October's blog: Melindaville
What could life be like
after recovery from hardcore drug addiction?
Today Melinda Roberts Tyler is a successful
and award-winning professor of psychology,
happily married to her soulmate, full of
warmth and gratitude for life. Over fifteen
years ago, however, she was a heroin and
cocaine addict living on the streets of San
Francisco, at rock bottom with very little
will to live.
Melindaville
chronicles
her journey from hardcore addict to honors
student and professor. It is a
fascinating, though often harrowing,
story. After moving to San Francisco to
pursue an acting career in the early
1980s, Melinda gets involved in the
burgeoning punk scene and performs as part
of the band Wild Women of Borneo. Along
the way she becomes an exotic dancer and
high-priced call girl, as well as
demonstrates an entrepreneurial spirit by
starting “the world’s first fantasy phone
service,” Julie’s Hotline. As her
dependency on drugs intensifies, her life
begins to fall apart. It takes twelve
years of addiction before she begins to
put it back together again.
The blog contains excerpts from her memoir in
progress (working title: Lost and Found: A
Journey) as well as
consciousness-raising posts on the nature of
addiction as a health, not moral, issue, with
underlying causes and more sophisticated
solutions than “just say no.”
Melinda’s ultimate goal is to use the
proceeds of her eventual book sales to fund a
foundation for sex workers. Drug addiction
and the sex industry are intertwined. Many
sex workers choose that path after suffering
childhoods of abuse. Maybe they start working
in the business to support an existing habit
or begin using just to get through the
workday. Drugs like heroin or cocaine provide
compelling comfort in a small package, a way
to numb the pain of the past and present.
Melinda plans to fund treatment and higher
education for these men and women who are so
often invisible and voiceless. I can think of
no better champion.