.

Eddie: And you're right. And then the truthfulness of that is important to understand. And I remember Sammy said, you're probably right. You only need three meetings a week, but you're going to have to go to about eight of them to find those three, because I don't know when they're going to happen. And that is the connection of AA and NA.

Eddie: You know, it depends a little on you. Something can happen before you go to the meeting. Maybe you have a bad conversation with your girlfriend, boyfriend, or mom or dad. That ruins that meeting. So you just got to sit through it. Or maybe the mix, you know, maybe it's just the wrong mix of people. Well, you just have to sit there, get what you can out of it, come back for another meeting, and maybe that will be. But I found that, and I was telling you that, you know, I always tried, you know, you get to where you look at the cars, all right, and I could see, ah, there was a guy named Jack, and Jack, I always liked it when Jack was there, because Jack had been... I really didn't have an addiction to alcohol, but I, you know, obviously there are correlations between cocaine and alcohol, and AA had a noon meeting at that time, NA did not.

Eddie: So, I needed a signature, and they wanted me to go, so I was willing to go. But Jack, I don't know, I love the hope of his story. He was a local physician and I don't know. I always just liked hearing him tell of the hope of recovery. He'd read the promises from the AA program and those become my favorite reading.

Mike: You know, there's a moment, and you haven't hit it yet, but there's a moment where you go from, because you've now talked about so many different people, and you haven't even hit them all, in your support system that helped you get it back on track. But then you, you became a support system at some point.

Mike: You began to reach out and help others.

Eddie: Yeah, so as part of the program, there were folks that would ask me to be their sponsor, and I would agree to be their sponsor. My dad got asked, so there was a local rehabilitation ministry, Teen Challenge, my dad was an assembly godmaster. So Teen Challenge was kind of formed out of a ministry [inaudible] that we got, by the name of David Wilkerson.

Eddie: And so dad was asked to be on the board for this new Teen Challenge program and a lot of the ministers knew me cause I'd been the preacher to get right on, so they needed a token director. So I want to make that sound more lofty than it was. I think I was asked to be on the the board of directors for that.

Eddie: A, because I was a recovery drug addict, and two, they'd all watched me grow up and they wanted to see me there (laugh) as way of a proof of recovery to them themselves. So, but it was obviously good to experience. But, let me make that point also. At some point when you're in recovery, you realize you owe.

Eddie: Give me a minute.

Mike: Yeah, no, that's great. I think you're right on the right track. That's the moment I was talking about.

Eddie: You got me. I've been doing good. But you owe proof of your recovery, right? And sometimes we're reluctant to give that. And I would just say, come on, give it. You know, I became a runner, and I learned it's hard to run at a good distance, at a good time, and be a cocaine user, right?

Eddie: So, if I ran races, my dad saw that score, he'd check it, all right, we're good. (laugh) So, you know, those little moments of comfort, somehow build them in where they're not fake, but allow your people to be, to see the proof of your recovery in a way that you're not demanding it, you know, in a way that goes beyond just your voice.

Eddie: Which they probably are not yet ready to believe without action.

Mike: That's really well put because there's there's that trust and there's that doubt and you don't want to make it the center of every conversation and so any little opportunity you have to alleviate those concerns is good. And sometimes, Eddie, support comes from unusual places.

Mike: My friends would tell me is called burying the lede. What? (laugh) But you did so much good stuff over so long that you recently received and, but when we're taping this, by the way, the president is still Joe Biden. President Biden gave you a presidential pardon. How does that come about?

Eddie: I applied some years ago.

Eddie: I think I told you earlier, I'm now married, ironically, still in the same law firm. I've married one of the young ladies that was working here and she's now been elected judge. While we're dating, she's like, you should, you should apply for a pardon. And so I got motivated and that was some years ago, probably seven years, you know, another guy was president.

Eddie: That didn't work out. And but I had worked through the process. And just so you know, that process, about a 20 page application, they want letters. You know, it's not impossible to do on your own. But you know, it takes some time. And in fact, I procrastinated for a long time, just because I had work, I had cases that were more important than that.

Eddie: And I eventually did it. You know, there's a season for pardon. It's kind of like, you know, squirrel season, duck season. And that season, pardon season is usually around the end of the term. So after the November election, I did reach out. So there's a United States pardon attorney. And some administrations don't lean on them much.

Eddie: Joe Biden has leaned on them quite a bit. It seems to me, or at least that day, that round of pardons he did. And I had sent a letter saying, Hey, I just want to check in, see if you need anything. They had previously already sent a retired FBI agent to Paducah twice to corroborate. So they're just from a public standpoint there, I can tell you there was there was quite a bit of scrutiny given to the application by the U.S. pardon attorney over a matter of years. But you know, it's also, what, 10,000 people apply a year.

Eddie: I don't know. I think I heard that figure that may not be right. So, you do what you can. I didn't know what was going to happen on December 11th. Ironically, it was my 60th birthday. About 2:30 in the afternoon, I looked down at my cell phone and it's a Washington, D. C. area code.

Eddie: All right. I'll take that one. Normally I don't take a call unless I know who's calling, right? I'll let it go to the voicemail. But I took that one and it was, I don't know the name of that person. But she was wonderful and she said, you got about 20 minutes? Let me walk you through this. She even said, this is probably going to be emotional.

Eddie: She was right. (laugh) So she asked me at the end of it, she said, do you have any questions for us? And I said, do you know today is my birthday?

Mike: Oh, wow. She didn't, did she?

Eddie: She didn't. No, of course she didn't. But I will say this, and her name was Deanna.

Eddie: I wrote it down, Deanna Evans, she'll probably never watch this, but she was so kind, she's a White House attorney, she called the next night, and she said, I'm just checking on you, you know, this is gonna be emotional, and, you know, it was, it was clear that she knew way more about me than obviously I knew about her.

Eddie: It was just, I don't know, just the kindness of the process was cool.

Mike: Well, and as you said, it's not an easy process. It's not one you can do by yourself. So you must be incredibly grateful to the people in your county. Well, one, they've elected you twice as commissioner, right?

Eddie: Yeah.

Mike: But there's a lot of support there.

Mike: Cause what I was reading, there was no like, Oh, and this is undeserved. They were like, they were at there at the front line saying you do this.

Eddie: Yeah. I really enjoyed being able, never would have thought I'd have the opportunity to do public service. My major in college was public administration. I don't really, you know, I do remember why I decided to write it. I'll tell you, it was 2016. And a guy who had started a coffee shop had been a city commissioner.

Eddie: I thought he was a cool commissioner and I'd gotten to know him and somebody else on the city commission decided they weren't going to run on that. You know what? I'd like to meet more people. What's the worst thing that can happen is they're going to talk about my recovery and my problems.

Eddie: And I'm pretty honest about that anyway, and I'm going to have a reason to meet more people in my town and I'll make more friends. And for the large part, that's been true. You know, it turns out even in local government, you can come a little passionate, you can maybe have opposite positions of people and that can affect your goal of making friends if you're not careful.

Eddie: But for the most part, that's happened. And what a rewarding experience it's been to be... So I didn't win that race, by the way. I lost. And the next time there was an opportunity to run for the county seat and run for the county seat and won, and that's been just a really heartwarming experience and consider the other commissioners and the county judge, some of my closest friends.

Mike: An opportunity to give back.

Eddie: Yeah.

Mike: Eddie, this has been fantastic. I could listen all day. I love stories like this. Is the reason we started the podcast, you know, break the stigma, allow people second chances, start all over again. Thanks for your story. Thanks for your work.

Eddie: Thanks. You honor me. Thank you. It's wonderful.

Eddie: Our country and its founding document has a provision for grace and that's pretty cool.

Mike: It is.

Eddie: Yeah. To get the forgiveness of our country. I'm greatful.

Mike: Outstanding.

Eddie: [inaudible] (laugh)

Mike: Well, for those of you listening, I'm emotional too. I hope you find support wherever you are. We always thank you for listening. Be safe and if you need a second chance, heck, I hope you get one and make the best of it.