Tom Coderre, Eagle Scout, state senator, United Way fund raiser... crack addict.

12:04 PM EST on Sunday, December 11, 2005

BY JENNIFER LEVITZ
Journal Staff Writer

The senator's key wouldn't open his door.

Multimedia

Journal / Gretchen Ertl

Slide show : Hear Coderre talk about his cocaine addiction, and what his life is like now, as narrated by Journal staff writer Jennifer Levitz.

They changed the locks on me?

Bastards!

I'll get them.

Tom Coderre, State House wonder boy, had been getting to them for months. He was hooked on crack cocaine and in late 2001, he was losing his career, his self-respect, and now, his family.

Coderre, then 32 and the majority whip, lived with his family in a triple-decker in Pawtucket. He'd stay clean for a few weeks, then vanish, leaving his parents to wait up all night for the call to say he was arrested or dead. His father seemed on the verge of a heart attack from the stress. His mother, Democratic state Rep. Elaine Coderre, knew she had to do something to save her family and wake up her son.

Coderre jiggled his key, and he grew furious at his parents.

Two years later, when he finally emerged from the darkness of drug addiction, he knew that his mother had done the right thing, and that he should have been mad at himself.

He realized that, sometimes, a man hits bottom only when he decides to stop digging.

But on that day, locked out of home, Coderre wasn't ready to stop digging.

I'll fix them.

And he went to get high.

ELECTED IN 1994, at age 25, Coderre was so scrubbed and starched, his brown hair so perfectly parted, that his colleagues kidded him that he looked as though he was at his First Communion.

"If an addiction can grab a hold of a kid like Tom Coderre, I don't care who you are. An addiction could grab a hold of you," says state Sen. Maryellen Goodwin, a close friend and Providence Democrat.

The middle child of Elaine, a longtime political figure, and Ray, a businessman and Pawtucket civic booster, Tom Coderre was a born "mover and shaker," he says.

At 12, he was traipsing around Pawtucket's high rises for the elderly wearing "god-awful" red pants, a white shirt, and a blue tie, and offering baked goods to get votes for his mother. He knew things were different with his mom in office. "We had to be on extra good behavior."

And he was. He became an Eagle Scout, and the vice president of the student council at St. Raphael Academy, a Catholic school in Pawtucket, and national vice president of the Jaycees.

But not everyone thought Coderre belonged in the Senate at 25, joining a world of big egos when he was still forming his own. They saw that Coderre's strength, caring intensely about what people thought, was also his downfall. "Thomas needs to worry about Thomas," Sister Regina, a nun at St. Raphael's would always tell him.

Rene Perrault, a spiritual director at St. Francis Chapel and Monastery who had led Coderre on Catholic retreats, saw signs of Coderre's addictive nature before he used drugs, in that he needed to please people and take on their problems. "I was very concerned," Perrault says. "I told him, 'Tommy, you have to have good control of yourself to be in politics.' "

Coderre, however, saw himself as "invincible." At the State House, he was unusually productive. He successfully pushed legislation to clean up abandoned properties in Pawtucket, then worked on statewide issues, such as parking for the handicapped. He did tasks for the Senate leadership, making his way into the inner circle. At the end of Coderre's first legislative session, then-Majority Leader Paul Kelly asked Coderre to be deputy whip, the third-ranking seat in the Senate.

Journal photo / Gretchen Ertl

Looking back on his years of addiction, former state Sen. Thomas Coderre says: "If you looked into my eyes, you'd think I had no soul."

Coderre continued to try to please his family and friends, going from event to event in the "white tornado," his white 1995 Chevy Corsica, even if it meant saying yes to three people in one night, says Goodwin, a longtime friend of the Coderre family.

By day, he worked full-time as a fundraiser for the United Way of Rhode Island. "Certainly, I, and everyone who met him, thought the sky is the limit with this guy," says Dennis Murphy, former president and CEO of the United Way.

Until 2000, it seemed, everything was going Coderre's way.

BUT BENEATH the public persona, Coderre's addiction was brewing -- both in his frantic lifestyle and in the way he drank. He used alcohol to calm down. His friends ribbed him about being an "alky." A few people told him his drinking was out of control.

Coderre, though, didn't think he had a problem. He told himself he was still doing everything he needed to do. But some days, he locked himself in his room and stayed there, wanting to be alone. "I had a hole in my soul," he says, "and I was looking for a way to fill it."

In the spring of 2000, he found something that lifted him up.

A new friend introduced him to smokable cocaine, known as crack because it crackles when it's smoked. He had never been attracted to illegal drugs. But could it hurt to try it once? With just one hit, he felt euphoria, the best he'd ever felt. He had found an instant escape. He felt more alert. His senses, especially his hearing, were heightened. "It was like going to a fourth dimension," he says.

But the effects faded in just minutes. Coderre switched to beer that night, while his friend took hit after hit of crack to maintain his high. The man's entire personality changed. The man made quick movements around his apartment. He peeked through the blinds, and insisted that someone was looking under the door.

Coderre flung it open. "See? No one is there. What are you doing? You're crazy!"

Bizarre, he thought, as he drove home to Pawtucket.

But the next day, Coderre was trying to get in touch with his new friend.

"Three years later," he says, "I was that guy."

CODERRE THOUGHT he could pick up cocaine, then put it down, and still go to work, as he did with alcohol. For a while, he could. But crack can quickly gain "a very addictive hold on you," says Steve Gumbley, a specialist with the Addiction Technology Transfer Center of New England, based at Brown University. "It seems people use it a few times and the high they get is so intense, they want to repeat it. There's a real compulsiveness about wanting to get high, and it overrides judgment and becomes the focal point."

In a short time, Coderre says, "I really started to crave it. It's the obsession of all obsessions, and the only way you stop the craving is by getting another fix."

His life began to fall apart. At first, his friends noticed small things. "Tommy, your hair is crazy," Goodwin would tell him. Then she noticed that he had started to miss meetings without calling.

Out with friends, he would talk furtively on his cell phone and then take off, says Chris Butler, a friend from high school. Butler chalked it up to stress. Coderre was helping to run Richard Licht's losing campaign for the 2000 Democratic primary for U.S. Senate. He was in the thick of a leadership battle at the State House. Former Sen. Bill Irons had wrested the majority leader position from Paul Kelly in November 2000, and a lot of people blamed Coderre for switching allegiance from Kelly to Irons and toppling the Kelly leadership. Some Senate colleagues refused to shake his hand and called him a turncoat.

At home, Coderre was staying up late and not getting up, says his mother. "He wasn't Tom. Tom was always good at being 'on,' " she says. He was losing weight. The Coderres had relatives who'd suffered from addictions, but Elaine Coderre never thought it would claim her son. "I had no idea at all what it really was," she says.

Near Christmas of 2000, she asked him what was wrong.

"I'm depressed," he says he told her.

That seemed reasonable to Elaine because she knew he was going through hell at the State House with the leadership battle. She helped her son to a doctor, who set an appointment for a psychiatrist, five weeks off.

"I'll stop using," Coderre told himself, "everything will be fine. I'll never have to tell my dirty little secret."

BUT HE couldn't quit.

The withdrawal from cocaine isn't as physically acute as heroin, but it's terrible nonetheless. His heart would race and he would sweat. He'd constantly feel as though he needed to go to the bathroom. Certain people or places or scents would trigger the taste of cocaine. "I knew intellectually and emotionally it was wrong," he says. "But I couldn't stop. I couldn't stop."

Journal photo / Gretchen Ertl

Coderre keeps a folder with newspaper clips from his darkest days. Addicts, he says, come with "built-in forgetters."

By February 2001, he was missing deadlines and meetings at his new job, as director of the Genesis Center, an adult-literacy agency. About to be fired, he checked himself into the Kent House, a recovery program in Warwick. He told his parents he was seeking help for depression, but the counselors at Kent House asked Coderre to tell his family the truth.

Coderre told his mother first, feeling his failure.

I'm not the person you think I am, not the person you have on a pedestal.

Elaine Coderre remembers saying, "Oh my God!"

"It was like a ton of bricks falling on me," she says.

She'd gotten her three children through high school; she didn't expect this blow now. She felt "very stupid." And she felt guilt. Like most mothers, she carried a mental picture of her children, "where everyone is, what everyone is doing. Here you have this person who desperately needed help and you didn't see it."

"Way in the back of my mind, I had a confidence that with everything he'd achieved, he could beat this, but I knew it would be a long, hard road," she says.

She was right. The Kent House asked Coderre to leave after 23 days, believing he wasn't taking the program seriously. He was still going to the Senate every day, and thought that was more important than working on his recovery. He made a lot of "special requests," and showed up late for group meetings and appointments, says Marty Madden, program director.

Madden says commitment is essentialin any recovery program. The failure rate is high -- less than one on five, he says. "He was ready but not willing," Madden says of Coderre. "We see this all the time."

Coderre tried and failed at three more treatment centers in 2001. He failed to stick with 12-step programs. He had two sets of license plates -- one for the Senate and another generic set which he put on his car to hide his identity when he went to support meetings.

Each time he relapsed, it was harder to quit, and he lost more of life. He resigned from the Genesis Center in the summer of 2001 and went on medical disability for substance abuse. He ended up using his monthly check and his savings to buy drugs. He was spending as much as $1,000 a week on crack cocaine. He still showed up for Senate sessions, but people were whispering, and in the fall of 2001, Coderre says, the majority leader asked him to resign as majority whip, the position to which he'd risen.

I can pick up the phone and fix things. Why can't I fix what's going on with me? Why can't I stop?

He swore off treatment centers. A doctor thought Coderre could get outpatient therapy and live at home, with strict monitoring. Elaine and Ray Coderre took their son's car keys and bank card. They laid out his schedule.

"We were in way over our heads," Elaine says now.

She'd go to pick her son up from a meeting, and he wouldn't be there. He'd disappear for days; then the stretches became longer. She was supporting her son's addiction, she says, "letting him come to 'hotel home' whenever he feels like it."

When she changed the locks on him, "I knew I was throwing him out," she says. But she had to do something.

Coderre stayed with various friends, until they'd get sick of him. He once showed up at Senator Goodwin's house, shivering and skinny and shoeless. He didn't talk to his mother for several months, until the next General Assembly session in early 2002. He called her. He'd bounced back and had decided to run for reelection in a new district, since his seat in Pawtucket was being eliminated in a redistricting plan. He'd rented an apartment in the new district, near the Central Falls line. Elaine Coderre had hope. "He was Tom," Elaine says.

It was to be a grand announcement event, with seniors bused in from the high rises. He ordered hundreds of "Tom Coderre for Senate" frisbees to hold the paper plates. He organized campaign meetings. But the people who used to help him on campaigns weren't showing up.

Coderre never picked up the frisbees. Instead he picked up a bottle of Bacardi 151.

I give up. It's one more thing I'm losing. One more piece of my life being dismantled.

Journal photo / Gretchen Ertl

Most days now, Tom Coderre, center, former Senate majority whip, meets Mark Warren, right, of Providence, and Billy Borek, of Pawtucket, for coffee at a Dunkin' Dopnuts in Providence. All three are recovering addicts.

The next year was the darkest of his life. He never went back to the State House after his term expired in 2002 to pack up his office. For the first time in his life, he says, he didn't have a plan. "I didn't know what was going to happen to me. That's what really drove me into a deep depression."

He drained $50,000 in mutual funds. His addiction took him into "dark holes"; he did things he never thought he would. He went "crazy," he says. He saw people in the bushes, in the trees. He saw shadows under the door. He became so paranoid that he set up a camera so if he was in his bedroom, he could click among three different views of his apartment, on Cherry Street in Pawtucket.

His physical transformation was remarkable. He hadn't gotten a haircut in months. Normally about 170, he dropped to 132 pounds. When he couldn't get high enough from smoking cocaine, he shot up. He'd lose feeling in his legs or arms -- a side effect of heavy cocaine use. He'd reach for a glass and his arm would go limp. When he walked downstairs, he had to hold the wall. "If you looked into my eyes, you'd think I had no soul, I didn't have a spirit. It had left me," he says.

He heard his brother and sister banging on his door and his friends on the phone. "Tom, answer your phone. Tom, you have friends."

Why don't they leave me alone?

I'm not ready. When I'm ready, I'll call you.

The Pawtucket police had been watching Coderre for erratic behavior. On April 22, 2003, officers, believing Coderre had bought drugs outside a liquor store, arrested him for posssession of about $100 worth of cocaine.

In handcuffs, surrounded by the media, the next morning in District Court in Providence, he promised to attend counseling and treatment -- and then, released on bail, he ran out the back door of the courthouse to find the only thing that could relieve his shame.

He was high that night as he watched his neighbors being interviewed about him on TV. Did you know he was a drug addict? What kind of neighbor was he?

He skipped his court-mandated treatment and stayed in his apartment for three weeks, leaving only to go to the liquor store. As he bought his Bacardi, he saw a newspaper headline: "Warrant issued for Coderre." So he bought a paper, wrapped his Bacardi in it, and walked home, only to be arrested on the sidewalk on his warrant.

This time, District Court Chief Judge Albert E. DeRobbio wasn't as lenient. He asked Coderre if he was still using drugs. I'm still struggling, Coderre confessed, but said he didn't need jail. DeRobbio disagreed, and he ordered Coderre to jail until a bed opened up at a treatment center where the former senator would not be free to leave. Coderre said the judge woke him up, and he felt himself surrender. "It wasn't until the man in a black robe forced me to make a decision, and asked me what I was doing, that I stopped telling myself I wasn't that bad," he says.

After two weeks in jail, Coderre went to Butler Hospital. His mother brought stacks of letters and prayer cards she'd received from the public. She learned how many families were struggling with drug addiction. National experts say four in 10 families have a relative or close friend in recovery.

What happened next -- maybe it was the prayers, or jail, or an act of God, Coderre says. "For the first time, the obsession left me."

He spent more than five months at the Wilson House, a treatment center in Pawtucket, and in the fall of 2003, at age 34, he moved into The Turning, a long-term recovery house in Providence.

Where do I start? How do I start to put my life back together?

Many people came to his aid. John Nazarian, the Rhode Island College president who knew Coderre from the Board of Governors, encouraged Coderre to come back to finish nine credits for his degree. Rene Perrault, the spiritual director at St. Francis Chapel, offered to provide guidance. His former colleagues from the State House didn't offer handshakes -- they hugged him.

He found that the stigma that had prevented him from asking for help was partly self-imposed. "All my fears about what people would say; nothing ever came true," he says.

Dan Mahoney, the director of The Turning, told Coderre, "The dream is up here. You're gonna get your degree. You're gonna go back to the State House, if you want, instead of some dead-end job."

For Coderre, now 36, recovery has meant two things: reassembling the pieces he lost and discovering what is to come. He made things "right" with his family, he says. He is close with them again, but still there are things they don't talk about. Only recently, his mother brought up her changing the locks on him. They had never talked about it before.

He has tried to discover what went wrong. In recovery, he began treatment for bipolar disorder. But he says that's no excuse. "I would neglect myself," he says. "The people I respect today are those who have balance, between family and friends."

As for what is next, he has two jobs, one as house manager of The Turning and the other selling toys at holiday parades. He's slowly gone back into public service, and wants to give hope to other addicts and improve the system for them. Just as he found a subculture of drug users during his down years, he has found a warm and thriving subculture of recovering drug users. He is on the board of directors of Rhode Island Communities for Addiction Recovery Efforts, a Providence nonprofit, and in May led "legislative day," taking a "bunch of addicts" to the State House to lobby senators on bills that affect them.

Last month, he spoke at a junior high health fair, and visited recovery drop-in centers in Vermont and in Massachusetts to study a model for Rhode Island. Before Thanksgiving, he spoke at a memorial service in Providence for homeless people who had died. Four steps up on the stage, in his starched white shirt, he looked apart from those gathered, though he knew he was just one bad decision away from them. The next day was 30 months of staying clean for him, and that, he says, is "early recovery." He must work hard to keep his disease at bay, "so I don't go back."

He says one of the hardest parts of recovery is accepting how far he fell. "To have been a state senator, with big jobs, to really have had the unbelievable life, to all of the sudden finding yourself having lost everything and being back at square one . . . ," he says. "It takes a lot of acceptance to be in that space."

The Turning, an 18-room, 19th-century Victorian in Providence, is just two blocks from the State House.

One afternoon, the sun came in the dining room and shined on Coderre as he flipped open a ratty red clip folder that chronicles his descent into darkness. He calls it his "remember when" file.

That day, his nails were spotless and his blueish green eyes were clear. His brown hair was perfectly parted and combed, and his cheeks pink with health.

"Former Sen. Majority Whip arrested," reads one headline.

"What size font is that?" he joked.

He keeps the folder because addicts have "built-in forgetters," he says.

"We have this way of minimizing things, saying, 'I wasn't so bad.' Whenever I get those feelings again, I open it. You can see I open it often. It turns my stomach almost every time I open it. It helps bring me back to where this thing took me."

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Contact Jennifer Levitz at Jlevitz@projo.com