Sandeep and his daughter on vacation on the Big Island in Hawaii in April 2012.
No one’s path to substance use, recurrence of use, or recovery looks the same. People take many paths to healing, and, at Evergreen Treatment Services, we seek to walk alongside those we serve as they chart their paths. People may take many turns, yet every twist is part of the journey.
Sandeep Kaushik, our Roots of Recovery speaker, said he feels like he’s living a separate life than when he was using heroin in the ‘90s. Sandeep is currently a political and public affairs consultant who is deeply involved in Seattle and Washington State politics, and is living proof that people can thrive after serious opioid addiction. But his life twenty-five years ago couldn’t have looked more different.
“The first time I smoked heroin, I was a teenager, but I started using more frequently in my early 20s,” Sandeep told us. His friends became addicted quickly, but it took several years of casual, intermittent use for Sandeep to fall into addiction. By the late ‘90s, he found himself living a “double life” as he worked on a Ph.D. dissertation while his addiction spiraled. Soon he was spending most of his days chasing heroin in the shooting galleries of Southeast D.C.
Sandeep recalls that in that era, the height of the Drug War, whole neighborhoods had been taken over by drugs and the ceaseless law enforcement efforts to police and criminalize addiction. Poverty and criminality followed. “When drug use reaches a critical mass in a community, everything starts to break down.”
While Sandeep avoided direct criminal involvement, his life rapidly unraveled. Looking back, he sees that part of the reason he used was because he had a life planned out—getting his PhD, becoming a professor, and teaching history—that he didn’t want to live. “That sort of disjuncture in my life was a void that I used heroin to fill. Part of what I had to do was bail out of that entire life for me to get clean.”
So, in 2000, he did. Sandeep abandoned his dissertation and relocated, moving to Cleveland to try to reboot his life. “I started my life over. I started delivering newspapers for the alt weekly that a friend worked at. Every Wednesday, I did two delivery runs, driving around Cleveland dropping off bundles of newspapers.” After a few months, Sandeep freelanced an article for the newspaper, and they liked it. He wrote another, and then a staff writing job opened up. “I got an apartment,” he said, “and started to make enough money that I could afford to have a stable life.”
But the biggest and most important change for him was that in Cleveland, Sandeep started on methadone. “I should have gotten on methadone much sooner, but there was such a stigma attached to it. When I first visited the clinic, they told me it would be 18 months of treatment. Eighteen months of treatment seemed like 18 lifetimes. When you’re living day to day with a serious addiction, that just seems like forever.” But while reluctant, he decided to start.
It made all the difference. He had previously tried Narcotics Anonymous to try to deal with his opioid addiction, but it wasn’t the right fit. “The people there and the sincerity of those rooms was incredibly real, but I couldn’t stop using,” he recalled. But it was the physiological approach that aligned. “I’d reached a point where I was ready to stop if I could. When methadone opened the door for me to stop using, I was quickly and effectively able to walk through that door even though I did eventually relapse. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked.”
Sandeep accepted a job at The Stranger and arrived in Seattle in the summer of 2002. Having recently relapsed, “the first thing I did when I arrived in town was look for a score,” he said. “I remember thinking, ‘Man, I’m going to have to start this job writing for a newspaper on Monday. If I’m using like this again, this is not going to end well for me.’”
So, Sandeep called up ETS and started treatment. This was a major turning point for him. Sandeep would visit ETS every morning for his dose of methadone, then carry on with his day as planned. “Through ETS, I was able to do my job and do it well. Sticking with methadone started me on my career in Seattle. None of that would have been possible without a trip to Airport Way every morning for my first six months in Seattle.”
Writing about politics and covering news for The Stranger led to other freelance writing gigs at The Boston Globe, Time Magazine, Salon.com and other publications. In 2005, Sandeep left The Stranger to take a communications job in the King County Executive’s Office.
Soon after that, he started doing campaign work, and by 2007 he left government to do campaign consulting full-time. Twenty-two years after his phone call to ETS, Sandeep is a partner at Sound View Strategies, a successful boutique political and public affairs company, where he does both campaign work as well as consulting for major business, non-profit and governmental clients. And he is one of the three co-hosts of Seattle Nice, a popular podcast about municipal politics in Seattle.
“I’m ensconced in Seattle now,” he told us. “My life is completely different. When I look back on it, I think of the ‘90s as my lost decade.”
When we asked Sandeep for his thoughts on the opioid crisis today, he told us that the introduction of fentanyl has completely changed the scene. He recalled that it wasn’t unusual for folks to be ‘stably’ addicted in the ‘90s. But now, this is much less common. Fentanyl’s lethality, and the drug’s ability to speed up the cycle of use, is unlike anything Sandeep experienced. “We have not responded to the public health crisis presented by fentanyl in a way commensurate with the scale and seriousness of the issue.”
Fentanyl is taking the lives of our neighbors, our friends, family, and peers at alarming rates. In 2023 alone, more than 1,000 people died from fentanyl in King County. We know there is more to be done to treat the opioid epidemic like the emergency it is. The stigma of treatment has shifted, though many of ETS’s clients still experience it daily.
We’re collectively making progress in harm reduction tactics, like safe consumption sites. While Sandeep questions some elements of progressive thinking on how to best address addiction—he feels people in active addiction often need a push to get help—he is an advocate for these spaces, and for expanded treatment options and more proactive efforts to get people the help that they need to break the cycle of addiction: “If safe injection sites existed in the ‘90s, I might have been able to get connected to treatment earlier.”
“Methadone saved my life,” he adds.
We have work to do to ensure that everyone has access to the treatment they need, when they need it.
Hear more from Sandeep Kaushik at our Seventh Annual Event: Roots of Recovery on September 26. Secure your spot today!
