'There's no way this was all I was meant for'

May 10—URBANA — One of the best days of Elizabeth Campbell's life, she recalls, was her 43rd birthday — when she was arrested.

After relapsing within her first week out from a local inpatient addiction recovery center in 2022, she had failed to appear at a scheduled court hearing and the state requested a warrant for her arrest on account of outstanding theft charges.

Campbell was on the run, but recalled feeling relief when an Urbana police officer pulled her over for a random traffic stop.

She was so exhausted from using drugs, sleeping behind dumpsters, stealing for people and hiding from others; in jail, she was finally able to get a full night's sleep and consider what the corrections officers were telling her: She wasn't going to last much longer living this way.

"I remember laying on a mat — because we were in lockdown because it was COVID, too — just laying on the concrete floor for days like, 'Is this really my life?'" Campbell said. "I started seeing: 'OK, there's no way that this was all I was meant for.'"

Two years later, Campbell is sober, employed, living in an apartment and officially set to graduate on Monday, along with seven other people, from the Champaign County Drug Court program she attributes her life's turnaround to.

The decades-old specialty court diverts people otherwise bound for prison into an intensive local treatment plan that aims to "bury them with resources" and address the root causes of their substance-abuse and legal trouble, said Judge Ben Dyer, who presides over it.

Campbell traced her addict-like behavior back to her childhood. When she was 4 years old, she and her younger brother were abandoned by their biological parents in a park in Korea.

Adopted by a family in Bloomington-Normal, Campbell enjoyed biking around the countryside with her brother — it felt like just the two of them against the world — but struggled with depression and attachment issues.

When a family relative then began abusing her, Campbell blamed her parents. While she now knows they weren't aware of the abuse, she felt she couldn't trust anyone, and began drinking alcohol and acting out to disappoint them.

"My anger and my fear caused me to just lie and manipulate my parents, because I was, in a way, trying to punish them," Campbell said. "Then it just started becoming like, you don't even think about doing it, you just do it. It just becomes ingrained, like I didn't even realize I'd be lying."

After she was older and living on her own, a stalker broke into her apartment and raped her. At 24, she moved to Champaign-Urbana and soon had the first of her three kids.

Campbell said she took a break from drinking and using drugs then. She lived a relatively stable 15 years, working as a preschool teacher and trying to be the "perfect mother" for her children.

However, suffering from back pain that stemmed from her childhood abuse, she saw a doctor and was prescribed Vicodin, an opioid pain medication.

"That changed the entire course of my life. He gave me a Vicodin and I've always said, 'I felt like, for the first time, complete and utter bliss,'" Campbell said. "It was like the first time I didn't feel any emotional or physical pain, I just felt normal, and it became my whole world."

Campbell remembers convincing doctors to prescribe her ridiculous amounts over the phone; she had really only forced herself to drink alcohol before because it made her "feel less dead inside," but Vicodin was different — it was energizing.

Soon, she was routinely blacking out and unable to take care of herself or her children. The low point came when she lost custody of her three kids. In a way, her subsequent cocaine addiction saved her life, she said, because without it she probably would have committed suicide.

In the three or four years that followed Campbell fell in and out of jail and in and out with different boyfriends — one of whom had her sell herself, while another introduced her to methamphetamine, a drug that made her unafraid of shoplifting clothes and electronics for herself and other people — stealing to be liked and loved, not wanting to be alone.

At the time, drug court was presided over by Judge Randy Rosenbaum, someone Campbell now names as a pivotal person in her life because he saw her as someone worth fixing.

Rosenbaum said it can be a tough decision to allow someone to enter drug court, as many have long criminal histories and have failed drug treatment in the past. The program currently boasts a roster of 30 to 40 people; those with violence- or gun-related charges are ineligible.

But after considering all the available information and the recommendation made by an assessment team, he takes a holistic approach to evaluating candidates, looking for people who will take advantage of the chance to restore stability in their life.

"A lot of people want to get into drug court and have no real intention of following the rules or aren't motivated to do so, and we don't want to use our resources on those people," Rosenbaum said. "We want to use our resources on the people who are committed to trying to get clean, and I think that I saw that with Campbell and (Orlando) Lewis and we gave them a shot," the judge added, naming another drug court graduate. "I'm happy that they're making it."

Campbell relapsed her first week out from an inpatient center because she thought she was ready enough to skip living in a recovery home, she said.

After spending her birthday in that cell — she remembers a corrections officer bringing her cupcakes from the vending machine and realizing that none of her friends from the streets really cared about her — she said she was lucky to be given a second chance at a treatment facility in Springfield.

Upon finishing inpatient therapy, participants must turn their lives over to drug court's many requirements: submit to curfews and random drug tests, attend numerous classes and regular group meetings, obtain a job and a sponsor, appear at weekly court hearings and separate from the people, places and things of their drug-using pasts.

Many people in Champaign County Drug Court face substantial sentences, but prison does not rehabilitate many people, Rosenbaum said.

Drug court routinely beats the Department of Corrections' recidivism rate, Dyer said.

"It's really impressive to see people who, many of them had less than nothing when they came into drug court," Dyer said. "They don't have good family support; they have unhealthy family problems; they don't have any money; they don't have a good education; they have a number of other problems.

"To see someone like that work really hard and get good results, it can change their life," Dyer continued. "They're really doing the hard work, which is expected of them and we'll guide them, but they end up doing the hardest stuff."

Campell didn't like the random drug tests at first or look forward to the classes. But she came to enjoy seeing the same people each week and solving problems together — a stubborn person, Campbell said she needed to be given no wriggle room.

Through attending 12-step meetings, Campbell said she found the friends she'd always been looking for, people who didn't degrade her, who were always happy to see her. Every time she goes to a meeting, someone in her "safety bubble" says something she needed to hear.

Through her life-skills classes, Campbell said she's learned how to budget and get accustomed to having a job again, how to reckon with whatever issues she is experiencing, the damage that was done to her and the damage she has done to herself.

Through her case manager, Campbell said she realized that a lot of her behaviors were normal reactions to abnormal situations, that she used drugs to run from her feelings.

She currently shares an apartment provided by C-U at Home — a local nonprofit and drug-court partner — with her best friend, Haley Boyer, who is not in the drug-court program but shares a similar history of trauma and addiction struggles.

Boyer said they bonded during their shared time in inpatient treatment, as she was scared to enter a recovery home but Campbell helped her move in, made her feel safe. She still does.

The two start every morning together with coffee and that day's 12-step message, calling each other to keep up the practice even if they're apart.

"When I first met her, she wasn't very organized, she was late for everything," Boyer said. "Today, she's the complete opposite. She's on time, she has a planner, she works so hard, she holds down a job. I mean, she's completely different from when I first met her to today, just being so organized. And that's really important for people like us, to have a routine."

Campbell said it feels good now to walk into a store and buy the things she wants. And while she never used to before, she looks forward to her birthday every year — the day she was born and the day she got clean.

Next, she's planning on going back to school and pursuing a degree in social work, to help women who have been abused or trafficked.

Ultimately, Campbell said she's both excited and nervous to graduate from drug court on Monday. She's gotten used to living within the institution's structure, and it will be a long road to rebuilding her relationship with her kids.

Regardless of the drug-court restrictions she needed imposed in order to get clean, she reminds herself that it was still her choice everyday to not use on the difficult days, to go to classes, to come to meetings, to attain a new way of life.

"It's hard at the beginning, when you're in jail or at the beginning of drug court, to see that your life could possibly get better because at the beginning, the hole that we've dug ourselves into is so deep, and so many things that we have to fix that it just doesn't seem possible," Campbell said. "But now I say, my hole keeps getting smaller and smaller and I can wake up now without shame and fear. I can wake up and know I didn't do anything wrong.

"I know things will be OK as long as I keep to my support system."