'A message of hope'

A mother of two and a born-again Christian says God called her to write a book about her time as a $300-a-day crack addict.

By WAVENEY ANN MOORE

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 16, 2000

ST. PETERSBURG -- Her mother listened on the other end of the telephone line, horrified.

I am a crack addict, the young woman informed her stunned parent, and I am about to kill myself.

Now a mother herself, Juliette Bartley Warnke giggles, embarrassed, as she recounts the day she made that call.

That was a different time and place.

Different from the house she now owns with husband Robert in a middle-class community close to the Pink Streets of Pinellas Point. This day, her daughters are playing in another part of the home. Their dog, Shasta, barks in the fenced yard. Blondee, their cat, is inside. There also are tropical fish. Dinner is cooking on the stove.

In darker days, 13 years ago to be exact, the scene was less domestic. Then Mrs. Warnke and her husband lived in a drug-infested California neighborhood, in an apartment where prostitutes and assorted hangers-on were welcome, provided they brought required offerings of crack cocaine.

Mrs. Warnke, 44, talks easily about that time. She has committed the story to print, self-publishing a book, Catch on Fire . . . Urban Evangelism, in which she recounts her dizzying descent into a $300-a-day crack cocaine abyss.

"The book is a message of hope," the Pinellas County substitute teacher said. "What God did for me, he would do for anybody."

The work was prompted, she said, by her pastor's preaching, visions from God and a personal celestial summons.

"In the middle of the praise and worship service, the Lord started to speak to me. He said, "I want you to be my witness.' He called me by name, and it almost scared me to death," she said.

"It blew my mind. . . . I was looking around, because he said, "Juliette. Juliette.' "

The idea for a book was born.

But the tale told in the small paperback, also a vehicle for Mrs. Warnke's evangelical poetry, continues to unfold. She is training to become a substance abuse counselor, but she herself admits to three relapses since she gave up crack more than a dozen years ago.

Robert Warnke, 41, continues to fight his own battle against an insidious cocktail of alcohol, prescription drugs and cocaine. Despite his troubles, Warnke supports his wife's efforts, recently donning a tie to match her bright red suit for the launch of her book. He says their relationship has undergone a change.

"Our marriage over the last few years has been kind of shaky. Over the last few months, it's like during the first few years of our marriage. It's really great," Warnke said as he sat in the couple's comfortable family room.

"I stopped doing the drugs, so my mind is clear so I can associate with my family. We can do things together now. It's not just get high and zone out. And I'm even getting involved with the church."

The couple met in San Diego on Valentine's Day 1987, at a time when Mrs. Warnke was at one of her lowest points. She had left her native St. Petersburg in 1979, soon after graduating from the University of South Florida. In California, she signed up for graduate school, but enrolled in a welding course and subsequently got work in a shipyard.

"The shipyard guys introduced me to cocaine," she said.

It was a habit that grew worse during her first marriage.

"I didn't realize that I was a drug addict until I got laid off from my job at the Boys Club," said Mrs. Warnke, who followed her job at the shipyard with a spot as a reporter at a radio station, then as a program director at a local Boys Club.

For about a year, "I was a full-blown drug addict," she said. "And it dawned on me when my unemployment ran out. It hit me in October '86, because I couldn't get up to job hunt. . . . I couldn't go three days without a rock. It was devastating. I actually cried."

As her marriage and financial situation deteriorated, she was forced to move from her mountain-view home to a converted garage apartment in an inner-city San Diego neighborhood. It was there that she met Robert Warnke, who arrived at her door with one of the prostitutes who worked out of her home. He moved in, she introduced him to crack cocaine and she became pregnant.

The pregnancy changed their lives.

Mrs. Warnke said she desperately wanted to kick her drug habit, at least temporarily, for the sake of the infant she was carrying. And, as the couple tells it, divine intervention came one day when Robert Warnke felt compelled to enter a nearby church.

Lena Perry, then a member of Greater Jackson Memorial Church of God in Christ in San Diego, remembers the occasion well.

"There was an alley at the back of the church and her husband was on the way home and in the process, he stopped in and we were praying and I invited him in," Mrs. Perry recalled during a telephone interview.

"He knelt down beside me and then I gave him just a big hug and he said later it was like a weight was lifted off him and then he said he wanted his wife to come. Before we dispersed that evening, she came in."

Mrs. Warnke showed up again that Sunday and answered an altar call for prayer, said Mrs. Perry, adding that another church member, Cynthia Russell, helped her to minister to the pregnant woman.

"When I went to the altar and I was crying out, my life was in shambles and I had accepted the fact that I didn't know much about God," remembered Mrs. Warnke, who was brought up Roman Catholic and attended parochial school.

Her parents, Khalilah and Waheed Haamid, later converted to Islam, but as soon as she was old enough, Mrs. Warnke shunned organized religion altogether.

"When I showed up at the altar, I was a mess. . . . I said, "God, hey, if you don't save me, I wouldn't be mad at you. I understand. Just save the baby.' "

Khalilah, now 12, was a healthy baby, but to Mrs. Warnke's distress, the infant declined to be weaned for 21/2 years.

"When I went to the altar, I wanted to save the baby. I figured, hell, I could do drugs and be a social user. I wouldn't succumb to a full addiction like I was before. . . . But the baby wouldn't allow me to do that, because she wouldn't take a bottle. So I was trapped for a while," she said.

The Warnkes left San Diego a year after their daughter's birth and moved to Peoria, Ill., where Mrs. Warnke got a job as a caseworker for a social service agency.

"Half of my clients were drug addicts. . . . I knew exactly what to tell them, refer them to support groups, invite them to come to church, tell them you're losing more than you're gaining. Then my husband, he was relapsing and he's out there doing drugs and God knows I want to be down there hitting it too, but I've got a baby breast-feeding, (and) I'm working this job," she said.

"I'd have these dreams. I'd be in the middle of these parties and everybody's doing drugs and there's all kinds of rocks around and I would be standing right there with a pipe and a rock in my hand, putting it in a pipe but never would I be able to hit. I would always wake up before I hit. Ah, so close."

Some power seemed intent on keeping her from her craving. She became pregnant with younger daughter Khadijah, now 9. After the baby's birth, she moved back to San Diego, leaving her husband behind in a drug treatment center. The family eventually reunited and moved to St. Petersburg in 1993.

Since returing home, Mrs. Warnke has worked as a case manager for Suncoast Center for Community Mental Health. She also held jobs as a juvenile probation officer and a youth counselor and has worked as a substitute teacher in Pinellas County schools. Her goal is to become a full-time substance abuse counselor, for which she is being trained at St. Petersburg Junior College. She hopes to receive her certificate in December and establish a substance abuse program at her church, Genesis Worship Center.

Surprisingly, Mrs. Warnke has not undergone substance abuse treatment herself. She found 12-step programs useless, she said, and other programs did not offer the confidentiality she sought.

Each time she has relapsed, most recently in 1998, she has cried out to God for help, Mrs. Warnke said.

"I begged for forgiveness and God told me, "I have delivered you from this addiction. What are you doing here?' "

But quitting is not easy, said Dr. Mark Goldman, distinguished research professor in the department of psychology at USF and director of the Alcohol and Substance Use Research Institute in Tampa.

"It typically involves periods of ceasing, interspersed with periods of relapse and in the ones that do eventually make it, the trajectory is decreased use, so that the periods of stopping get longer," Goldman said.

"The truth is, it's not unlike any strong habit and like any strong habit, exposure to the conditions that led to use in the past increase the likelihood that you will use in the present."

The professor added that it is imprudent to talk of a cure.

"It's a little bit like learning to ride a two-wheel bicycle. Once you got it, you got it," he said.

Robert Warnke has been struggling with his addictions since he was 13.

"It was just primarily alcohol until I got introduced to crack," he said, adding that he also had experimented with crystal meth.

A former solid waste employee with the city of Largo, Warnke said his struggles intensified after an on-the-job injury about a year and a half ago. His addiction to prescription drugs worsened, leading him to take as many as 40 pills a day, the Navy veteran said.

"It's a struggle. I wouldn't say an everyday struggle like it used to be," Warnke said as he pondered his addictions.

"I more or less pray a lot and ask God to help me. If I get the urge, cravings, whatever, I ask him to take it away from me. And I talk to my wife. She helps me."

The drugs also have brought him legal trouble, he said.

"I would be a saint if it wasn't for my addictions," said Warnke, who went on to talk about an incident in 1995.

"I walked in somebody's house and thought it was mine. I walked in the door and sat down on the couch and said, "Where are my kids?' They arrested me for trespassing. I was in jail for two days. I don't even remember being in jail," he said.

More recently, in March, he was arrested on charges of cocaine possession.

Mrs. Warnke is not impervious to her husband's battles.

"I've had three relapses and two of them were from him. . . . The times that he had drugs, he would be in denial. He would have them out in the garage and it would just make me mad that he would use the money that way," she said.

"There was one time when I was looking for it, because he was denying it. But I knew he was using it. I could tell. He looked like he was high on crack and I was searching in his jacket pockets and I came across a bag of rocks and I smoked it. ... It wasn't something that I struggled with. I found it. I did it and I told him."

Another time, she said, a bag of rock cocaine fell out of his pocket while he was rough-housing with their children.

"I took it and after the kids were asleep, I showed him and we smoked it," she said.

What about their daughters?

"My daughters have seen firsthand the destruction of drugs and alcohol. They have seen that watching their dad. There have been times when he has been on life support for three days. For an overdose," Mrs. Warnke said.

Their pastor, the Rev. Linda Sesler, provides comfort.

"Life is difficult," Sesler said. "People's lives, regardless of how we like to portray them as being perfect and well-rounded, that is not so. It's not the truth. If I use the Bible as my primary example for people's lives, many of the patriarchs' lives by today's standards would be considered X-rated."

Sesler, whose congregation recently began meeting at New Covenant Holiness Church, 1625 Sixth Ave. S, said she has worked to "knit" the Warnke family back together.

"This is a beginning for them, for healing," she said. "But they are not out of the woods by any stretch of the imagination."

Mrs. Warnke is putting her faith in prayer.

"Don't stop praying for your loved ones," she tells audiences during speaking engagements at which her book is sold. "My mom prayed for me always."

That's so, confirmed Mrs. Haamid, who recently recalled the day she learned of her daughter's addiction.

"I just thought everything was going well with her. . . . It was really devastating," Mrs. Haamid said.

"Thank God, the main thing is that she got out of it. She has been restored."

Mrs. Warnke believes she is steeled against future relapses.

"I've got a whole new walk now that I've got to be for real," she said.

"My ministry is the deliverance and restoration power of God. That keeps me sober. That keeps me strong. . . . I'm sincere now. I was telling people that before, but now my life is out there. Everybody knows my story."

- Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

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