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Const. Travis Funk, Genene Kimber-Zinger and Ryan Oscar work with the Addictions Crisis Team to provide support to people with addictions issues in the criminal justice system. Oscar spoke the News about his own battles with addiction and how they informed his career trajectory.
jappel@medicinehatnews.com@MHNJeremyAppel
Ryan Oscar has a somewhat unique asset in counselling drug addicts with the Medicine Hat Police Service — he used to be one.
“I know what that feeling is like when you’re desperate, you’re at the end and the darkness is there, you’re lonely and have that feeling of hopelessness. I know what that looks like, because that’s where it took me,” he said. “That part helps. There really isn’t anything that any of the participants I work with can tell me that I really don’t believe.
“Drug addiction takes you to some deep and dark places, so the stuff that they’re telling me is easy to relate to.”
Oscar, 44, works for the Addictions Crisis Team, a partnership between the Canadian Mental Health Association and MHPS, since the team’s inception in January 2018.
When police arrest individuals with drug and alcohol issues, they’re sent to Oscar and his partners — Const. Travis Funk and fellow CMHA employee Genene Kimber-Zinger.
He and Kimber-Zinger then get direct access to meet with individuals in cells, which Oscar says is quite uncommon in that line of work.
“If there are drug and alcohol issues while they’re in there, we go and have a chat with them to see if there’s any way we can support them,” explained Oscar.
He has direct lived experience of that intersection between addiction, mental health and law enforcement, which can help him build a relationship of trust with his clientele.
But he’s cautious to ensure the focus is always on the person he’s counselling, not himself.
“If I think that bit of self-disclosure is going to help move that relationship along or build it faster, I have no problem bringing that up and talking about it, while still trying to keep on the professional side of the line and be a counsellor, not just someone with lived experience in recovery,” Oscar said. “I want to be able to help draw the motivation to get people to help change themselves.”
In February, Oscar will have been sober for five years, but his path there was riddled with obstacles.
“Addiction was something that I never really thought much about growing up,” he confesses.
Oscar always drank heavily, during his teenage years in Swift Current and even when he went off to the University of North Dakota, but his addiction issues started getting out of hand when he returned home to work in oil and gas.
“It’s all superficial relationships with people, surface-level stuff” he said of his time in the patch. “There was never really any serious conversations about anything except for work, and drinking goes hand-in-hand with that.”
He eventually developed a cocaine habit when he was in his mid-30s after his father, who was also an oil and gas man, passed away in an accident.
“I never really dealt with it the right way,” Oscar confesses. “I dealt with it the way he would have dealt with it, being a man’s man and going back to work four or five days later.”
He worked his way up in the industry, but still felt a certain emptiness.
“I had the big house, a wife and kids, and lots of money, and still I had that void I was trying to fill,” said Oscar.
“Life was crumbling around me, but still the most important thing in my mind was the compulsion to use drugs. There wasn’t much near the end that came ahead of that. It’s an awful place to be.”
It took him getting fired from his job, his wife and kids leaving him and two suicide attempts with each followed by a stint in rehab before he was able to clean up for good.
“That was the darkest moment of my life, but I look back now and think maybe that’s when the lights came on,” Oscar said of his second attempt on his own life.
He went to Prairie Sky Recovery Centre in Wilkie, Sask., where he realized he was finally making authentic connections with people that weren’t solely based on getting intoxicated.
He decided to go on a bike trip across Canada with a dear friend he met in recovery, hitting up as many 12-step meetings as possible along the way, when he realized he wanted to dedicate the rest of his life to helping those seemingly trapped in the cycle of addiction.
“I was done chasing money. I was done living that lifestyle of trying to work my way up the ladder,” said Oscar. “The bike tripped showed me all I really needed to survive was on four bags strapped to my bike and talking to those people along the way for three months really inspired me to want to continue doing that.”
Working with people who are in the same boat he used to be can be occasionally frustrating when that individual isn’t co-operative.
“You have to always realized that it’s their journey,” Oscar says. “What worked for me isn’t going to work for the next person, isn’t going to work for the person after that. Everybody’s running this journey at their own pace.”
