Zach Benge is at the beginning of his journey.
The 28-year-old Crawfordsville native soon plans to buy his first house. That’s where he’ll help raise his daughter, whom he jokes is three “going on 23.” His bills have been paid early for just over a year.
And later this week, he’ll celebrate 18 months in recovery from drug addiction.
“I haven’t missed a beat and I am proud of that, but 18 months isn’t a very long time when you compare it to the amount of time that I’ve spent in the gutter,” Benge said. “I am proud of that. I give myself a pat on the back for that, but that’s all I will give myself at this time because it’s early and a lot needs to be done still. I’m a work in progress.”
Benge spoke during the Montgomery County Drug-Free Coalition’s Red Ribbon Breakfast on Tuesday at the Youth Service Bureau. The annual event is part of the nationwide observance of Red Ribbon Week, which promotes drug prevention education and advocacy.
“This is the time we don’t necessarily want to focus on statistics and gloom and doom and how awful the crisis is, whether it’s in Montgomery County or anywhere else. But what we do want to do is have that story of hope,” YSB executive director Karen Branch said.
The oldest of seven children, Benge said he was born to young parents who were battling drug addiction and left their kids to fend for themselves. By age six, his grandparents, Ron and Leslie Frazier, took custody of him and one of his sisters.
“Without them, I would be dead, probably,” Benge said as his grandparents listened in the audience of local stakeholders.
During the week, he said he lived in a non-stop episode of “The Andy Griffith Show” in North Salem, where he picked up the guitar and attended church. But his parents shared custody of him on weekends, and he said he learned to adapt to both environments.
Benge said his drug use started with beer and marijuana and evolved into pills, then heroin and methamphetamine, his drug of choice. He said he used with his parents as a teenager, all while keeping up his grades in school and playing football.
He graduated in the top 10 of his high school class, he said, but dropped out of college less than a year into studying music technology. As his addiction worsened, he was kicked out of the house by his grandparents, who first thought he had a gambling problem when they discovered he was stealing from them.
“We always loved him,” Ron Frazier said. “We never lost that.”
Benge picked up his first arrest on a felony charge of fraud when he was 19, opening a criminal record that includes convictions for possessing meth and paraphernalia and unlawful possession of a syringe.
“The sheriff who used to be my babysitter in the ‘Andy Griffith’ town that I grew up in ended up being the guy that was looking for me,” Benge said about his first case.
After surviving an overdose and struggling to maintain his sobriety, the turning point came during a stay at the Montgomery County Jail where he was accepted into the Jail Chemical Addiction Program.
JCAP seeks to put inmates on the path of recovery before their release, and Benge said he thrived under the program’s structure and discipline.
“It was like an oasis within the jail,” he said.
Benge said he is currently participating in Montgomery County’s Drug Treatment Court and praised the local resources available to the recovery community. He said he’s rediscovered his faith, attending weekly Bible studies and playing music at church.
While noting Benge is still early in his recovery, the Fraziers’ say they’ve put the challenges caused by his addiction behind them.
“That was yesterday and today’s a new day,” Leslie Frazier said.
Benge, who said he sacrificed his relationship with his parents to stay healthy, call his grandparents “mom and dad.”
“It’s probably the most solid family relationship I have,” he said.
