Freedom Robber

Once a free and energetic teenager from a good home with every reason to succeed, she was later offered promises of greater thrills but only given a long ride of deception and lies. Many years ago, Florence was a woman I once knew who lost her freedom. I was a college student of 19 and worked parttime with a Drug Rehab Program. She was 52 when I met her but had lost the best years of her life before then. There were years of incarceration but that is not the primary freedom robber. She lost her freedom with that first experience with illegal drugs which led her to hard drugs and onto a never-ending path of destruction and captivity. When I met her in 1969, heroin had taken everything from her except a broken down body willing and ready for anything looking like a remedy from the kingdom of heroin. She came into the program and kicked her addiction 'cold turkey' and soon after the withdrawals, she was sent hundreds of miles away to a more extended recovery program. The next months and years witnessed a great transformation of a woman once born free and full of smiles and laughter but later stripped and torn of peace and happiness. She later became a mother and healing tonic to many young ladies bound as she had been for most of her life. Florence became the first of many with whom I was privileged to meet and give aid to their recovery. She was my first hands-on introduction to the hard-core street life of drug-infested America. In the late '60s, with one eye I was witnessing the quest for civil and political freedoms, and with my other eye, I was deep in the trenches with people hungering and longing in a quest to be free from drug addiction. I learned my lessons well from the streets of Chicago. 03262019PoSoupContest, Freedom To Nothing To Something, Delilah Ventura