'I was a poison to the community': One man’s comeback from addiction to recovery

Everyone loves a good comeback story. The fallen hero who has to rise to the challenge; the guy who has been given chances to make good finally does; the underdog who has to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds to reach the other side. People flock to the stories, looking for something to hope for, restore their faith, or just something in which they can relate.

Whatever the reason, people just want a good comeback story.

The good news is that it doesn’t take much to find one. Sometimes, it is in our own backyard. One such comeback story, among the many that can be found within recovery, lives within Joel Kenworthy.

The name many be familiar to some. He was a talented hockey player who had been featured in sports stories in the early 2000’s. And for a while, his name was featured in police blotters as he spiraled into the throes of addiction.

“I was a poison to the community,” the 34-year old says. “I went from the sports section to the police beat to recovery.”

He says it wasn’t an easy journey. Since the age of 3, he grew up with a hockey stick in his hand. His father worked in a remote village in the Aleutians, while his mother remained in Wasilla, remarrying a few years later. He would travel back and forth, and explains that while in the village, there wasn’t much for parental supervision during the day, and he would run around with the other kids, “causing trouble.”

“That’s what our entertainment, because there weren’t any playgrounds. So we’d ride our 4-wheelers and vandalize things for fun,” he says of his times with his dad.

When he would come back to Wasilla, he’d hang out at the skate park with the “stoners” while also playing hockey.

“I was doing all the things because I never wanted to go to my mom’s house because her husband was a trooper,” he said.

Ironically, it was his stepfather he was trying to avoid, that would come when called in the middle of the night.

“When I started getting into drugs, he did end up trying to rescue me if I got pulled over in the middle of the night. I don’t think he knew the severity of my situation, but was trying to build a better relationship,” he said.

And his situation was severe. Kenworthy says at some point, he was doing cocaine in high school.

“I started off smoking weed at parties, trying to be accepted,” he explains. “I think acceptance is a real strong thing I struggled with because I always wanted to fit in, I always wanted to be the craziest guy there. I wanted to be the person that was talked about.”

His desire to be “that guy” that everyone looked up to for the “stupidest reason” while thinking everything was cool, ultimately led him into addiction.

“I had all the friends, I was popular in school, so I thought I was cool. I didn’t know that I was an addict or alcoholic until I saw that everyone would party and go to school, while I was in the bathroom at school snorting coke,” Kenworthy said.

Kenworthy says that his addiction really took off when he really got into pills after a hockey teammate offered him some OxyContin.

“His mom had a prescription and I would sell them for her. So I had lots of money selling, and I had no bills at that time, that’s when my addiction really took off,” he said.

After he graduated high school, he stopped playing hockey and was full-on into his addiction, moving from oxy to meth, then to heroin

“I’ll do coke, but I’m never gonna do meth,” he told himself but before long, he would be saying, “I’ll do oxy, but I’m never gonna do heroin.”

His first stint at rehab was in 2009, after he went to his dad, telling him he needed help. But he was still enabling him, as Kenworthy tells it, by letting him stay at his house and turning a blind eye to his behaviors.

“He didn’t really understand the brain of an addict, you know,” Kentworthy said.

He went to rehab in California, and stayed clean for a while, remaining in California for 10 months. He joined the Navy for a while before being medically discharged after contracting an illness related to his prior drug use.

Returning to Alaska, he was sober, working, and met a girl, and before he knew it, they both started using again. Her parents held an intervention for them both. While she went to treatment in Wyoming, he started using Suboxone, a prescription medication used to treat opioid addiction in adults.

When she returned, she got pregnant, and they had a daughter.

“We were clean, we had a kid, and we were doing all the things, having jobs, cars, a life,” he says.

Not long after, Kenworthy started an apprenticeship in sheet metal, making good money and taking care of his family. He had a good stretch for a few years.

Then they broke up, and his ex-girlfriend and daughter moved back to Wyoming. For a while, he kept himself clean, had 7,000 hours in his apprenticeship, still making good money, and making trips to visit his daughter. But he’d lost his support network he had in California.

“I didn’t talk to them, I thought I was fine, I never really understood the severity of addiction,” he says of that time.

Kenworthy says he had also started hanging out with his old friends.

Most people know that it can be hard to be around negative behaviors without eventually falling into those behaviors yourself, which is what happened to Kenworthy.

“I was hanging out with all the old people, they were getting high, and I wasn’t, at first thinking I’m fine. After a couple weeks, if that, I started wanting that too. I started using again,” he said.

It wasn’t long until it was affecting his work, using at work all the time. Soon he lost his job, along with everything else.

“Things then quickly vanished. My truck got repo-ed, I couldn’t afford to go see my daughter. I lost everything,” Kenworthy said.

He says that at the time, his daughter hadn’t seen him under the influence, and in his mind, that he wasn’t doing too bad.

“In reality, my daughter didn’t see me…at all.”

Kenworthy ended up living in a trap house, selling drugs, stealing anything to support his addiction. Soon, his picture ended up on Facebook as his criminal activities increased and warrants were issued.

During this time period, SB-91 had been the law in Alaska, which reformed the state’s parole and pretrial systems and lowered criminal punishments for nonviolent offenses. While Kenworthy had racked up arrests for minor offenses, little did he know that those arrests were adding up. In May of 2019, he was arrested, again. But there would be no slap on the wrist like before.

“I thought I was going to jail for a couple of misdemeanor warrants. But when I was in jail, I was served with a bunch of papers-all the charges were adding up. I wasn’t getting out of jail,” he said.

With a bail set at $15,000, and the Alaska Senate voting to repeal and replace much of SB-91, making simple drug possession a jailable offense, multiple arrests for certain misdemeanors a felony, and increases in punishments for violating conditions of release, reality had set in for Kenworthy.

“I didn’t think it would ever happen to me, going to prison for a long time. I was so used to getting out of jail all the time,” he said.

When he was in jail, Kenworthy heard of a religious treatment facility that he ended up going to, which marked the start of his comeback.

“I didn’t really believe in God, you know? I went there (to the treatment facility), and really built a relationship with my Higher Power.”

He was in treatment for 53 days, but relapsed and was sent back to jail for a year.

“I went back that time (to jail), and thought about all the things I learned. I clearly wasn’t ready until then; that’s when I had my change of heart. I went back and I really got with the program. Started taking every class possible, started going to church every week, anything possible to better myself,” Kenworthy said.

The change didn’t go unnoticed, and though he remained incarcerated for a year, when he went before the parole board, he was released with discretionary parole.

“I never looked back since then. My turning point was going to prison.”

After receiving his parole, Kenworthy moved into a Christian transitional house and began the process of rebuilding his life. Much of it he says he owes to law enforcement.

Kenworthy says now when he sees the police officers that arrested him, or raided his house for stolen goods, that now he thanks them for sending him to prison.

“Who knows where I’d be if I didn’t go to prison, that’s what it took. I couldn’t stop myself, I was running, wouldn’t contact my daughter or my family. People wondering if I was even still alive,” he says, adding that his father was relieved to know he was in jail because that meant he was alive, as apparently there was at one point a missing person report on him.

“The things you do in addiction, I never thought I would be that guy, that I would be such a poison to the community,” Kenworthy said.

Which is one of the reasons he now works for True North Recovery.

Initially, Kenworthy worked in construction after his parole, but would attend sober recovery events, and through his volunteering, one day he was approached by Karl Soderstrom, who asked if he would be interested in working for him. After praying about it, he realized that rather than being confined to crawl spaces or installing heat units, he could put his high energy and adaptable personality to work.

“I can relate to others who are struggling with the same things I struggled with,” he said.

He has worked for True North Recovery for over a year, and loves going to work every day, providing some guidance to the clients is “what fills my cup.”

“I get to be a son today, I get to be a father today,” he said.

He also plays hockey again, recently playing against some of the very people who had arrested him in the past.

Kenworthy says he now sees his daughter regularly, even now he’s preparing to leave to visit her this month.

These days, Kenworthy is the Residential Peer Lead at Vida Nova, a residential treatment program that serves as part of TNR, no longer a “poison,” but offering guidance and hope to people going through addiction and recovery.

“I thought ‘no one wants to hear my crap.’ But just getting out takes that grip away and is freeing. The odds are that you’re not unique and that someone’s gone through what you’re going through. You just have to talk to people and figure out how they got through it,” he said.

He is coming up on three years of sobriety. Kenworthy acknowledges that recovery is something he has to deal with on a daily basis.

“At first it was shameful, like ‘I can’t believe I did this.’ But now, I say ‘I did this and I came out of it and I’m doing amazing.”

When asked what he wants people to know as a final thought, Kenworthy says, “Recovery is possible for anybody. I went from the bottom of the barrel, the scum of Wasilla, and I sit here today able to show up for my family, my daughter, with all the things I have. I did it, so can they.”

For more information about True North Recovery, visit tnrak.org. If you or someone you know is experiencing mental health crisis, dial 988.