Stephen Evans: Drug Lord to Dad to Possible Cult Member
“I don’t wanna be too graphic when I say this…” Wry laugh. “…But when you have all the drugs you could possibly want out in front of you, and you have nowhere to put a needle in your body cuz you’ve just blown out all your veins, like… you have to do some pretty questionable things to make sure that gets into your system. You’ll spend two, three hours, just stabbing at yourself, like a madman, bleeding everywhere, just hoping you’ll find somewhere to put the drugs in you.”
This is Stephen Evans, a heroin and coke addict for ten years. His dad got arrested the night he turned one, and is in prison for the rest of his life. His mom used to give him shots of whiskey to make him go to sleep at night. But Stephen’s plenty of other things too: tall, likes the dentist but not his teeth, has an adorable daughter named Annabella. He’s got a calm vibe — he’s polite, funny, charismatic, open. Really open. None of my questions were too nosy for him, or if they were, he answered them anyway.
“What made you want to stop?” I asked, in a hushed voice.
“You know, you’re addicted, you’re depressed, you’re frustrated, you’re usually withdrawing, and you’re just stuck there in that sheer anxiety, and then you do it and it lasts for 10 minutes and you’re like, ‘Well that was a nice relief but now I gotta do it again,’” Stephen said. “It just got old, and that happened quite a few times. This last time…I don’t know, something clicked this last time, it wasn’t fun anymore.”
So this is his story: how he went from taking entire bottles of Benadryl in elementary to being listed on the same suspect list as members of a Mexican drug cartel to becoming a father to ending up as an atheist in a Christian rehabilitation center in the middle of nowhere. And like everyone’s story, Stephen’s starts with his family.
The first time Stephen tasted the whiskey his mom gave him to put him to bed, he was about five years old, and he thought it was medicine and tasted terrible. But he didn’t go to sleep right away; instead, he stayed up and read a book, and the feeling the shot gave him quickly changed his mind about this new strange tasting medicine. He asked for it every night after that, and went through the entire medicine cabinet tasting medicine to try and find out which bottle the whiskey was in.
At 12, he started taking entire bottles of Benadryl and Ambien because he couldn’t sleep.
“I had insomnia for a couple of years, and it sucked,” Stephen said. “Now, I like drugs that make you fall asleep, and heroin makes you fall asleep.”
But he didn’t go straight from Benadryl to Heroin at the age of 12 — heroin came later, and it didn’t start out how you’d expect.
“My girlfriend at the time got female cramps pretty bad, and doctors will apparently prescribe you narcotics for that,” said Stephen, 17 at the time. “One night she just told me, “If you take exactly 2.5 of these, it feels great,” and I was like, ‘Well that’s more than you’re supposed to be taking.’”
But his girlfriend cajoled a little, and although he was scared half to death to take them, he did. She regretted immediately introducing him to something that he cared about more than her, or anything: things spiraled out of control immediately. They refilled the prescription as many times as they could, probably 20 times a month, until half a year went by and they were caught.
Time out, though. What made him care about the drugs so much? If you’ve never done drugs, you’re probably pretty in the dark about the actual feelings that come up when you find a drug you like. As cliché as it sounds, Stephen grew up feeling like the kid who didn’t belong, and drugs made him feel like he was ok, like he fit in.
“My brother used to tell me, ‘You can keep doing drugs, they don’t change you at all, you’re cooler this way, I like you better this way,’” Stephen said. “People picked on me growing up, I just grew up feeling different as it was, and it made me feel…” really quietly “…like I felt like I belonged, I guess.”
When he first started doing them, Stephen wasn’t trying to get messed up on drugs.
“I was like, ‘I should only do this much cuz I don’t wanna die or anything,’ then it was like, ‘I don’t care,’” Stephen said.
The school kicked him off the basketball his senior year because of how messed up on drugs he was. But years later, he still didn’t realize he was addicted.
“I had gone to a methadone clinic to try and get off opioids, and this lady told me I should go to AA and NA, to talk with all these other guys about how we got a drug problem, and I remember I just looked at this lady and laughed incredulously and was like, ‘What’s a drug problem?’”
Since there weren’t any drug addicts in Stephen’s family, even when he was a full-blown drug addict, he didn’t recognize it, or think anything of it. In the years that followed, Stephen was in and out of jail three times, on the run a lot more. The first time they sent him to jail, at age 19, it was for drug trafficking charges in El Paso county.
“They picked me up in a whole group of, this is gonna sound insane, but I got picked up in kinda like a RICO case; they grabbed a whole ton of us that were involved in this drug thing down there. So when you look at the list of names and court appearances and the discovery they give you of why you’re there, it says “Known or suspected Mexican cartel affiliates,” and there I am, right in the list of all the people, because I was one of two Caucasian people caught in this whole drug bust that was all Mexican nationals,” Stephen said.
“I was a part of that group of people and what they did, but in no way would I consider myself affiliated. I knew that they did worse things, but it was my job, it was my responsibility. They had a copy of my ID and I couldn’t use Facebook or Myspace (yeah, it was that far back), nobody could know my real name, I couldn’t hang out with people outside of there or answer personal phone calls. I was like a mule in a sense, a drug mule, but one that at least has some say in whether I do it or not. But I definitely wanted to go down in history, if it was gonna happen.”
When he was 25, he got jailed a second time. He had left all his drugs and paraphernalia at his family’s house in one of those gym bags that’s typical for this kind of thing — it was enough heroin and scales and money along with his wallet and identification to incriminate him.
So he was arrested for that, he got out of jail, went on the run, had a failure to appear in front of the court, turned himself in, got rearrested, and got out again. He would stay in hotels for months at a time, but it wasn’t a stable living situation, or a stable financial one either — one year he brought in $300,000 and the next he put it all into his arm through a needle.
Years later, and just a few months ago, Stephen got caught again. This last time the arrest was for more distribution charges, vehicular eluding from the police, getting out of his car and running with the partner that he was with, “And then that was like, when I kinda reached my criminal fame in a sense,” Stephen said. “I went to jail, I had a very easy jail stay. But then I thought about it while I was there, and I was like, this is seriously, what I wanted? Like, a bunch of people in orange jumpsuits that are just completely locked down all the time and just wanna beat the crap out of each other and have ego driven conversations with each other, it was just kinda depressing to think about it.”
Each time Stephen went to jail, it was only for a couple of months. He’d bond out, go on the run, bond out again, then say he would go to rehab.
“If I say that rehab here is monotonous, jail is — -when you get bored, you walk around in circles. Literally. Not like ten foot by ten foot circles, but like you walk around the whooooole bay area that you can walk around. You just like find a walking buddy, and you just walk. And talk,” Stephen said.
I asked if it was hard finding walking buddies. He said it was. “I’d make friends with the new guys, the one that walks in there with that look on his face like ‘Oh man what’d I do,’ you know, I’d just walk up and be like, ‘It’s gonna be alright bud. This is just gonna be really boring,’” Stephen laughed.
After his most recent stint in jail, Stephen was ready to go on the run again, selling drugs with some people he’d met in jail as soon as he got out. They wanted him to hang out with them in Gold Canyon one day. Stephen thought, “Alright, sweet,” and piled into the full car. He started feeling a little weird the further they wound up the mountain, though, and when they finally ground to a stop, another car pulled up sharply and Stephen knew he was about to get robbed or beaten.
“They wanted all the drugs that I had — everybody turned on me and I got stabbed and beaten half to death, I was bleeding everywhere. They stole my phone, money, drugs, my whole wallet, the hat off my own head, they even took my glasses off my own face,” Stephen said. “I finally, miraculously get out of that situation — some people who were riding their bikes up there in the hills came back to where their truck was, drive me back to civilization in the back of their truck and I’m just like dying in the truck bed basically.
“I go and tend to everything, and get more messed up of course, and I go and try to get ahold of my mom. I was on Facebook video messenger with her, and my face was beat to a pulp and I’m bleeding everywhere, like my teeth had been hit so hard they practically went through my lip — you can see scars everywhere on the inside of my mouth to this day even though outwardly it healed miraculously.
“My mom saw my face and she didn’t look shocked at all. I was like, ‘I need help, this is what happened,’ and she just… told me I deserved it and to figure it out, and then hung up on me.
“I didn’t really know how to take that…you know…when the one person who’s always had your back no matter what just looks at you borderline deathbed…you don’t know what to do. I won’t say I like had some epiphany or revelation over it, but it made me feel like a pretty terrible person, that my family would just give up on me like that.
“At that point, you just hope to die, really, and I did. I did. After everything I’ve been through, feeling scared, alone, feeling like I can’t trust anybody, it takes a lot to get a person like that to that point, but I finally felt like I don’t know who to trust and everyone turned their back on me.”
If a narrator were narrating Stephen’s life, it’d probably go something along the lines of, “These were dark, dark times for Stephen,” hopefully in a Morgan Freeman voice. To this day, Stephen still doesn’t really know how he feels about his mom, of all people. But he knows what he wants his daughter to feel about him. He’d been clean for a while when his daughter was born, but those nine months were a tense time for him and his ex-wife — they probably wouldn’t have stayed together as long as they did if she hadn’t been pregnant. As soon as his daughter was born, though, “I got soft,” Stephen said ruefully. “I was a hard core mean guy, a total douchebag, and then I had my daughter and all of a sudden I cry all the time, I’m a nice guy. It changed me, immediately, it was like I didn’t even care about my ex-wife and the cheating anymore, I just cared about this kid.”
Because he doesn’t have shared custody over her, though, Stephen hasn’t seen his daughter in five months. First thing on his agenda when he finishes his stint at Harvest Farm is to get a custody lawyer.
“I want my daughter back in my life. No matter what, if she became a drug addict, an alcoholic, was down and out, no matter what the situation was, I know I would go there and I would help her,” Stephen said. “People might call that an enabler, but… people can’t be given up on or they die.”
In October of 2017, when the judge gave him a choice between six years in prison or choosing a treatment facility, Stephen chose to come to Harvest Farm. But it wasn’t his first time here: seven years ago, Stephen checked himself in and left after a day of being there. It seemed a little like a cult, he thought, with the giant crosses everywhere and people singing hymns all the time.
Seven years later, they were still singing hymns. When he checked in the second time, Stephen walked down the road he would come to know so well in the coming months as high as he could possibly be, the new face that showed up. He walked into a room and everyone circled up and singing religious music. There was some praying involved. He thought sarcastically, “…And this is exactly why I left the first time.” But he didn’t leave a second time.
“You know, I came from jail, being down and out, robbed, screwed over, family giving up on me, to a place where I walked in and was shown love and compassion, which was nice, because everyone I know beat me up over the years, mentally and physically, including myself. So it was nice to come somewhere where they just… preach the New Testament of love and forgiveness and grace you know,” Stephen said with a “what can ya do about it” kind of laugh. “There’s a lot more love and leniency here than what I was used to.”
Stephen could definitely get away with leaving Harvest Farm’s program, but he doesn’t actually want to.
“You know, I don’t want to have any more regrets in my life, and one of them would be not finishing this, as easy as this is,” Stephen said. “They just ask you to go to your job, go to church on Sundays, don’t do drugs, don’t smoke cigarettes, and just don’t — don’t do any outlandish crap and you’re fine.” He laughs.
As simple as the program here is, though, it’s not easy giving up what consumed his life for a decade. Participants of the program take classes, and in one of the classes, they all did an exercise where they write down their four biggest values. Stephen wrote the usual: being a father, having friends, writing, etc., but was blanking on the last one. A lot of people seemed to be blanking, so the professor pointed out the value that was so obvious that nobody could see it. “Did anybody here write down drugs at all?”
“I was like, ‘Well I should’ve, cuz like it’s sad to say that it’s in my top four values, but like all that stuff and then a blank? I shouldn’t draw a blank,’” Stephen said. “Drugs is what I was passionate about for like ten years off and on — and it’s like losing your best friend kinda, in a sad messed up kind of way.”
This year, Stephen will be one year sober. But even after a couple of years being clean here and there, he says you never really forget about it.
“How drugs make you feel, it’s like, how do I describe it…you’re gonna go on a date with a guy you really like, ok? You’re like, ‘Oh he’s so great, I can’t wait to go, I wonder if he’s gonna kiss me,’ you know, you get butterflies in your stomach — that’s the feeling every drug addict and alcoholic gets before they use drugs or alcohol,” Stephen says. “And then one year later, you’re not getting that feeling in your stomach anymore. You’re like a person in a bad marriage that can’t get away. It goes from that butterfly feeling to hating the relationship.”
According to Stephen, he’ll never be able to stop thinking about it, or counting the time that he’s been sober, and it kind of gives him a sense of doom and gloom to have to count up all these increments of sobriety.
“To be clean, you gotta be devout to that lifestyle. Even for me at times, that just is mindboggling, I’m like, ‘You’re kiddin me, like, you’re telling me I can’t just take a couple Percosets on the weekend if I just wanna sit at home and play video games like the innocent old days?’ And the sad reality is, you just can’t,” Stephen said. “Cuz you do that, and a week later you’re doing heroin. It’s just that quick, like your brain just flips a switch and you’re back at it.”
The thing is, Stephen knows that healthy people have healthy routines. Being able to get in his own car, go to his own place, have his own living is something he doesn’t have anymore, and he misses it, more than almost anything, really.
“When I get free days, I’ll just sit there and people watch and look at how normal, and happy they are,” Stephen said. “And I just saw something I wanted. To be as normal as I possibly can, and not have to worry about being on probation for three years like I am or going to prison for six years like I can, or using drugs ever again, which has never gotten me anywhere besides exactly where we’re sitting right now. I just want to be a whole person again.”