TROY — Initially of the pandemic, Jamie Magur had been sober for almost seven years.
That was no small factor. In a previous model of his life, Magur’s lengthy, painful battle with alcoholism had resulted in an 18-month jail sentence after six arrests for drunken driving. As he willingly concedes, he was lucky to not have killed any individual.
However after leaving jail, Magur turned a nook. He launched a profitable downtown Troy barbershop. He was married and elevating two kids. He ran for the Troy Metropolis Council a couple of instances, unsuccessfully.
Then, the wheels fell off.
Early in 2020, the pandemic closed his barbershop, Troy Grooming Co., and overturned Magur’s life. His children had been now not in class. Monetary pressures had been mounting. To cease himself from worrying, to numb the ache and the stress and the melancholy, Magur poured himself a stiff drink.
Then one other. And one other.
Many People had been doing the identical. Alcohol consumption spiked when the pandemic arrived and has apparently continued, with one recent study discovering that just about 20 p.c of adults have been consuming closely.
For many people, these glasses of wine or whiskey helped take care of the sudden lack of connection to family and friends, with the disruption to routines, with new anxieties and even with easy boredom. Heck, within the early days of the pandemic, there wasn’t a lot else to do — and liquor shops had been “important companies.”
However for Magur, that first drink (vodka, he believes) was a descent. Immediately, he was proper again to the place he was earlier than the jail sentence. He spiraled. He misplaced management. He drank every day, consuming a couple of drinks, at greatest, or as many as 12.
One night late in 2020, Magur sneaked a couple of drinks after work then climbed onto his Vespa for the journey to his household’s residence close to Frear Park. He crashed the scooter earlier than he bought there, an accident that despatched him to Albany Medical Middle with extreme head trauma.
The crash additionally put him again behind bars on a felony DWI cost. As a part of a plea deal, Magur walked into Rensselaer County Jail in October.
That four-month sentence most likely saved his life, Magur instructed me, but it surely was torture. Most of all, he missed his two younger daughters. He felt responsible for letting them down and the ache he had as soon as once more triggered.
“That is simply one thing that I’ve to simply accept,” he instructed himself. “This needs to be the top of my relationship with alcohol.”
Magur, 42, left jail a few week in the past and is trying to rebuild his life. He is working once more on the barbershop. He is attempting to heal the injury achieved to his marriage and to friendships. He is attempting to regain belief and atone.
It’s attainable, in fact, that Magur would have returned to consuming with out the coronavirus pandemic. In that alternate model of actuality, another stress or frustration may need led him to pour that first drink.
However after two years of COVID-19, Magur additionally illustrates the pandemic behind the pandemic — a tidal wave of melancholy and dependancy fueled, partially, by isolation and loneliness. Alarmingly, drug overdoses had been up 30 percent in 2020 to the best quantity on document, and early data from the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention suggests final yr’s toll was even larger.
“What COVID did to individuals who battle with dependancy is actual,” mentioned Magur, who’s taking the medicine naltrexone to quell his cravings.
Magur would not need folks to suppose he is utilizing the tragedy of the pandemic as an excuse for his fall. He is aware of skeptics will discover his choices unforgivable or contemptible. In fact, it could be simpler for him to return to his life with out airing his errors so publicly.
However speaking brazenly and actually about dependancy, he mentioned, is the one option to drag it from the shadows. It is also his approach of accepting accountability.
“I do know that I let folks down, however I am praying that I’ve the chance to make amends,” he mentioned. “I am human. I made a mistake. I am right here, and I am not going anyplace.”
As he reconstructs his life, Magur hopes he generally is a mild for these trapped within the darkness of dependancy. Do not hand over, he mentioned. There’s hope. You will get by way of this. Most significantly, ask for assist.
“It’s a must to attain out to somebody, irrespective of who that’s,” he mentioned. “The door on the barbershop is at all times open.”
cchurchill@timesunion.com ■ 518-454-5442 ■ @chris_churchill
