OMAK — Ira Michel remembers the moment he realized he was hopelessly addicted to drugs and alcohol.

“I was sitting in my car, a glass pipe in one hand, a bottle of whiskey in the other. I took a drink of whiskey and said to myself, ‘OK, I’m done.’ But a minute later, I picked it back up,” he said recently from his office at Okanogan County Juvenile Detention. Again and again, he tried to take just one more drink, one more hit, and set that bottle and pipe down forever.

But he just couldn’t do it.

Michel, 32 — who now counsels kids with addiction problems in the county’s juvenile outreach program —said the realization hit him hard. He always thought he could stop whenever he wanted. Drinking and drugging since he was 14 years old, Michel was ready to give it up. But he didn’t know how.

“In my mind, I felt I had gone too far for help,” he said.

A daily drinker who also used pot, cocaine, methamphetamine and other drugs, Michel said he tried to control his use. He tried using only alcohol. Only pot. But ultimately, he said, “The longer I used, the worse things got.”

Then, on March 22, 2005, Michel was arrested. He’d been arrested before, but this was his first felony charge. He doesn’t really remember what happened.

“I guess I was out in the woods somewhere. I don’t even remember where. They arrested me for possession of meth (methamphetamine). Possession of marijuana. There were needles in my car —a bunch of stuff I was arrested for,” he said.

Diane “Tasha” Martinez — his girlfriend and the mother of two of his children — remembers it too well. He left with her cell phone, her money and the car, and didn’t call or come home for almost two weeks. He’d left before, for days at a time. But never weeks.

“We called the police, the hospital. We didn’t know where he was,” she said. “Then a neighbor told us they heard that they busted him up by the lake.”

Michel had been in trouble before, and his parents came to the rescue. Not this time.

“Me and Ivy, we decided, this is the last straw,” said his father, Bruce Michel. “We’re not going to bail him out. He was mad at us for a while. He wouldn’t even speak to us.”

It wasn’t easy to leave his son in jail. But the alternative was worse, Bruce Michel said. “I have a bad history of people in my family dying for those reasons. My dad, he drank himself to death. I have an uncle, my dad’s brother, the same thing happened to him. My cousin, same thing,” he said. Bruce Michel was only 18 when his father died, and Ira was just a baby. “At times, I tried to tell the kids about that stuff. I didn’t want his skin to turn yellow. His internal parts to just stop,” Michel related.

Martinez supported their decision. “He kept begging me to get him out of jail, and I wouldn’t,” she said. “It was hard. When he went to jail, I didn’t have a job.”

What’s more, she and Ira had a newborn child, Samantha, and a one-year-old, Emily, and she was caring for Ira’s oldest daughter, Marie, for whom he’d fought to gain custody.

While in jail, Michel was offered a shot at a new program — Okanogan County Adult Felony Drug Court. It was voluntary, but if he joined and succeeded, he could get his felony charges dropped.

He spent 65 days in jail, and while in custody, he started the drug court program. That sent him to a rehabilitation center, where he spent an additional 95 days. “Then things started clicking,” he said.

When he came home, the constant oversight of drug court was stressful, but probably necessary, he said.

“There were quite a few times I could have used, but I didn’t, because I had a UA (urine analysis) coming up,” he said.

He enrolled in Wenatchee Valley College to become a chemical dependency counselor, and attended all the required meetings, court hearings and counseling sessions. With the support of his family, he graduated from drug court in 18 months, and got his degree in chemical dependency about the same time.

Michel has been clean and sober now for over four years, and said the biggest difference is the time he now spends with his family.

“It’s one of the biggest gifts, besides freedom from addiction,” he said.

His daughters are now 13, 5 and 4 years old, and know their father as a sober, responsible man.

Martinez said it was a struggle to get back on their feet financially, but the effort was worth it. “I think we’ve become even closer as a family, because he’s always around,” she said.

“He’s earned my respect back,” his father, Bruce Michel, said, adding, “Ira, he found out what was important in life. Some people don’t know what they’ve got until it’s gone, and it’s too late. I’m glad Ira figured it out now.”

K.C. Mehaffey: 997-2512

mehaffey@wenatcheeworld.com