AIR IN THE NEWS
Published December 8, 2003
The Star Tribune, Minneapolis, MN
By Larry Werner
He never used drugs while growing up on the south side of Chicago, where so many others took refuge from poverty in the arms of addiction. But Bob Poznanovich couldn't resist cocaine once he became a rising star in the corporate world.
"It appeared to be the drug of the rich and famous in those days, and I wanted to be rich and famous," Poznanovich said. "I got addicted."
Nobody intervened before he lost his job and all the money he had made as a vice president of a major electronics company. Nine years after getting sober at Hazelden, Poznanovich is building a company that helps families convince addicted people they need help. From a third-floor office of a commercial brownstone on St. Paul's Cathedral Hill, Addiction Intervention Resources (AIR) dispatches trained chemical-dependency professionals throughout the country to co-dependents and their addicted loved ones.
After a career selling computers and software for six-figure salaries, at one time supervising a division with 300 employees, Poznanovich pays himself a small salary to manage 11 intervention specialists and hopes his company will gross $500,000 this year. That's how much he spent on cocaine the year after losing his job.
"This isn't about making money," he said. "I would have stayed selling software if it were about making money. I used to love things and use people. Now I'm trying to use things and love people."
And in the process, he's trying to build a business convincing people to get treatment for a chronic illness he shares.
It amazes "Chicago Bob" that he stayed clean while growing up in a steelworkers' ghetto on Chicago's south side. He said he learned from the bad examples all around him, and from a single, immigrant mother who believed in education, that avoiding drugs and alcohol was important if he wanted to be successful.
By his mid-20s, he was getting wealthy selling personal computers and building a cocaine habit that reached $1,000 a day. He finds it interesting -- and instructive -- that he wasn't confronted about his drug use, even though it was apparent to his employer and colleagues. He lost his job, he said, because of a reorganization, not because of an addiction, and that meant time off and severance pay he could use to enjoy his habit.
When he crashed, he went to Hazelden, the Center City treatment center that launched a chemical-dependency industry responsible for a nickname -- "Minne-sober" -- that's been hung on the state by the recovery movement.
After treatment, Poznanovich took his after-care medicine by living in a St. Paul halfway house and riding two buses to menial jobs. He then returned to the corporate world to make more money selling software, interrupting that career for a stay at Structure House, a North Carolina center for people addicted to food.
He's known addiction and treatment, he said, and decided to turn his knowledge and passion for recovery into a business. At Structure House, he was given lots of tests, including some measures of what he should be when he grows up.
"Everything that came back said I should be an entrepreneur and something in the addiction field," he said. "I decided to take a leap of faith. There wasn't a company doing what we're doing. There's nobody out there who's purely an intervention consultant."
There are individual practitioners -- counselors and psychologists, for example -- who are hired by families to help them with this painful confrontation. But Poznanovich envisioned a national company with trained people who can meet with families to assess the situation, then accompany families and employers as they confront the dependent person to talk about the effects of addiction and insist that the sick get help.
He took on a partner, Andrew Wainwright, whom he had met in treatment. The two business partners have nine employees in nine cities from Boston to San Francisco. When they get the call, often a referral from Hazelden or another treatment center, they go to where they're needed.
For $2,500 a day, plus travel expenses, they counsel the family on the intervention process, then conduct the meeting where stories about the pain addiction has caused is shared with the person causing the pain. On Thanksgiving Day, he said, one of his employees flew to Bloomington, Ind., where a woman dying from the effects of her alcoholism was gathered up and flown to a South Dakota treatment center.
After treatment, AIR assists the recovering person with re-entry into the world of work and family stress.
For now, he said, intervention counseling pays the bills, but the company is trying to broaden its services to include "prevention" work. Poznanovich said he is days from signing a contract to distribute Hazelden's educational materials to schools and teachers.
In his new venture, he hasn't lost his peddler's flair for superlatives.
"One day, somebody's going to say there's this really big addiction-consulting company called Addiction Intervention Resources, and what we do is help people get better and break the stigma associated with addiction," he said. "It makes sense for business, but it absolutely makes sense for people's lives, too."
The expert's opinion: Mike Schiks, executive vice president of recovery services at Hazelden, said AIR is one of about 20 places to which his center refers people when they need help with an intervention. He confirmed that the others who do such work are individual practitioners rather than intervention companies.
"Addiction, whether alcohol or drugs, is the illness that is very much in the closet," Schiks said. "There is this view that this is a willpower issue, and that feeds into a substantial amount of denial. So for a family to be able to come forward and say we don't think you can do it alone is often very daunting."