Kirk Driskell

Kirk Driskell has not put a drug or a drink in his body since April 24, 1995, and he now runs a house for men trying to do the same.

Driskell hosts a podcast called Caddywampus and had Brad on it first, to talk about adoption. Brad went and read up on Vision Warriors afterward and asked him onto the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast to talk about the other thing. He dedicated the episode to the friends, family and business partners he has lost to addiction, and said out loud that it is the subject nobody wants to raise.

What makes Vision Warriors different is who holds the door. Men are there by choice, and the men already there vote the next one in. No staff member approves anybody. Driskell's problem with most of the industry is that a frightened family spends an exorbitant amount of money on somewhere pretty that feeds you well, keeps you thirty or sixty days, then opens the door, pushes you out and tells you that you are cured. He is careful to say there are inpatient programs doing real clinical and emotional work. But watching a YouTube video and buying a skill saw at Home Depot does not mean you will not take your arm off, and that gap is what the house is for. Men land there out of jail, out of prison, out of detox, and practice the things they were taught somewhere that demands transparency and holds them to it.

He is careful to say the wreckage was his own. Great family, no childhood trauma, just his wiring and how he coped. He went in to do the bare minimum and get his parents off his back, certain he might have a drug problem but definitely not a drinking problem. He left college, went home to his parents, then went to stay with his grandmother and grandfather in middle Georgia, which he calls his own version of Vision Warriors, somewhere safe enough to get out of his routine. What held him was the people, none of whom were paid to be there, showing up for bad coffee and cigarettes and genuinely happy about it. He remembers thinking that an old man with a cane who might smell funny had something he wanted. One of them told him to look for the similarities and not the differences. He can still, thirty years on, feel the alcohol going down his throat if he sits and thinks about it.

The part of the work he did not see coming is the phone. Not a three in the morning call that lets you off the hook when nobody answers, but a mid morning one, with enough space left in the calendar that he can actually take the conversation when it comes back. He gives out his number to anyone who says there is no detox, no meeting and no faith partner where they live, and tells them he will find someone or come himself. As he puts it, it is hard to be a miserable asshole if you are full of gratitude.