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Getting Sober in Delray Beach: The Recovery Capital From the Inside
If you’ve spent any time in recovery in Florida, you’ve heard Delray Beach called the recovery capital of America. I got sober there. Not the first time I tried, and not the first time I tried in Palm Beach County either. But it’s where it finally held, and it’s where I met the friend who probably saved my life.

I’m Austin Rampt, author of One Last Hit. I grew up in the Tampa area, in Northdale and Brooksville, but two of the most important chapters of my life happened on the other coast, in North Palm Beach and Delray Beach. This is what that part of Florida looked like from the inside, from a guy who came in on the worst terms possible.

Why is Delray Beach called the recovery capital?

Because recovery is everywhere there. Treatment centers, sober homes, and meetings at pretty much any hour. You can walk out of one meeting and find another starting later the same day. People come from all over the country to get sober in South Florida, and a lot of them stay.

That’s the upside. The flip side, which anybody who has been there will tell you, is that a lot of people relapse there too. Drugs don’t leave town because there are a lot of rehabs. When you put a lot of people in early recovery in one place, you get a lot of hope and a lot of funerals. I saw both.

North Palm Beach, Thanksgiving 2005: Freedom House

My first real taste of recovery in Palm Beach County came years before Delray. After a heart attack at 21, and a 22nd birthday where my mom and brother walked in on me holding a pipe and a butane torch, I prayed for the first time in years. “God, please help me.” My grandfather paid $35,000 for treatment, and around Thanksgiving 2005 I landed at Freedom House, a halfway house in North Palm Beach.

I didn’t know anybody. I didn’t know the program. In my first AA meeting I shared three times, which is about three times more than a newcomer should. I’ll bet they wanted to kill me. But that was the first place the 12 steps actually meant something to me. I started to feel hope. It lasted years. I built a business, got married, had Madison and Zachary.

Then I relapsed, blew it all up, and ran from a court ordered rehab to Mexico. That part is in why I wrote One Last Hit. What matters for this post is how I came back.

How I ended up at Next Chapter in Delray Beach

I didn’t come to Delray because I was inspired. I came because I ran out of options. After Mexico I’d been clean a little while, then kratom, then dark web opiates, then heroin and crack again. My general manager fired me from my own company. I ended up in a motel shooting heroin while an ex watched on FaceTime, and I was out for 12 hours.

When I woke up I called my mom, mostly to ask for money. By the end of that call I’d agreed to detox. In detox I met Steve, a rehab salesman, who pitched me on a place called Next Chapter in Delray Beach. My mom paid for it. I went.

What treatment in Delray actually looked like for me

The thing I remember most isn’t the building or the beach. It’s group. In group at Next Chapter I told the whole Mexico story for the first time. Cancun, the cartel guys, the money, Sofia, all of it. My body shook. I couldn’t catch my breath.

The feedback was not gentle. One guy said, “You fucking abandoned your kids.” I wanted to argue and I couldn’t, because he was right. I’d heard a lot of counselors say kind, careful things to me over the years. It took a peer saying it ugly for it to land.

Then there was Malia, my therapist. She showed me a photo of a baby and asked, “What does this baby have to do to deserve love?” I said nothing. She said, “Nothing. And neither do you.” I’d been trying to earn love since I was a kid batting cleanup, when hitting home runs was the only time I felt my dad was proud of me. That was the first time I really looked at Tokyo, my mom drinking every night, my dad checking out. Malia got me to go back there.

Nate

Nate was a North Carolina good ol’ boy, and he was my best friend from Next Chapter. He was the first guy I ever saw be emotionally honest without making it a performance. I watched him say how he actually felt and not die from it, and I started trying it myself.

We got out around the same time and got the same sponsor, Bill, a long haired surfer who didn’t care how smart either of us thought we were. Nate and I ran meetings together. If you’re picturing early recovery in Delray as a bunch of guys drinking bad coffee and setting up chairs, you’re picturing it right. It was the best thing that had happened to me in years.

Nate eventually moved to North Carolina. He stood next to me as a groomsman when I married Haley on November 25, 2018, at Casa Feliz in Winter Park. On June 12, 2021, I was eating at a Mexican restaurant with Haley when Bill called. Nate had died of an overdose. He was 27.

I say Nate saved my life, and I mean it literally. He showed me how to get honest. I still don’t fully understand why I’m the one who’s still here. That question is part of why I wrote the book.

I carry that call with me into every meeting now. Delray gave me Nate, and Delray is also where I learned that the rooms can’t hold onto anybody who stops reaching for them. Both of those things are true at once.

What I’d tell anyone heading to South Florida for treatment

I’m not a counselor and I’m not going to recommend specific programs. But from my own experience in North Palm Beach and Delray:
- Go to the meetings outside of your program. The rooms around Palm Beach County are full of people with real time, and they’re the ones who’ll still be there after your insurance runs out.
- Get a sponsor fast, and pick someone who annoys you a little. Bill annoyed me. That was the point.
- Find your Nate. One honest friend in recovery is worth more than any amenity on a brochure.
- Be careful when it starts going well. My relapses usually showed up after the good stuff, not the bad.
I’ve had five sobriety dates over my life, all with at least two years between them, so I’m not writing this as someone who figured it out once and coasted. As of late 2025 I have about two years. Haley and I have Delilah, Nicholas and Skylar, and my older kids Madi and Zachary are growing up fast. A lot of what I have now traces back to a group room in Delray Beach.

If you’re figuring out treatment for yourself or someone else, read why rehab didn’t work for me until it did and what early recovery looked like. Families might start with how addiction destroys families. I talk with people from all over the recovery world on the One Last Hit Podcast, and there’s more about me here.

If you’re struggling right now, in Florida or anywhere else, call the SAMHSA National Helpline at 1-800-662-4357. It’s free, confidential, 24/7, and they can help you find treatment.

FAQ

Is Delray Beach a good place to get sober?
It was for me, mostly because of the people and the number of meetings. It’s not magic though. Plenty of people relapse there, including some I loved.

What is a halfway house like in Palm Beach County?
Mine, Freedom House in North Palm Beach, gave me structure, rules and other guys in recovery around me. It was where the 12 steps first started making sense to me.

Who was Nate in One Last Hit?
Nate was my best friend from Next Chapter in Delray Beach and a groomsman at my wedding. He died of an overdose on June 12, 2021, at 27. He’s at the emotional center of the book.

The full story of North Palm Beach, Delray Beach and Nate is in One Last Hit on Amazon. Learn more at onelasthitbook.com.
October 14, 2026
Why Rehab Didn’t Work for Me Until It Did: Relapse After Rehab

I’ve had five sobriety dates. Every one of them came with at least two years of clean time between them, and I relapsed anyway. Over the years I went to rehab eight times. I’m not proud of that number, but I’m not embarrassed by it anymore either. It’s just the truth, and if you’re reading this after your own relapse, or after your kid came home from treatment and used again, I think the truth is more useful to you than a pep talk.

I’m Austin Rampt. I wrote One Last Hit, a memoir about addiction that runs from a fishing dock in Northdale, Florida, to Cancun, Mexico City and finally a rehab in Delray Beach. This post is about the rehab part. Why it kept not working, and what was different the time it did.

Why does rehab fail for so many people?

I can only speak for me, but rehab failed for me because I kept treating it as the cure instead of the starting line. I went in, got the information, got healthy, felt great, and walked out thinking I’d graduated.

Information alone is not sufficient to keep an addict sober. I could have taught some of the groups I sat in. I knew the steps, the slogans, the science. None of that was ever the problem. The problem was what happened at 9 p.m. on a random Wednesday six months later when I felt bored, or proud, or ignored.

Teen Challenge: I got promoted, then got kicked out

My first long stretch in treatment came after I got arrested at a Walmart on Xanax. In court a quarter pound of weed and 50 Xanax fell out of my pant leg. I’m not making that up. I ended up on two years of probation, failed drug tests, and went to Teen Challenge, a faith based program in Sanford, Florida.

It was washing cars, church every night and bologna sandwiches. I was good at it, which tells you a lot about me back then. I got promoted to crew leader. I always do well when there’s something to win. Then I got kicked out for drugs.

The first night I was home, I asked my mom for a beer. She gave it to me. I don’t blame her. Nobody in my family understood yet that this wasn’t a phase.

Freedom House: the first time it worked

After a heart attack at 21 and a 22nd birthday where my mom and brother found me holding a pipe and a butane torch, my grandfather paid $35,000 for rehab. Around Thanksgiving 2005 I went to Freedom House, a halfway house in North Palm Beach.

That was my first real experience with the 12 steps. I went to my first meeting and shared three times. I’ll bet they wanted to kill me. But I had hope for the first time, and it worked for years. I built a business. I married Claire. We had Madison and then Zachary.

So why didn’t it stick? Because I quietly stopped doing the things that got me there. Success felt like proof I didn’t need them. I’d learned as a kid hitting home runs that if I accomplish things, people love me. When the business and the house and the family still didn’t fill the hole, I blew it up.

The rehab I ran away from

When I relapsed after years sober, it was bad enough that my family filed a Marchman Act, which in Florida lets families petition a court to order someone into treatment. I ended up in a court mandated program. My girlfriend Sarah talked me into leaving with her for Promises in California. We ran. A dealer met us at a hotel with crack.

That’s where I decided the only way to avoid the Marchman Act was to leave the country. I opened the JetBlue app, Cancun popped up first, and I spent the next 18 months in Mexico. Crack around the clock. Cartel connected dealers. A near kidnapping on Isla Mujeres. A night in Mexico City with a dealer holding a pistol in his lap. If you want that part, it’s in why I wrote One Last Hit.

The lesson there isn’t complicated. You can’t get treatment from a place you’re actively planning to escape.

Relapse after rehab: my pattern

When I look back, my relapses had a schedule. I started a business when Madison was born. I relapsed after Zachary. Again before Delilah. Again after Nicholas. My longest stretch, seven years, ended with kratom, which I told myself didn’t count. Within months it was dark web opiates, then heroin and crack.

Later there was a bath salts overdose at the Hard Rock that put my kidneys into failure and landed me in a 12 day detox at Promises in Santa Monica.

The common thread is that every relapse happened when life was either really good or really emotional. Big moments. I didn’t have a way to feel big things without using. Rehab taught me that in a classroom. It didn’t teach my body.

What was different at Next Chapter

My last real bottom was a motel room where I passed out on heroin for 12 hours. I called my mom for money and ended up agreeing to go to detox. A rehab salesman named Steve pitched me on Next Chapter in Delray Beach, and my mom paid for it.

Three things were different there, and none of them were information.

I told the whole truth. In group I told the full Mexico story for the first time. My body shook. I couldn’t breathe right. The feedback was, “You fucking abandoned your kids.” Nobody had said that to me plainly before. It hurt in the exact place that needed it.

I stopped trying to earn love. My therapist Malia showed me a picture of a baby and asked, “What does this baby have to do to deserve love? Nothing. And neither do you.” For a guy who’d been trying to earn love since Little League, that sentence rewired something.

I had a person. I met Nate there, a North Carolina good ol’ boy who showed me what being emotionally honest looked like. We left together, got the same sponsor, Bill, and ran meetings together. Connection did what eight programs of information couldn’t. I wrote more about that place in getting sober in Delray Beach.

What I’d tell someone who just relapsed after rehab

Get back fast. Every hour you spend in shame is an hour the disease gets to talk to you alone. Call your sponsor, call your old counselor, call a hotline, call your mom. I didn’t always do that, and it cost me years.

Also, stop measuring yourself by how many times you’ve been. I know people who got it on the first try. I needed a lot more. Nate went to treatment, did everything right that I could see, and still died of an overdose on June 12, 2021, at 27. Rehab is not a guarantee in either direction. What you do after it matters more.

For me that’s a daily thing. I think of sobriety like a bomb strapped to my chest. It’s guaranteed to go off unless I do a few simple things every day. Meetings, calls, honesty. I don’t get to skip them because I’m having a good year.

If you’re the family member in this picture, read how addiction destroys families and how ours survived. If you’re fresh out, here’s what early recovery actually looked like for me. I also talk relapse and treatment with guests on the One Last Hit Podcast, and you can read more about me here.

If you need help finding treatment, the SAMHSA National Helpline is 1-800-662-4357. It’s free, confidential and available 24/7, and they can point you to programs near you.

FAQ

How many times does it take rehab to work?
There’s no magic number. For me it took eight rounds of treatment over many years, and the one that stuck was the one where I got honest and connected with people, not the one with the best curriculum.

Is it normal to relapse after rehab?
It’s common. It happened to me after years sober, more than once. It isn’t a reason to give up on treatment, but it is a reason to keep doing the work after you leave.

What should you do right after a relapse?
Tell someone that day. A sponsor, a counselor, a family member, or the SAMHSA line. The longer I hid a relapse, the worse it got.

The full story of every rehab, every relapse and the one that finally held is in One Last Hit on Amazon. Find more at onelasthitbook.com.

October 14, 2026
Why I Wrote One Last Hit: The True Story Behind My Addiction Memoir

The first line of my book is “Sticking needles in your arm for fun is NOT normal.” I wrote that sentence before I wrote anything else, and I kept it because it is the most honest thing I know about myself. For a long time I did something insane every single day and called it normal.

My name is Austin Rampt. I grew up in the Tampa area, first in Northdale, then Brooksville. I have been to rehab more times than I like to count, spent 35 days in Falkenburg Road Jail, had a heart attack at 21, and at one point fled the country on a JetBlue flight to Cancun to dodge a court order to go to treatment. I ended up living in the orbit of the Sinaloa Cartel. Today I am sober, married to Haley, and a father of five.

People ask me why I would put all of that in a book with my name on the cover. Fair question. Here is the real answer.

Why would anyone write a memoir about addiction?

Because I had the information for years, and it never saved me. I have had five sobriety dates, all with at least two years of sobriety between them, and I relapsed anyway. I knew the literature. I could quote the steps. I had a sponsor, a home group, a job, a family. Information alone is not sufficient to keep an addict sober.

What moved me, every time something actually moved me, was a story. Somebody in a meeting telling the truth about the worst night of their life. Nate, my best friend from my last rehab, describing exactly how he felt in a way I had never had the guts to describe myself. Stories got under my skin where facts never did.

So I figured if I was going to help anybody, it would not be with a list of tips. It would be by telling the whole thing, including the parts that make me look like an idiot, or worse.

The parts I almost left out

There were chapters I did not want to write. One was about selling. In Brooksville in high school they called me “Ace.” I sold weed, pills and ecstasy to kids, to grown men, even to a few teachers. I was not some kingpin. I was a scared, twitchy kid who figured out that if I had what people wanted, they would want me around. I sold to support my habit and to buy a feeling of belonging. That distinction matters to me, but it does not erase what I did.

And I wrote about my mom in the ICU after my heart attack, looking at me and saying, “Do you want my blood? Because I have nothing left to give you.” I went home from that hospital, saw leftover crack on the floor, and smoked it. That is what addiction actually is. Not a choice you make once. A choice you keep making after it has nearly killed you.

What I was trying to explain to myself

Writing the book forced me to go back to the beginning, which I had avoided for most of my life.

When I was a kid my family lived in Tokyo for four years. I was overweight, I did not speak Japanese, and I had tics. My hands jerked. I made involuntary dolphin noises in class. Kids laughed me out of rooms. When we moved back to Florida I found baseball, and I was enormous for my age. I batted cleanup. On the field they called me king, and it was the only place I ever felt my dad was proud of me.

So I learned a rule early: if I accomplish things, people will love me. When accomplishment did not fill the hole, I blew everything up. Then I would rebuild, accomplish again, and blow it up again. A business when Madison was born. A relapse after Zachary. Another before Delilah, another after Nicholas. I kind of picked up that there might be a pattern there.

Then there was the first drink, at my friend Ryan’s garage party. I describe it in the book like passing under an overpass in a rainstorm. The noise stopped, just for a moment, and there was peace. I spent the next couple of decades trying to get back under that overpass.

Mexico, and why it had to be in there

Mexico is the part people want to hear about on podcasts, and I get it. I flew to Cancun on JetBlue miles because my family had filed a Marchman Act to get me into court ordered treatment. A cab driver sold me coke on the way from the airport. Within weeks I was buying from Gus, a deported guy from Chicago who was connected to the Sinaloa Cartel. I watched a cop hand drugs back to him after one phone call to the local boss.

I burned through more than half a million dollars in savings and credit. At my peak I was spending around $10,000 a week on drugs. I bought two Rolex watches for $30,000 cash in a scheme to trade them for a kilo. Someone sent photos of me on Isla Mujeres to people who wanted to kidnap me for ransom, and I was off that island within an hour. In Mexico City I sat across from a dealer named Juanito all night while he held a pistol in his lap, because I had offended his Rottweiler at a party. I genuinely thought I was going to die in that room.

But the cartel stuff is not the point of the book. The point is what was waiting at the bottom of it. In Mexico City I stayed with Sofia, a woman who had almost nothing. She boiled water on the stove so I could shower. Her rent was under a hundred dollars a month. And she was happier than anyone I had ever met, including me back when I had money and a business and a nice house. I was chasing the whole thing wrong.

When I left Mexico the last time, she stayed the night in my hotel without waking me and left a note on the pillow: “Tienes una vida bonita. Have a beautiful life.” I had to borrow $20 from a stranger at the airport to pay the exit tax.

What finally changed

It was not one moment. But two stand out. At Next Chapter in Delray Beach I told the full truth about Mexico in group for the first time. My body shook. I could not breathe right. The feedback was brutal: “You fucking abandoned your kids.” Nobody had said it that plainly before, and they were right.

Then my therapist Malia showed me a photo of a baby and asked, “What does this baby have to do to deserve love? Nothing. And neither do you.” I had spent my whole life trying to earn love by hitting home runs. That question cracked something open.

And there was Nate. We left rehab together, got the same sponsor, ran meetings together. He stood next to me as a groomsman when I married Haley. On June 12, 2021, he died of an overdose. He was 27. I wrote about him because he saved my life, and because his story is the reason I do not get to treat my recovery like a trophy. I wrote more about that time in what getting sober in Delray Beach looked like from the inside.

What I hope you take from it

If you are using, I am not going to tell you that you are ready. You will know before I do. I just want you to see that a guy who did everything I did is sitting on his back porch right now watching his kids run around the yard. That is not a sales pitch. It is just what happened.

If you love someone who is using, I hope the book helps you understand the lies, because they are not really aimed at you. I wrote a whole post about the lies I told myself, and another on how addiction tore through my family and how we survived.

The thing I believe more than anything now is in the last chapter. Connection was always the real antidote. Not willpower, not information, not money. People.

If you want to hear me talk through some of this out loud, I host the One Last Hit Podcast, where I sit down with people in recovery and the people who love them. You can read more about me here.

If you or someone you love is struggling right now, call the SAMHSA National Helpline at 1-800-662-4357. It is free, confidential, and open 24/7.

FAQ

Is One Last Hit a true story?
Yes. Every event in the book happened. Some names are changed, but Cancun, the cartel, the heart attack, the jail time and Nate are all real.

Who is One Last Hit for?
People who are using, people in early recovery, and families who are trying to understand someone they love. A lot of readers tell me they just like a wild true story, and that is fine too.

Is Austin Rampt sober today?
Yes. I have been sober about two years as of late 2025. I do not take it for granted, because I have relapsed before after long stretches.

You can get One Last Hit on Amazon in Kindle, paperback and audio, or find everything at onelasthitbook.com.

May 26, 2026
How Addiction Destroys Families and How Ours Survived

If you’re reading this as a family member of someone who’s struggling, I want to say something to you before anything else: I see you. I know what it takes to love someone who is destroying themselves. I know the exhaustion, the anger, the specific grief of watching someone you care about disappear into something you can’t fight for them.

I know it because I was the one being watched.

My name is Austin Rampt. I wrote One Last Hit, a memoir about addiction and the long road back. The book covers my years using crack cocaine and heroin and what those years cost me and the people I loved. The chapters about family were the hardest to write. Because the damage I caused to the people closest to me was real. I carry it.

What Addiction Does to a Family

It doesn’t show up with an announcement. It moves in quietly. First it’s small things: a missed dinner, a mood that comes and goes without explanation, money that doesn’t add up right. Then the small things become impossible to ignore. Then comes the stretch where everyone in the house knows something is seriously wrong but nobody has language for it yet.

By the time addiction is undeniable, it has already reshaped everything around it. The family reorganizes itself to accommodate the chaos. Kids learn to go quiet and not ask too many questions. Partners develop a constant hypervigilance, reading every interaction for warning signs, managing around the unpredictability, holding everything together while also carrying their own fear. Parents cycle through hope and devastation in ways that leave permanent marks.

And the person in the middle of it, me, is often the last to understand the full weight everyone else is carrying. Because the disease lies. It tells you that you’re managing it. That it’s contained. That the people around you are overreacting.

It is not contained.

What It Actually Looked Like in My Family

Trust goes first. Once the people around you figure out that your words and your actions don’t match, they stop relying on what you say. That’s a specific kind of grief for everyone involved. For them, it’s losing the version of you they thought they knew. For me, it was knowing I was the reason for it.

Financial damage is real and extensive in ways that go beyond just what you spend on the drug itself. Jobs lost, opportunities missed, money borrowed or stolen, costs that fell on people who should never have been responsible for any of it.

There’s also what I think of as the emotional inheritance. Kids who grow up in a household shaped by addiction absorb things that don’t surface until years later. Anxiety that doesn’t have a name. Trouble trusting people. Hypervigilance that makes it hard to relax. These aren’t inevitable outcomes but they’re real risks, and I’ve had to look honestly at what I may have passed on.

And there’s the isolation that settles over the whole family. The quiet decision to stop talking to people outside about what’s really happening at home. The social life that shrinks. The loneliness of living through a crisis that never gets spoken about out loud.

What I’d Tell Every Family Member

You cannot want someone clean more than they want it for themselves. I know that’s not easy to hear. But it’s true. Trying to force it through ultimatums or control or sheer force of will burns you out without changing anything at the root. I say this not to discourage you but because I’ve seen what happens when families pour everything into trying to fix something that can only be fixed from the inside.

Holding your ground is not abandonment. There’s a real difference between enabling someone’s destruction and supporting the person. You can love someone deeply and still refuse to be part of the cycle that keeps them sick. Where exactly that line is will be different for every family, and finding it is genuinely hard. But drawing it is not a betrayal.

You did not cause this. Addiction is not something families create. The guilt that families carry, the “what did I do wrong” and “what signs did I miss,” is weight that doesn’t belong to you.

And if you can: keep the door cracked. Not to enable. But because the day they decide they’re ready, and that day can come, it came for me, they need somewhere to go.

How We Made It Through

We made it because certain people didn’t give up entirely, even when they had every right to. Because I eventually reached the point where I could not take one more step in the direction I’d been heading. Because when recovery finally came, it didn’t happen in isolation. It happened with people around me who were willing to be part of a long, slow rebuilding process.

That process was not clean or linear. There were setbacks and hard conversations and moments I genuinely didn’t know if I was going to hold on. But we came through. And the relationships that survived, the ones we rebuilt on honesty instead of the patterns we’d developed around my addiction, those are stronger now than they ever were before.

Not every family gets that ending. I understand that. But some do.

If you’re still in it, still fighting for someone you love, I hope something here is useful to you. The full story is in One Last Hit.

Get One Last Hit here.

May 26, 2026
Life After Crack and Heroin: What Early Recovery Really Looked Like for Me

The first night I came home from Teen Challenge, after months of washing cars, going to church every night and eating bologna sandwiches, I asked my mom for a beer. She gave it to me.

I tell that story because it says everything about early recovery that nobody puts on a brochure. Getting out is not the finish line. For me it was usually the most dangerous moment of the whole thing.

I’m Austin Rampt. I used crack and IV heroin, among a long list of other things, and I spent a good chunk of my life cycling in and out of treatment. I have had five sobriety dates. Some of those stretches lasted years. So when I talk about life after crack and heroin, I am talking about it from both sides: the times it worked and the times I walked right back into it.

What does early recovery from crack and heroin actually feel like?

Honestly? Like being skinned. For years crack and heroin did one job for me. They turned the noise off. Take them away and the noise comes back at full volume, plus all the stuff you did while it was off.

The physical part is real. Coming off heroin, your body revolts. But for me the physical stuff ended faster than the mental stuff. The cravings for crack were not even mostly physical. They were ritual. The lighter. The smell. A certain kind of afternoon light. A gas station I used to stop at. Any of it could drop me straight back into wanting.

And then there is the boredom. Nobody warns you about the boredom. When you have spent years where every hour is about getting, using or recovering from using, a normal Tuesday evening feels like a prison sentence.

The first time I actually had hope

After my heart attack at 21, after my mom said “Do you want my blood? Because I have nothing left to give you,” I still kept using. What stopped me, for a while, was my 22nd birthday. Nobody came. A girl showed up with meth. Then my mom and brother walked in and found me with a pipe in one hand and a butane torch in the other.

That night I prayed for the first time in years. Just “God, please help me.” My grandfather paid $35,000 for rehab, and around Thanksgiving 2005 I landed at Freedom House, a halfway house in North Palm Beach.

That was the first time the 12 steps meant anything to me. I went to my first real AA meeting and shared three times. I’ll bet they wanted to kill me. But something started to feel possible. I built a business. I got married. I had Madison, then Zachary. Life got good.

Then I relapsed. That is the part I need you to hear if you are in early recovery right now. Things getting better is not the same as being safe.

Why the good times were the dangerous times

I have a pattern, and it took me way too long to see it. I started a business when Madison was born. I relapsed after Zachary. I relapsed again before Delilah, and again after Nicholas. My best seven year stretch of sobriety ended with kratom, of all things, which I told myself did not really count.

Here is how I think about it now. Sobriety, for me, is like having a bomb strapped to my chest. It is guaranteed to go off unless I do a few simple things every day. I don’t know when, and I don’t know where, but if I stop doing those things, it explodes. Every relapse I have ever had started with me deciding I was fine and could skip the simple things.

Early recovery is when you are most likely to believe you are fine. You sleep better, you eat, your skin clears up, people start talking to you again. That feels like being cured. It is not. It is the allergy going quiet.

What actually helped me in the first year

I’m not a doctor and I’m not going to pretend there is a universal plan. But these are the things that kept me alive in the stretch I’m in now.

Somewhere structured to land. After Mexico, my friend Lou picked me up from the airport and took me fishing in Islamorada. Then I went into a halfway house and got a job. I needed walls around me. When I tried to skip that part and go straight back to running my own life, it went bad fast.

A sponsor who would not let me be clever. After Next Chapter in Delray Beach, Nate and I both got the same sponsor, Bill, a long haired surfer guy. Bill did not care how smart I thought I was. I needed that.

Doing the boring stuff. Meetings. Phone calls. Showing up. Nate and I ran meetings together. It was not glamorous and it worked better than anything glamorous ever did.

Learning humility the hard way. One therapist had me write a paper on humility. I wrote a four page masterpiece. She crumpled it up without reading it. It wasn’t about writing a great paper on humility. It was about learning something about humility. That one still makes me laugh, and it still stings a little.

Letting someone see all of it. When I met Haley on Bumble, she was a therapist at a rehab center. On our first date I told her everything. Mexico, the kids, all of it. She almost did not swipe on me because of my cargo shorts, which I think about a lot. She stayed anyway. We got married on November 25, 2018, at Casa Feliz in Winter Park. She taught me a lot about how to feel things and how to be a parent.

The relapses that came after

I’d love to tell you I went from Freedom House straight to a happy ending. I didn’t. After years sober I went to Mexico and nearly died there. After I got back, I got clean, then started on kratom, then dark web opiates, then heroin and crack again. I got fired from my own company by my general manager. I nodded out in a motel room for 12 hours while an ex was on FaceTime with me.

Later there was a bath salts overdose at the Hard Rock that put me into renal failure and a 12 day detox at Promises in Santa Monica. I don’t say any of this to scare you. I say it because if you relapse in early recovery, you need to know you are not the only one, and that it is not the end of the story unless you die. Get back up fast. I wrote more about that cycle in why rehab didn’t work for me until it did.

What life looks like now

As of late 2025 I have about two years. I sit on my back porch and watch Delilah and Nicholas tear around the yard. Madi is a teenager. Zachary is growing up fast. Skylar was born in April 2025. Most days are ordinary, and ordinary is the thing I spent most of my life running from.

There are nights I still dream of Cancun. Maybe that never goes away. I don’t actually want it to, because I want to remember what I am capable of if I’m left to my own devices.

If you are new, I’d also read what rock bottom actually felt like for me, and the post on how addiction affects families if you’re trying to repair things at home. I also talk to people in early recovery on the One Last Hit Podcast, and you can read my background here.

If you’re struggling right now, call the SAMHSA National Helpline at 1-800-662-4357. It’s free, confidential and open 24/7.

FAQ

How long does early recovery last?
There’s no official clock. For me the first year was the shakiest, but some of my worst relapses came after years sober. I treat every day like early recovery now.

Do cravings for crack ever go away?
They got much quieter for me. They come back sometimes, usually tied to a place, a smell or a mood. Calling someone when they show up is what works for me.

Is relapse part of recovery?
It was part of mine, many times over. It is not required, and every relapse can kill you. But if it happens, it does not mean you can’t get sober.

The full story, from Freedom House to Mexico to Delray Beach, is in One Last Hit, available on Amazon. Learn more at onelasthitbook.com.

May 26, 2026
The Lies I Told Myself (and Everyone Else) While I Was Using

I was a very good liar. Not because I was smart, but because I believed most of what I said. That is the dangerous kind of liar, and it’s the kind addiction turns you into.

I’m Austin Rampt, author of One Last Hit. I grew up between Tampa and Brooksville, Florida, and I spent most of my life using something: alcohol, weed, LSD, Xanax, pills, crack, meth, IV heroin. When I went back through my life to write the book, the thing that hit me hardest was not the drugs. It was how many lies I had to tell to keep them.

These are the real ones. Not a list I made up for a blog. The actual sentences I said to myself and to the people who loved me.

“I’m not like those people”

In high school in Brooksville they called me “Ace.” I sold weed, pills and ecstasy to classmates, to grown adults, to grandparents, even to a few teachers. I told myself that made me the guy in control. The customers were the ones with problems.

Then one day I sold crack to a customer and decided to try it myself. That’s how that lie ended. I was never the guy in control. I was a kid with tics who had figured out that if I had what people wanted, they would let me stay in the room.

“This is just what kids do”

My first cigar was on a fishing dock in Northdale with my buddy Sebastian, around 1996. My first drink was in Ryan’s garage, and it felt like passing under an overpass in a rainstorm. The noise stopped. My friend Chad handed me LSD in eighth grade and said, “just put it on your tongue.” I was on Vicodin at 14 and remember just melting into the recliner.

Every step, I told myself everybody my age was doing the same thing. Some of them were. The difference was that they stopped, and I needed it. When my mom let me smoke pot in the house at 16, I took it as proof I was fine. Looking back, she was trying to keep me close. I was using it as permission.

Why do addicts lie to the people they love?

People ask me this on the podcast all the time, usually parents. My honest answer is that the lies were mostly aimed at me. The people I loved just happened to be standing in front of them.

If I admitted the truth to my mom, I had to admit it to myself. And if I admitted it to myself, I had to stop. I could not imagine stopping. So the lie protected the drug, and the drug protected me from everything I didn’t want to feel. Tokyo. Getting laughed out of classrooms for making dolphin noises I couldn’t control. A dad I only felt loved by when I was hitting home runs.

That doesn’t make the lies okay. It just explains them. Families deserve to know they weren’t the target, even though they took the damage. I wrote about that damage in how addiction destroys families.

“I almost died, so now I’ll stop”

At 21 my boss found me facedown and naked in my trailer. Heart attack. He called 911. I woke up in the ICU with my family around the bed, and my mom said, “Do you want my blood? Because I have nothing left to give you. You’ve taken it all.”

I meant it when I promised I was done. Then I got home, saw leftover crack on the floor, and smoked it.

That’s the lie I think scares families the most. You assume a near death experience has to be a turning point. Sometimes it is. For me it was just another Tuesday with a better story.

“I’ll go to treatment, just not that one”

When my family filed a Marchman Act to get me into court ordered treatment, I talked my way into a rehab on my terms. Then my girlfriend Sarah convinced me we should bolt for a program called Promises in California. We left. A dealer met us at a hotel with crack. Sitting there, I realized the only real way to dodge the Marchman Act was to leave the country.

I opened the JetBlue app. The first destination that popped up was Cancun. I told myself I was taking a break to get my head right. I stayed in Mexico about 18 months.

“I have it under control” (in Mexico)

This one is almost funny now. I told myself I had it under control while spending around $10,000 a week on drugs. While buying two Rolex watches for $30,000 cash so a cartel guy named Gus could trade them for a kilo. Gus got picked up for wearing one of them. Then a guy named Victor, who worked for the cartel, became my dealer, and he always seemed to know where I was.

Under control. While a fixer named Ivan showed me photos someone in the Sinaloa Cartel had taken of me on Isla Mujeres, because somebody wanted to kidnap me for ransom. I left that island within an hour. Under control. While Juanito sat across from me all night in Mexico City with a pistol in his lap.

“I’ve done the work, I’m good now”

This one is sneakier, because it’s the lie of a sober guy. I have had five sobriety dates, with at least two years between every one of them, and I relapsed anyway. I had a seven year stretch that ended with kratom. I told myself kratom wasn’t really a drug, it came from a smoke shop, it didn’t count. Within months it was dark web opiates, then heroin and crack again.

I had all the information. Information alone is not sufficient to keep an addict sober. The lie was thinking that knowing about my disease was the same as treating it.

What ended the lying

It wasn’t a single moment of honesty. It was being forced into one. At Next Chapter in Delray Beach, I told the whole Mexico story in group for the first time. My body shook. Somebody said, “You fucking abandoned your kids.” Nobody had ever said it to my face like that. It was true.

My therapist Malia took it further. She showed me a picture of a baby and asked what that baby had to do to deserve love. Nothing. “And neither do you.” I had been lying my whole life because I thought the truth about me was unlovable. Hearing that I didn’t have to earn it changed how I talked to everybody.

Then I met Haley, and on our first date I told her everything. Mexico, the kids, all of it. It was the first relationship of my adult life that started without a lie.

If you want to see where the lying led, read what rock bottom felt like for me. And if you’re wondering why I kept going back to treatment, I wrote about why rehab didn’t work until it did. More about me is on the about page.

If you or someone you love is struggling, the SAMHSA National Helpline is 1-800-662-4357. Free, confidential, 24/7.

FAQ

Do addicts believe their own lies?
I did, most of the time. That’s what made them convincing. By the time I said something out loud, I had usually already sold it to myself.

How should families respond when an addict lies?
I’m not a clinician, but from my side: don’t take the bait, don’t argue the details, and don’t fund it. Stick to what you can see. My mom stopped bailing me out eventually, and that mattered.

Can someone who lied for years become honest?
Yes. It took me practice, a lot of meetings, and people who called me on it. Today I tell the truth even when it makes me look bad. That’s most of what my book is.

Every lie on this page, and the truth behind it, is in One Last Hit on Amazon. You can find the audiobook and more at onelasthitbook.com.

May 26, 2026
What Does Rock Bottom Really Feel Like? I Hit It More Than Once

People talk about rock bottom like it’s one specific floor and everybody hits the same one. Mine had a basement. Then the basement had a basement.

I’m Austin Rampt, and I wrote One Last Hit about the years I spent on crack, meth and IV heroin, including about 18 months in Mexico where I ended up broke and living around people connected to the Sinaloa Cartel. I’ve hit bottom more than once. So I want to tell you what it actually felt like each time, because I think the myth of a single clean rock bottom keeps a lot of people waiting for something that might not come in time.

What does rock bottom actually feel like?

For me it didn’t feel dramatic while it was happening. It felt small. Quiet. It felt like sitting alone in a room doing the same thing I always did and realizing nobody was coming.

The dramatic moments, the ambulances and the court dates, were not my bottoms. They were just things that happened to me. The bottoms were the moments right after, when I understood I had no more excuses and no one left to blame.

Bottom number one: my 22nd birthday

About a year earlier I’d had a heart attack at 21. My boss found me facedown and naked in my trailer and called 911. My mom stood by my hospital bed and said, “Do you want my blood? Because I have nothing left to give you.” I went home and smoked the crack that was still on the floor.

So by my 22nd birthday, people had stopped showing up. Nobody came. Not one person. A girl came by with meth, and that was my party. Then my mom and my brother walked in and found me with a pipe in one hand and a butane torch in the other.

I remember the look on their faces more than anything I said. That night I prayed for the first time in years. “God, please help me.” That’s it. My grandfather paid $35,000 for treatment, and I ended up at Freedom House in North Palm Beach around Thanksgiving 2005. That was the first time I really got sober.

It wasn’t the last bottom. But it was the first time I asked for help without a con attached.

One more thing about that night. I wasn’t sad in some movie way. I was numb, and a little annoyed that they’d walked in. That’s what scares me looking back. Rock bottom didn’t feel like rock bottom. It felt like being interrupted. The prayer came later, after they left, when the room got quiet and the torch was cold and there was nothing left to smoke.

I also did 35 days in Falkenburg Road Jail in Tampa for possession during my using years. Jail wasn’t my bottom either. I counted the days and planned what I’d use when I got out.

Bottom number two: Mexico City with nothing

Years later, after a business, a marriage and two kids, I relapsed and blew it all up. My family filed a Marchman Act. I dodged it by flying to Cancun on JetBlue miles. I’d started that trip with more than half a million dollars in savings and credit. I spent around $10,000 a week on drugs.

By the time I got to Mexico City I had lost all my drugs and most of my belongings. I was staying with Sofia, a woman who lived in real poverty. She boiled water on the stove so I could shower. I was basically showering out of a bucket. Her rent was less than a hundred dollars a month.

And here’s the part that broke something in me. Sofia was happy. Actually happy. She had nothing and she was content. I’d had everything a guy could want, and I was a hollow, shaking mess scraping together money to buy drugs in Tepito, one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city.

That was a bottom, but not because I was poor. It was because I finally saw that money had never been the thing. I was chasing the whole thing wrong. I still kept using, though. That’s the honest part.

The $20 at the airport

When I finally left Mexico, my passport had expired. I spent three days stuck in a hotel room while I waited on an emergency passport from the US Consulate. Sofia came to the hotel, spent the night without waking me, and left a note on the pillow: “Tienes una vida bonita. Have a beautiful life.”

Then at the airport I couldn’t pay the exit tax. I had to ask a stranger for $20. A guy who once paid $30,000 cash for two Rolex watches, begging a stranger for a twenty. If you want to know what rock bottom feels like, it feels a lot like that. Humiliating, and a little bit funny, and mostly just tired.

Is rock bottom the same for everyone?

No, and I don’t think you should wait for one. I’ve heard people say “they just haven’t hit bottom yet” about someone they love, like it’s a weather report. Some people’s bottom is death. My best friend Nate, who I met in my last rehab, died of an overdose on June 12, 2021. He was 27. Nobody got to talk about his rock bottom afterward.

The thing that changes is not how low you go. It’s whether you’re willing to stop arguing. You can raise your bottom by deciding the current one is enough.

My last bottom: a motel room and a phone call

After Mexico, my friend Lou picked me up at the airport and took me fishing in Islamorada. I got into a halfway house and got a job. I got clean, briefly. Then kratom. Then dark web opiates. Then heroin and crack. My own general manager, Galen, fired me from my own business.

I ended up in a motel shooting heroin while an ex was on FaceTime with me, and I passed out for 12 hours. When I came to, I called my mom for money. That’s honestly why I called. Somewhere in that conversation I agreed to go to detox.

From detox I went to Next Chapter in Delray Beach. That’s where I told the full Mexico story in group, and where somebody said to my face, “You fucking abandoned your kids.” That’s where my therapist Malia showed me a baby picture and asked, “What does this baby have to do to deserve love? Nothing. And neither do you.” That’s where I met Nate. I wrote more about that place in getting sober in Delray Beach.

What came after the bottom

Getting sober after that was not a straight line either. I’ve had five sobriety dates. I’m about two years sober as of late 2025. I married Haley in 2018, and we have Delilah, Nicholas and Skylar, along with my older kids Madi and Zachary. On a good evening I’m on the back porch watching the little ones run in the yard.

The bottom didn’t fix me. People did. Haley, Nate, Bill my sponsor, Malia, my mom, who eventually stepped in to take custody of Madi and Zachary when they were close to going up for adoption. That last one still gets me. If you’re the parent of someone at the bottom, read how addiction destroys families and how ours survived.

If you’re in early recovery after your own bottom, this is what early recovery actually looked like for me. I talk with other people about their bottoms on the One Last Hit Podcast, and there’s more about me here.

If you are at the bottom right now, you don’t have to wait for a lower one. Call the SAMHSA National Helpline at 1-800-662-4357. It’s free, confidential, and answered 24/7.

FAQ

Do you have to hit rock bottom to get sober?
No. I hit several and kept using after most of them. What finally worked was being honest and being around people, not finding the lowest possible floor.

How do you know when you’ve hit rock bottom?
For me it was the moment I stopped making excuses, even for a minute. You usually only know for sure looking back.

What should families do when someone hits rock bottom?
Point them toward help, like the SAMHSA line or a detox, and keep the door cracked without funding the habit. When I called my mom for money that last time, the call ended with me agreeing to detox. That is part of why I’m alive.

Every bottom in this post is told in full in One Last Hit on Amazon. More at onelasthitbook.com.

May 26, 2026