At 23, Tony Landecker is a college sophomore making up for lost time. He's on the dean's list at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, an amazing turn of events given his flagrant 12-year history as a drug and alcohol abuser — drunk, crack smoker, paint huffer.

Landecker has two words tattooed on his back: “Never Forget.”  He was a child prodigy of substance abuse. Now, living in special housing for students in recovery, he is a believer in the 12 Steps. “If you don't start having a higher power and start cleaning out the wreckage of the past,” he says, “you don't have a chance.”

Landecker's downward spiral is a cautionary tale; it doesn't take much to start a habit.

He grew up in a middle-class home in Minnesota’s Breezy Point, set on a lake in the north woods. His grandfather gave him his first beer when he was nine, while on a family trip in Canada. “I remember thinking, ‘I'm one of the guys at nine years old!’” he says. “And I was slurring my speech and I remember everyone thinking it was kind of a joke that I was feeling drunk.'"

Next came more drinking on family hunting and fishing trips; then, cigarettes, shoplifting and mixing “Windsor-7s” — Windsor Canadian Whisky and 7-Up cocktails — for his parents, Kim, a homemaker, and David, a land surveyor.

“Pretty soon I started having friends over after school and we would drink. One of the most memorable times was we got drunk before going to the eighth-grade football game; we took a bunch of shots, then played. It wasn't looked down on in my family, drinking."

Still, his parents saw red flags and enrolled him in an adolescent treatment center in nearby Brainerd. “It was kind of hardcore that I was in treatment at 14 and I definitely thought it was cool … As with most treatment centers, you get what you put into it. And I wasn’t putting anything into it.”

He spent eight days at the renowned Hazelden treatment center in Minneapolis. Landecker complied only enough to “keep the heat off,” then became an outpatient at a hospital clinic — and went straight.

He didn't touch alcohol for more than three years. He went to 12-Step meetings, excelled in school, played varsity basketball. Still, “it kind of lingered in my head that I'd never done drugs."

After 10th grade, while working for his dad’s surveying business, an employee “showed me how to huff paint, and I was instantly hooked. I huffed paint, butane. And I smoked pot for the first time. And from there it was off to the races: acid, methamphetamines. I'd be a spree person: acid for four or five months, then Ecstasy.”

During senior spring break, Landecker went with friends to Fort Myers Beach, Fla. They promised themselves to drink only once, but got drunk “four or five nights in a row.” Back at school, he didn't stop. Why bother? He was popular and a star athlete: “I hit the longest home run in school history, drunk.”

He was also a “menace”: Landecker claims he introduced many of his classmates to alcohol and drugs. He was pushing his mother around, threatening his father, frightening his little brother. His parents “would lock their door because they'd fear I was going to kill them.”

Graduating high school in 2002, he won a scholarship to play football and baseball at the University of Minnesota in Crookston and immediately “got mixed in with people who got drunk, smoked, did cocaine.” He never went to class: “The only time I woke up to shower was at night to go to the bar.”

Having been through the 12-Step program as an adolescent, he only too well understood the cycles of his dependency: “Every time I used, I’d think about how stupid I was, how this was going nowhere but bad. And every drug I used, I got addicted to. So I hated myself. And then to stop hating myself, I used. And the more I used, the more I forgot about what I was doing. It was a great escape route.”

Back in Breezy Point during the summer of 2003, he worked in a marina owned by alcoholics. “I was doing a lot more cocaine now, probably $500 a week. And I'd start drinking at 8 in the morning, vodka Red Bulls, and I wouldn't stop drinking until 2 or 3 the next morning. I started having an enlarged liver — people could see it; you can see it womp out when it’s swollen. I was doing 1.75 liters of hard liquor a day and pretty close to going to treatment. I'd always end up getting drunk and forgetting about it.”

At school that fall, he dealt cocaine and marijuana. “And, finally, one day, I wrote like $2,000 in bad checks. My court fines (for a DUI and underage drinking violations) weren't being paid. I called my dad and told him that I needed help.

“They sent me to this place called Glenmore in Crookston, and I had seizures while detoxing. It was a five-day process of puking and waking up hot and cold and seeing hallucinations of little purple men. It was just unbelievable, the depths of addiction I had in my body.”

He transferred to Hazelden and landed in a halfway house. He didn't drink. But he also didn't do prescribed chores or attend 12-Step meetings. Instead, moving to a privately owned “sober house,” he began visiting casinos and strip joints.

School was history. He moved in with an ex-roommate and “started smoking crack. I started drinking all day long again. And I had never been to such a low point in my life. I was calling my parents drunk from the highway.”

In August 2004, his roommate took him to The Lodge at Hazelden. This was the turning point: Landecker “had a spiritual experience, really got in touch with the higher power. They take you on nature walks. They make you pray in the morning and in the night and in the day. And they made you fill out a list of things you were grateful for, like having a family that actually cared about you, like having friends who cared enough about you to take you to this place. “And I've been sober ever since.”

His relationship with his family is “outstanding. They want me to come home. They trust me again.”

His parents have banned alcohol from their lives; his mother is earning a degree toward becoming a chemical dependency counselor.

In his first year at Augsburg, Landecker has a 3.66 GPA. “Football's going exceptional,” he says; he plays free safety. He hasn't missed a class, avoids parties and is a rock-solid follower of the 12 Steps, attending three meetings a week off campus. “I've never been this strong.”
He’s now a role model for the newly sober, because he was mentored himself — and because he needs to “vicariously feel the pain” of addiction, so he doesn't forget his own and slip back.

Landecker speaks about addiction in schools and clinics and is helping establish a national online recovery network to help college students, especially athletes, find sober roommates and maintain sober lifestyles.

Augsburg, a Lutheran liberal arts college with 1,700 day students, has its own “StepUP” recovery program, with sober dorms, counseling and regular community meetings for about 40 young men and women, as well as StepUP alumni. The 12-Step philosophy is integrated into the program. It all serves to reinforce Landecker's sobriety.

Yet he doesn't believe most treatment programs are effective, at least not for stubborn young people: “Let's say my kids end up alcoholic; I'd never even send them to treatment unless they were so deep into their addiction that they needed to get out of there.”

He is convinced that recovery comes only from the 12 Steps and what they teach: faith in a higher power and “service to the newcomer who's got one day of sobriety.

“In the end,” he says, “no one could have told me to stop using drugs and alcohol until I was ready. You just can't push someone to that.”

(Richard Scheinin is a reporter for The San Jose Mercury News.)
 

Back to Top