- Drugs
After his birth in Houston, Texas, Hank grew up in the swamps of Killian, Louisiana. Hank experienced abuse from the very beginning of his life. His childhood was eaten up with addiction and sexual, mental, physical and spiritual abuse. His father was extremely abusive to his mother, his four siblings and Hank.
At an early age of eleven, Hank saw his brother taking magic mushrooms and watched the change in him. Parents and adults in his life drank and he saw them change as well. He wanted that change and remembers clearly reaching up to the table at very early age for leftover beers and he went for the mushrooms as well. In his memory, it was all like a “happy cartoon” and for the next seventeen years that followed, he chased that feeling. Smoking crack became part of his life at age twelve and from there it went downhill fast. Hank quit school at 7th grade and moved to Atlanta. Hank suffered from severe bullying and also watched two sisters and one brother die from addiction. He slipped deeper into crime and addiction, since he believed it was his destiny, too.
Hank got married at age seventeen. The marriage lasted seven years and blessed him with two children. Hank and his wife were high on drugs all the time. He overdosed numerous times and placed a pistol multiple times in his mouth to kill himself. The addiction was stronger than his desire to die, and it gave him the urge for another hit instead of killing himself.
When they had a small baby that was addicted to crack, both Hank and his wife were living in a crack house with the baby. Seeing that this was not a good way to live, he woke up from his using and made the decision to try for a different life. He had a gun in his hand, but flushed the baggies with drugs in the toilet, grabbed the baby and left. Hank’s mother drove him around, seeking help. His weight was down to 117 pounds, he was bleeding, but five treatment centers turned him down. He felt hopeless and still remembers wearing one red and a blue flip flop, blue jeans, and no shirt as he finally made it to the doors a narcotic addiction support meeting in Marietta, Georgia. He was 24 years old, broken and bruised, just before the death mark but with the gift of desperation.
There, he found the help he needed and since then has been clean for nineteen years and has helped thousands of recovering addicts get clean and remain clean through a program of complete abstinence from all drugs. Hank lives in Jacksonville, Florida, and is currently working on a PhD from the University of Metaphysical Sciences and launching the ‘Empowering Teens Program’. He has owned and operated a recovery center for eleven years, where he has helped over 500 ex-convicts re-enter into society and achieve transformation from a rugged hard life to a spiritual journey of peace.