Meet Geoff Mahoney, Teen Challenge Student Raising Money on Elm Street

Last month, NewCanaanite.com ran a three-part series on heroin addiction and our town.

Experts told us that heroin abuse for New Canaan teens typically begins at home, when kids start using opioids and painkillers they find in their parents’ medicine cabinets. (Next weekend, on Saturday April 26, New Canaan is participating in National Prescription Drug Take-Back Day, and people can bring unused drugs to Walgreens.) When addiction sets in, the teens turn to heroin as a less expensive alternative as a form of morphine, and can become addicted. The problem often is exacerbated by many individuals’ and families’ reluctance to reach out for help.

Today on Elm Street, we ran into a table set up in front of Dunkin Donuts, a fundraiser for the New Haven-based Teen Challenge Program, an interdenominational Christian residential drug rehab program that’s part of a network with 10 centers in New England and New Jersey.

Here’s our chat with Geoff Mahoney, who is in the program and out raising money and awareness today. He’ll be here until 5 or 6 p.m., in case you’re downtown.

Geoff Mahoney is a student resident of the Teen Challenge Program. He is five months clean of heroin and is in New Canaan on Thursday, April 17, speaking about the organization that's helped him.

New Canaanite: Tell me about the program.

Geoff Mahoney: Teen Challenge is a 15-month long residential center that helps men and women with drug and alcohol addictions. I’m a student in Teen Challenge and I was a heroin addict before I came into the program and I right now I’m five months clean from heroin. I have my life back. My family is being restored.

Where are you from?

I grew up in Glastonbury.

This is a huge epidemic, we’re facing in Connecticut. Including in New Canaan. New Canaan is a town where many kids have access to opioids in their parents’ medicine cabinets. How old are you, Geoff?

I’m 26.

It’s something that is handled quietly sometimes, but part of the difficulty in addressing heroin is that it can be faceless a lot of the time. People like to handle it very quietly and that can be a barrier to getting real help. What makes you want to stand up and say, ‘I’m a recovering heroin addict, here’s my past and here’s what I’m doing now’?

I know the destruction that drugs, including heroin, can have. I know I myself stated with drugs when I was very young and it took a lot of my reputation, it took a lot of my family relationships and things I valued in life and so I was left hopeless because of what heroin and cocaine did in my life. I had nowhere else to go except to ask for help and so I began to seek help and I actually cried out to God for help and the Lord, I believe, came to my aid by opening the door to Teen Challenge.

Teen Challenge has been a refuge for you.

Yes sir.

What are your life plans? What are your goals in terms of school or career, and so on? What’s next for you?

When I graduate Teen Challenge in July I plan on going back to school in Texas to be a missionary and to help other people with drug and alcohol addictions and to let people know that there is hope. That there is a new life that God wants to give you.

That’s terrific. Thank you so much for sharing your story, Geoff.