Family Drug Court celebrates big turnarounds

Rikki Garcia is not the person she used to be.

“I’d always been dependent on a man to take care of myself,” Garcia said Monday.

Garcia’s long-term relationship crumbled, so she found something else to depend on — drugs.

“It just numbed me inside. It just helped me to not think about all the things I was losing in my life,” Garcia said, looking back.

After being sober for six years, Garcia fell back into her old ways with methamphetamine.

“I thought I could do it just once, but when you’re an addict, there is no doing it just one time,” she said..

Not only was she smoking the drug, according to court documents, police suspected her of selling it.

Redmond police raided her home in August of last year, but no charges were brought.

“The children were there, and it was horrible,” Garcia recalled. “I don’t want to cry, but it was like the worst, most traumatic day of my life when my kids were removed from me.”

Garcia says she knows it’s easy to judge the choices she made, but living them, she couldn’t think past the next hit.

“I enjoyed the affect that meth gives you, that speed high,” said Garcia. “You know, my house was spotless, I had all these things that I got accomplished, and that’s the way it started for me — it was recreational.”

Soon, meth was part of her daily routine. Garcia says she would get high in her room, then take her kids to the park.

After 13 months in the Deschutes County Family Drug Court program, Garcia still takes her kids to the park. But she doesn’t need the drugs to get through her day.

“I’m grateful that it happened and it happened the way that it did because it put me in a position to where my life has changed drastically,” said Garcia.

Garcia was one of four women to graduate Monday from the Family Drug Court program. In its sixth year, the program has helped more than 100 parents get clean and sober.

They also work to help parents with drug addictions to be reunited with children that have been taken from the state and get them safe and stable housing.

Garcia’s son and daughter, now 9 and 7, were put in a foster home after her arrest. Now, she says getting her kids to trust her again has been the most difficult and painful part of her recovery.