Every morning when Patti Wladika was using heroin, she had the same routine.

Wladika would wake up at her boyfriend's house, get a fix of heroin ready and make a mixed drink of vodka and Hi-C. She would sit in her brown rocking chair at around 6 a.m., shooting heroin and drinking.

“It hit me and I would be like, ready for the day,” said Wladika, 50, of Butler.

If one were to see Wladika now, they might never know she was once a daily heroin user. She has been in recovery from addiction for nine years.

“(Addiction) can be beat,” Wladika said. “You can overcome it and be a productive member of society, and get your family back and friends back, but you have to work at it. It's not just going to come like that.”

At the same time, Wladika and others in recovery, including Jason Beckwith, 40, of Butler, are taking a stand against the common misconception that addiction is not a disease.

“The use of drugs or alcohol alters a person's brain chemistry and function, turning a choice into a desperate need,” Beckwith said. “Give a man in the desert (who is) truly dying of thirst a gallon of water, and tell him not to drink any of it for 24 hours and you will give him all the water he wants afterward. That's the battle we fight.”

Jamie Christy, 38, of Butler, also knows the throes of addiction. She said she never felt comfortable with herself even before she started smoking marijuana at age 13.

“I was looking for a feeling of something inside that was missing,” Christy said. “ ... I felt normal when I (used drugs).”

Ron Benjamin, who grew up in Pittsburgh and lives in Butler, once thought his alcohol use in middle school was nothing out of the ordinary.

“I thought it was normal that everybody drank,” said Benjamin, 62. “That's why I didn't realize that when I was a drinker, I was drinking to excess.”

Riding the downward spiral of addiction

Eventually, the drug and alcohol abuse caused their lives to unravel.

Wladika drank on weekends, but was able to keep her alcohol use from interfering with her job until her 30s. That's when she started taking OxyContin and Vicodin to cope with stress.

Beckwith was already smoking marijuana and using LSD when his mother died in 1995, and alcohol was a way for him to cope with her death.

“Everybody thinks, 'Well, it was your choice to do that,'” he said. “But you don't know what the other option was. For you, it might have been clear as day. In my mind, that was the better of the two choices I had to face.”

Beckwith also noted that mental illness and drug addiction often go hand-in-hand.

About one-third of all people dealing with mental illness — and about 50 percent of people who deal with severe mental illness — also struggle with substance abuse, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

“(People) can't fathom why somebody would have high anxiety in certain situations or be depressed constantly, because the tape is on a loop and they don't see that the tape is on a loop inside that person's head,” he said.

While living in Florida, Beckwith was prescribed copious amounts of OxyContin following a sports injury in the early 2000s. When he moved back to Butler in 2003, he found that his friends had begun using heroin. He had run out of OxyContin and was withdrawing when his friends suggested heroin to ease his suffering.

“(Because of) the obsessing in my head to get out of those current withdrawal symptoms, I snorted a bag (of heroin),” he said. “I snorted for two weeks, and the next thing you know I was an IV drug user.”

Benjamin became a firefighter in the Pittsburgh area, and still didn't see anything wrong with his drinking because it was commonplace among his co-workers.

He got married and had children. However, his wife died in a boating accident when his children were young.

Benjamin began to date someone who was using cocaine, which led to his own cocaine addiction.

“It just seemed that it wasn't doing her any harm,” Benjamin said. “I remember people saying, 'You could immediately be hooked,' and I just didn't believe that.”

Christy's progression went from marijuana and alcohol, to cocaine and LSD, and then to painkillers.

“(Painkillers) just have an ease of like, everything's going to be all right and you can just do anything,” she said. “It is the best feeling, but you sell your soul without knowing you're selling your soul.”

When your life looks like 'Groundhog Day'

After Christy graduated from high school, she was able to hold down various jobs, but soon addiction became her main focus.She switched to heroin because it was a cheaper opiate than pills, and her life revolved around heroin and her job.She and her boyfriend, Adam Christy, whom she eventually married, lived in his mother's attic and sold heroin to finance their addiction.“I couldn't function without it,” she said.Like Wladika, Christy had a daily routine. She'd wake up, see if she had any heroin left from the night before, and figure out a scam for the day to finance her addiction.“It was like 'Groundhog Day,'” she said. “It becomes normal.”It wasn't long before Christy's addiction not only took a toll on her, but the people around her.Her family and friends tried to intervene, but after multiple stints in rehab most of them gave up on her.Benjamin faced similar problems. He got married a second time, but was divorced because of his addiction.Meanwhile, Wladika's addiction was affecting her work, and in 2003 she went to rehab for opiate addiction. However, by 2005 she was using heroin.Christy ended up selling heroin to a police informant, and days later police raided the house where she was living.After a stint in jail, she was released and soon overdosed on heroin. She survived, but drugs no longer provided the elation they once had.“In the beginning it was great euphoria, and then somewhere along the line it just got a little discouraging,” Christy said. “I got very depressed, and very hopeless.”For people living with addiction, there are marriages and divorces, lost jobs, family tragedies, trouble with the law, moves in and out of Butler County and even the use of different kinds of illegal drugs.“You're like, 'I can't believe it's gotten to this point,'” said Beckwith, who had at one point considered suicide. “But then you beat yourself up about it getting to that point, so how do you cope with that? More heroin.”Finding the motivation to overcome addictionBeckwith had lost one of his sons to an automobile accident, but he chose life for the sake of his surviving son.Christy had a similar motive; while she was on probation, she got pregnant with her daughter and decided to make a change.“I just knew that my life was a mess,” she said.She went to rehab in Erie, and has been in recovery since September 2003. She also gave birth to her daughter, Jade.Benjamin was sober for a time, but relapsed and was homeless for six months because he was afraid his wife would have thrown him out of the house anyway had she found out he was using.Eventually, he went to short-term rehab, and then, as a Marine Corps veteran, went to long-term rehab at VA Butler Healthcare.He cites help from the Butler County Housing Authority with finding a place to live. He worked minimum-wage jobs until the Pennsylvania Office of Vocational Rehabilitation helped him get his license to drive a tractor-trailer.“It was just a matter of having enough people to trust that I was worth investing in,” Benjamin said.He completed rehab and has been clean since 2007.Wladika had trouble holding onto money. Following one weekend during which she spent her entire income tax refund check, she decided to become clean.She went to a methadone clinic in 2007, and spent a year weaning off heroin. Wladika has been clean since March 2008.“I would never suggest anyone doing what I did, because I'm one in a million that (methadone works),” she said.Beckwith initially struggled in his recovery efforts, and he relapsed in April 2015. However, he has been in recovery since June 2015.In February 2016 he was accepted into drug court, which allowed him to stay out of prison as long as he completed long-term rehab, a stay in a halfway house and a stay in a three-quarters-way house.During that process Beckwith learned a major key to his recovery.“It's a fact that you have feelings, but your feelings aren't always fact,” he said. “And that was a mind-blowing thing for me. My reality that I'm looking and perceiving the world as being is not correct.”Beckwith changed his perception through Dialectic Behavioral Therapy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and even finds the good in tragedy.“The reason I feel like my son died was so I could spend eternity with him, because I found God,” he said. “If he wouldn't have died I wouldn't have gotten sober, and I would have died of a drug overdose eventually.”

Wladika also found comfort in her faith. She attends First United Methodist Church in Butler and is active in church events.Beckwith, Wladika, Christy and Benjamin all made amends with past friends and family members. Though it has taken time, they are slowly building up the trust of their loved ones.“I'm a lot more comfortable with each day that passes, and more grateful and think it's going to stick,” said Donna White, Beckwith's sister. “Because other times he's never gone this long (sober).”Benjamin divorced his wife because he moved to Butler and didn't want to go back to old places and habits, and she had a job in Allegheny County.He worked as a truck driver before recently retiring. He lives in Butler and sticks to a strict, daily regiment of meditation, recovery meetings and socializing.Combating the societal stigma of addictionBenjamin wants addicts to know that there is free help for them through programs in Butler County, and hopes addiction will no longer be taboo.“There are more people addicted than what we're willing to realize,” he said. “I think we're in denial about that. Everybody has somebody in their family (who is in addiction).”Benjamin, Wladika and Christy all have brought recovery meetings into Butler County Prison.Wladika said that the stigma surrounding addiction has improved somewhat in recent years.Christy graduated from Slippery Rock University in 2010 with a bachelor's degree in psychology. While she was in college, she spoke about addiction at schools with Pat Cannon, the former head of the Butler County Drug Task Force.Cannon helped her get a pardon of her criminal record in 2011, and she now works at Victim Outreach Intervention Center in Butler.Her life changed again when her ex-boyfriend, Adam Christy, reconnected with her via Facebook.“I was like, 'I still probably owe him amends,'” she said. “So I said, 'Let's do lunch,' and the rest is history.”They were married June 3, and both are still in recovery. She said that as time has gone on, recovery has gotten easier.Christy said she wants people to “quit bashing people who have a disease,” and also had advice for those dealing with people in addiction.“Try and support family or friends that have an addiction, but don't enable them,” she said. “Love them emotionally, but not materially.”Beckwith still lives at and runs the Hope House on East Brady Street. He started Action in Recovery, a project which consists of people in recovery doing volunteer community service.Beckwith said that even though the American Medical Association deemed addiction a disease in the 1950s, it still is surrounded by stigma.He observed that people often question why taxpayers pay for Narcan, which is used to revive people who have overdosed. He noted that he was treated with Narcan in 2008.“I wouldn't even be here helping out many people on a daily basis if it wasn't for Narcan,” he said.Beckwith urged people to understand that people in addiction use drugs to cope for just about anything, including funerals.“When you're walking in and looking at somebody who has died from the same thing that you do, and you're looking death in the face, it's like, the disease is stronger than that.”Beckwith is trying to make people aware of the problem, as well as to help solve it. He is a member of the Opioid Crisis Program, which holds forums in Butler County to confront the epidemic of opioid addiction. He also is working with churches with the goal of running sober living houses.Beckwith wants addicts to “invest in themselves” by going to rehab, and said that while he feels regret for some of his past, he doesn't allow himself to feel shame because it would only lead him back into addiction.“I'm happy today that I was an addict,” Beckwith said. “I'm happy that I went through what I went through. It built the character of who I am today, and I can help people because I went through it.”