160 Touched By Addiction with Carmine

160 Touched By Addiction with Carmine

How do people find hope in the darkest times? This conversation with Carmine from Touched By Addiction shows what it can look like to come back from repeated overdoses, serious illness, and years of chaos, and still choose recovery every single day. Carmine talks about growing up in a loving Italian immigrant family, playing sports, going to university, and slowly realising he had an "addictive personality" that showed up in food, relationships and later drugs.

He walks through two major cycles of addiction, including crack cocaine and multiple fentanyl overdoses, one where his dad found him lifeless on the bathroom floor and another that ended with two weeks in hospital fighting for his life. A nurse’s blunt question – "How many times are you gonna do this and get away with it, man?" – becomes a turning point.

Carmine explains how entering Teen Challenge, a faith-based rehab, and meeting future Touched By Addiction teammates like Bowdoin, Adam, Ryan and Olya gave him genuine support rather than a jail-like environment. Later, a severe bout of COVID that left him in a coma coincides with the birth of Touched By Addiction, a group using their own experiences to help others get into treatment.

You’ll hear Carmine’s simple but hard-hitting rules for staying clean: don’t keep hanging around using friends, stay active through service and meetings, and build a small support circle you can call when you’re hurting. He describes sobriety as "a delicate flower" that has to be protected and says he literally turned around on the way to buy fentanyl after thinking of his niece and nephew.

There’s plenty here for anyone wondering what long-term recovery really looks like – messy, fragile, but full of new routines, fellowship, and a growing sense of purpose in helping others. Could some of Carmine’s daily habits and hard-won lessons be the next step on your own recovery road?