A VISION OF HOPE

Drasen recalls his experiences with addiction, incarceration, and healing in this memoir.

The author opens with a vignette from a day in Feb. 2019, which he planned to spend with family celebrating his mother’s 61st birthday. What began as a pit-stop to pick up a free heroin sample from his dealer, T-Bone, ended with him passing out in his car before being awoken by an emergency medical technician and the police. Given that he was already on probation—with a rap sheet that included seven felonies and two prison sentences—Drasen knew that he would be arrested. The rest of the work blends anecdotes ranging from his childhood to his young adult years and his imprisonment in 2019. The book’s nearly 90 sections alternate between journal entries from his time in the Milwaukee Secure Detention Facility and chapters offering autobiographical sketches of his upbringing in a loving home, fond memories of his grandparents, his initial addiction to OxyContin as a 15-year-old, and his lifelong mental health battle with Seasonal Affective Disorder (a condition exacerbated by the winter climate of his home state of Wisconsin). The journal entries, which span from February through July of 2019, reflect on his desire for recovery and provide an insider’s look at the American prison system. A medium-security facility, MSDF had better food and more professional guards than the county prisons the author had prior experience with, but it was overcrowded and offered limited opportunities for improvement (the author spent 20 hours a day in his cell). Other topics addressed in the journal entries include racial dynamics and the prison system’s “extremely lackluster” recovery programs that “recycle the same information and follow the same curriculum,” which Drasen describes as “a waste of time.”

Central to the narrative is the importance of faith and hope in the author’s eventually recovery. While he occasionally cites Bible verses, Drasen approaches faith with broad strokes; he often refers to God as “my Higher Power” and posits that Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and those from other faith traditions “are all united under God.” This theologically vague but inclusive conception of faith also applies to the memoir’s titular emphasis on hope. (“So long as there’s air in your lungs,” the author reassures his readers, “there is still hope.”) While much of this work is devoted to the gritty, often poignant chronicle of Drasen’s personal story (rife with expletive-laden stories of sex, drug addiction, and prison life), it doubles as a self-help guidebook speaking directly to “anyone who has ever felt broken, stuck, addicted…or out of chances.” The text is full of inspirational quotations and prayers and includes a companion workbook and other ancillary materials for readers seeking personal growth and healing. It also provides a powerful social commentary on the failures of mass incarceration, for-profit prisons, cash bail, and punitive approaches to addiction as told by someone who experienced them firsthand. While Drasen has accomplished much since his release from MSDF in terms of personal recovery and entrepreneurial success, that story is unfortunately absent from this volume’s narrative.

A powerful account of addiction and incarceration in 21st-century America.