Ben Owen
Appearances
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I know my team's getting ready to go down there and do that with you. Yeah. I'm going to take them to 1428 Wilbert Street, the house that used to be full of bullet holes. There is a woman and her three children living in that house that just celebrated Christmas. The women that used to sell dope out of that house, I've got them housed in another old trap house around the corner.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I moved into a trap house with some guys I had literally just met that night. in South Memphis. What's the trap house? The trap house is a house where narcotics and women are bought and sold. It's, you know, a trap. It's a spot. It is the single source of every bit of pain and suffering in any neighborhood they exist in. It's hell. That's what it is. It's hell. I had nowhere else to go.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I had a warrant. I couldn't go home. My wife didn't want anything to do with me. I had no idea what my kids knew or didn't know because, like I said, we'd hidden all of this from them. Daddy getting arrested is going to... I don't even know how to have that conversation with them. I'd go into hiding, basically.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
This dope boy that obviously all the dope boys in South Memphis knew how much money I'd been spending, and they all wanted to know me. So I was welcomed with open arms out there. And the one that ran Melrose Street I'll actually say his name because he's dead now, Rodney Cotton. He used to go by the name Fat Boy or Hot Rod.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
He kind of took me in because he was convinced I was going to teach him how to run businesses. I don't know what he had in mind, but basically put me to work in security at a trap house out there. which was odd because I'm the only white guy in the hood and I'm deciding who can and cannot get into the trap. This went on for a few weeks. What did you see inside the trap houses?
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Everything you can imagine. What does that mean? I've witnessed murder. I've witnessed attempted rapes. I've witnessed overdoses. Um... I've witnessed people do unimaginable things that even with my background experience can't wrap my mind around for a hit of dope. Crack in particular. Like what? You won't want to hear it if I tell you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I've seen people do the most debased, dehumanizing things you can ever imagine. Because their addiction commanded them to. They had become complete and total slaves to a substance. And in turn, complete and total slaves to whoever controls that substance. I didn't know the true depths of human depravity until I was out there. Until I lived in it and saw it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And all of my hope and faith in humanity died on that street. My hope for having a future died on that street. I was going to kill myself out there. I was interrupted. And then ended up in handcuffs again. How were you going to do it? With a knife. I was just going to cut my own throat. It was the only way I could do it. Because I refused to touch heroin after I got arrested.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I would not go back to it. I was still smoking crack, but I refused to touch heroin. And I was afraid that if I tried to overdose, because once you've shot up heroin, there's no other way to kill yourself. It's an embrace from God. Like, it's a painless way to go. My fear was that because my tolerance was so high, I would try to kill myself, and I wouldn't, and I would end up addicted again.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I would rather die than have that happen. And so I was going to cut my throat with K-bar.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
In and out, in and out. But my whole story is punctuated with highs and lows where everything looks great. I wasn't homeless for five years. I wasn't running from that warrant for five years. But all in, I was battling South Memphis for five years. That run stopped when they found me on that warrant. Wow. And, you know, we were talking about Godwinks.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I feel like this was a missed Godwink on my behalf. But maybe not, because if I'd taken it, I wouldn't be sitting here with you today. Veterans Court refused to take my case. I did serve long enough to be eligible for Veterans Court, even though I don't get, like, VA benefits. I was eligible for that. They wouldn't take my case because of the gun charges.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
They were convinced the feds were going to come after me. Now, I knew that wasn't the case because I legally owned the guns and I wasn't actually selling drugs. So I had faith that justice would prevail. But the drug court judge heard about my case and decided to take a chance on me. And he told me that if I would sign up for his program, he would send me to rehab and he'd pay for it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I jumped at it. And so... After spending two months out there in the traps, that run, I was actually excited. I thought, you know, things are going to be better. And he sent me to rehab. I spent 54 days in there. And, like, I was serious about it. I wanted to be clean. I did not want to go back to that life at all. I graduated the rehab program and got off to...
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
fairly good start on drug court I think I got released back into the free world early November and I made contact with Aaron you know I wanted to get back in the kids lives and I mean because this just hit them completely out of the blue like they didn't see any of this coming you know so from July to November there had been very minimal interaction with my kids they didn't know what the fuck was going on or I don't know what they knew
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Let's put it that way. And, you know, Erin had filed for divorce. Her attorney told her it would help her if she got a restraining order against me. And so she did that. And they served me with it in the middle of drug court in front of everybody on my birthday. Like, that was humiliating. Mostly because I've never laid a finger on her. I've never threatened any of them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I've never, you know, made her be afraid of me or the kids or any of that. But she had to attest that I've done all of those things on this piece of paper. So I did what any good addict would do, and I went and got high over that. Now, when they released me from rehab, they court-ordered me into Rebo's, which is a halfway house in Memphis, sober spelled backwards.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And one of the biggest rules in a civil living house is you can't get high. And I did that. And so I knew I was about to go back to jail. So right back to South Memphis I went. I just went on the run. And then I actually had a conversation with Erin that her attorney did that without her knowledge or something. I don't remember what it was.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I started realizing how bad I fucked up by going on the run and getting high again. I went and turned myself in. And sure enough, I mean, obviously I went to jail, you know, uh, but the drug court judge was, he's gonna give me another chance. Like he sees this a lot. He expected it, blah, blah, blah. I was banned from that halfway house.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Um, and they were like, we're just gonna leave you in jail until we figure out what to do with you. Cause you can't go home. Uh, you can't go back to the halfway house. You know, we don't know what to do with you. And so I spent my birthday or not my birthday. I spent Thanksgiving in jail. They kept me. God, they probably kept me a month that time with no bond. Like there's no hope of getting out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
You get out when the judge says you can get out. And I pissed the judge off at this point because he took a chance on me. Even though we expected it to happen, he's mad. They finally let me out December 17th. And I'll never forget this. That day in court, because the jail backs up to the courthouse. It's literally like underneath the court kind of. So they took me into the courtroom from jail.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And this guy named Brian Owens comes up to me and asked me, he's like, you tired of living like this, dude? I was like, yeah, I'm really tired of living like this. And he looked me in the eye for a minute. He's like, you know, you don't have to. And I don't know why that simple yet incredibly profound statement hit me like a ton of bricks, dude. I started bawling in the middle of the court.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
It was weird, but it just hit me. Because I could tell by the way he said it. This guy that I'm just now meeting for the first time, in the way he said that, I could tell he's been where I was. He literally where I was. I come to find out later he had been standing on the other side of that wall years ago as a client in drug court, and today he works for that court.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
But I could tell this guy knew something. He knew a way out of this, you know, and he told me that he was going to get me out of jail that day, and then he wanted me to meet him at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting that night. Now, I'd been to N.A. back in California, but I just used it as a place to pick up chicks. I didn't pay any attention.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
But I would do whatever I had to do to get Brian to get me out of jail. and I would do whatever I had to do to not live that way anymore. And I meant it. Like with every fiber of my being, I meant that shit. I was dead set on I'm going to do this. And so he got me out of jail.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I found out after I left the jail that day that the judge was dead serious when he said I can't go home and I can't go to the halfway house. But they forgot to figure out what to do with me, so I had to figure that out. which I'm sure was 100% intentional, right? They wanted to see what I was going to do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
So now I'm a free man, and it's the middle of December right before Christmas, and I have nowhere to go. I'm on the streets. Am I going to fuck up or am I going to do right? And I think that's what they were trying to figure out. And I did right. I got with my dad and got into an extended stay motel. I went to an NA meeting. First time I ever saw her. And I was serious about doing it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I decided I wanted to try to fix things with Erin. She's the mother of five of my kids, and divorcing her was something I could not wrap my mind around. No matter how bad she wanted to, you know, she spent all those years thinking I was the one for her, knowing the problems that I had. And here we are with the problems front and center. What are we going to do? I had that conversation with her.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
We decided to reconcile. And so I think it was Christmas Eve of 2014 I moved back into the house with her and the kids. In hindsight, it was a terrible idea. Did you blame her for the restraining order? Were you upset about that? I was upset about it. I was hurt more than anything. I didn't blame her for the relapse. I will never blame anybody else for that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Now, I make my own decisions, and when I choose to go get high about something, that's on me, not them. When we went to court for the restraining order, because the way they do these things, they'll issue it just based on the word of the woman. And that's good. I'm glad they do that. And then you have a hearing about it to decide if it's going to stand or get tossed out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And when we sat down in the courtroom— They start asking Aaron all these questions like, when did Mr. Owen strike you? When did he do this? And she's like, no, no, none of that ever happened. And the judge is basically like, well, then you can't have a restraining order. What are we doing?
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And so it just got like, what I was afraid of was that Aaron was going to lie and say I had put my hands on her or something, which nothing like that ever happened in that marriage. Were you sharing needles? Never not once. In fact, this is one of the reasons I was able to hide it so well. I was the worst person I knew.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
So how could you blame her? I don't. Yeah, I don't blame her at all. In fact, hindsight being 20-20, I wish she hadn't let me move back in. I had no business being around my kids right then at all or her. I didn't deserve to be sleeping in that house that we had worked to pay for together. Yeah. A thousand things could have gone wrong.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Yeah. Yeah. I don't handle guilt well. Never have. I drink at guilt. I always have. And I don't think things were meant to work out to me. Too much damage had been done. And it was a terrifying thing to try to accept that because you start... You start trying to think, how am I going to raise a family with her? With the exception of this 10-month period...
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
All things considered, I've been a pretty stellar dad. You know, outside looking in. You know that that's not true because you've heard all the fucked up stuff that I was doing. But I was still telling myself the lie that I wanted the world to see. And I'm trying to figure out how am I going to raise these kids in a broken home now? What's going to happen with my cases?
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I was looking at a lot of prison time if I fucked up drug court. And, uh, and so much damage had been done to the relationship with Aaron and I, and, uh, I just, I don't think there was any fixing it. I don't think there was. What happened? I moved out in February and, uh, I think it was February. Stayed clean. I was working a program, got a sponsor, started working steps.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I was taking recovery seriously, like very seriously. So you weren't drinking? No. Well, so drug court, from the day I signed to drug court, they drug test you randomly. And one of the tests they do now is called an ethanol glucuronide test that tests for alcohol metabolites going back 80 hours.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And thank God they do because if they weren't doing that, I'd have been drinking like a motherfucker thinking I'm going to cheat the test, you know? So yeah, I stayed sober from November. God, almost until the next November. A whole lot happened in that gap.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Aaron left with the kids. Aaron left with the kids. This is like the end of 2014. We decided to reconcile.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
You left. I left. And I think it was February, March. I just realized that Well, I've been trying to avoid this because I don't want to put my business out there, but it's unavoidable. So Erin had an affair, right? And I knew this when I moved back in in December, and it happened while I was in jail. And if I'm being completely honest, I can't blame her. I mean, I ran her life into the ground.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I had not physically touched her in a year. You know, everything was falling apart, and she didn't think there was any chance we were ever going to work out anyway. So I don't blame her for that, but it is part of what played into my decision to move out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Through all that shit? Through all that shit, I did not. Wow. I would not have expected that. Well, I don't think she expected it either, but it is the reality. So you couldn't forgive her for that? I thought I could, but no. I definitely could not. I definitely could not. How did you find out? I just knew. Finally, she admitted it. She's part of me now. Something seemed off. Did you know him?
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Oh, yeah. Friend? Employee. An employee? Yeah. Are they still together? Oh, God, no. I don't even know if they ever even saw each other again. Yeah. So in the middle of all this... Let me back up to December.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Because you're sober. I'm sober, and... Well, I'm just going to own it. I was still a manipulative ass at the time, and the only thing standing in between me and living in my home with my children was the judge telling me she didn't want me there. So the way I handled it was basically to tell her, look, we can work through this. You just got to let me come home. So you knew before you went home?
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I knew before I went home. That was the ammo I used to get her to tell the judge, let me come back to my house. Now, part of that was necessity. I have to have a place to live. This extended stay wasn't going to work. I missed my kids. I was sober. I wanted to rebuild my life, and I wanted to rebuild my business and fix my marriage. I did genuinely want all of those things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I've known this woman since I was 12.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
It was different. It was a different kind of love. I've still got love in my heart for Aaron to this day, and I always will, but not the kind that is required to be married to somebody. You know what I mean? Mm-hmm. And so I moved back in, and my understanding was that all the bullshit that had come out from either of our side had come out, and it was all out in the open.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I get a phone call New Year's Eve from my landlord or my landlord's attorney. Now, keep in mind, I haven't paid a rent on my warehouse in six months because I was too busy spending my money on heroin or being in jail or running for warrants to handle things. So my understanding was that my warehouse had been seized and my assets and belongings of that warehouse no longer belonged to me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And Aaron said, confirmed that was the case. Well, I get this phone call New Year's Eve from my landlord's attorney asking me if we had decided not to get my inventory out of the warehouse. Now, keep in mind, I had over a million dollars in inventory in this warehouse.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
So come to find out, he had not seized any of my stuff and just wanted me to move my business out and let him have his warehouse back. The problem was I had until midnight New Year's Eve of 2014. And I didn't find this out until the day of. My parents and my wife had known for months that this was the case and that my business was not done.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
It was, in fact, sitting there waiting on me to pick it up and move it somewhere else and simply turn it back on. I went ballistic. You know, smashed my phone. I may have broken my hand punching a brick wall. I mean, I snapped, dude. That was it. Like, from that point forward, I have accepted this is not – there's too much resentment.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Couple that with the fact that I don't even know how I'm going to deal with the infidelity. I just can't do this. I didn't know what to do because I still had to have a place to live. And so I just tried to tough it out, man. I spent a lot of time with my kids.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Yeah, so there's a part. What was that like? I remember rebuilding bonds, dude. Kids are resilient. How old are your kids at this point? Oh, they were, I want to say 9, 10. Let's see. This would have been December 2014. So Jacob would have been 9. Jackson would have been 10. Lily and the twins were 3, 3, and 4. Almost 4, 4, and 5.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Um, we just kind of picked up right back where left off, you know, watching nature shows together, going hiking. Uh, there's a IH park.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
It was dicey for a few days. That's it. That was it. Because when I was living in that extended stay, Aaron could tell that something had changed in me, and that I was trying to stay clean, and the kids came and stayed with me some of that extended stay. So we had gotten most of the real rough part out of the way. I've always been very close to my kids, so even though— What was the rough part?
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Just the uncomfortability, like them staying with me and crying at bedtime, wanting to go see Mommy, you know. I bet they had a lot of questions. They really didn't. They really didn't. They didn't want to know why you were in there? And the extended stay?
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Well, they did, and that was the rough part, was explaining to them, Mom and Dad are getting divorced. And that was just the hardest thing I've ever had to tell my kids.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I was addicted to heroin for 10 months before the arrest. I was home for most of that. I would make my runs to the dope track, get my dope. But then you were living at the trap houses. So that wasn't 10 months. That was four months I was out there, this run in the traps. And so I don't really know how to explain it. We just kind of picked right up where we left off. It was strange.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
How did you tell your kids you're getting divorced? I didn't. Aaron didn't. And then Christmas Eve, we told them, never mind, we're not. Like, Merry Christmas. And, you know, we had a real happy Christmas. Everything was great. But then New Year's Eve came, and I found that out about the business. And it was just the totality. It was too much.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I also knew that, like, as far as my part went, like, I'm not saying she did all the damage. I'd done tons of damage. It was all my fault to begin with. So I owned that. And I knew in the back of my head that she might think she can get over all this, but she's never going to trust me again. I have destroyed our lives.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Our life savings invested in a firearms collection has been stolen by the police. I'll never get them back. That one, I actually sued the state of Tennessee trying to get those back. Lost because I took too long to file it. But, you know, the business we had poured blood, sweat, and tears into that my kids had sacrificed hours and hours of time with me, I ran that into the ground.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Like, so I'm not sitting here trying to say it's because of the infidelity or it's because of the warehouse. It was the totality of all of these things. I, we, we destroyed that marriage. Um, and so I spent a lot of time with the kids, January and February. Um, And part of that was because I wanted to spend time with my kids. Part of it was because I wanted to get the fuck away from the house.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I wanted to be away from her. I was so mad. And, you know, I don't know if you've ever done 12-step recovery, but in the rooms they always say resentments are the number one offender. Resentment is the most common thing that sends people back on a relapse.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I was taking my recovery pretty seriously at this point in time, so I was trying to avoid resentments, which meant avoiding her and the house. So we spent a lot of time out in the woods, a lot of time fishing as March rolled around, a lot of time hiking. And I started hanging out with this other guy in Drug Court named Thomas who loved fishing too. And we'd go fishing all the time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
We'd go shooting together. His parents lived on a bunch of land. And before long, I had opened up to Thomas about what was going on at home. He's like, bro, just come stay up here, man. And so I was kicking that idea around about going to stay with Thomas, um, cause he lived up in Millington near the Navy base.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Um, we were in Lakeland, which is a suburb of Memphis at the time in the house that I bought when I got the job at Pfizer. I mean, we hadn't moved. Um, and my, my other best friend at the time was this little kid named Brandon Kelly. I call him a kid. He had some endocrine problems and literally looked like he was a child, like 14 years old. He was really 25. But I met him in jail.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I actually met him and Thomas both in jail. All three of us were on drug court. And so we just started hanging out a bunch. And then, you know, getting into early spring – Narcotics Anonymous does a lot of functions, or they'll do outings, like events where just people in recovery can go hang out at things that normally happen in Memphis. It's just a group of people that aren't doing drugs.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
You know, it goes to these things. And so I started hanging out with those, with that crowd that's going to the stuff all around Memphis. And I had found an NA home group with Brandon Kelly. It was his home group, and That's where I met Jess. I had actually met her back in January at that Brian Owens guy, his wife or girlfriend at the time was celebrating her sober birthday.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I met Jess at that birthday, but we didn't really talk much. Like we'd play trivia crack back and forth, you know, and texted a little bit, but nothing weird. But like I can tell, like she's somebody I enjoy spending time around. And so when the events picked back up in spring, you know, I found myself around her more and more.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And then one day she invited me and her boyfriend at the time to go to the Quentin Tarantino movie fest they were having to drive in. And I went and he no-showed and we'd watched like four or five Quentin Tarantino movies. And then the next day she invites me to go fishing with her. And I was like, well, hell yeah. You know what I'm thinking.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Out at Shelby Forest in the Mississippi River, middle of nowhere. Yeah. I get out there. Not only does she not have fishing rods, she has brought her 10-year-old daughter with her. I was like, oh, God, you know, what the hell is happening? So, as an aside, to this day, I have not gone fishing with Jess. To this day. We're going to fix that at some point.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
But we ended up hiking around Shelby Forest. And this is weird because I've lived in Memphis for almost— Jess, what's going on here?
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Did you hear that? Yeah, she was, and it worked. It worked. I never knew Shelby Forest existed. I've been in Memphis 10 years, and I never saw this place. As much as I love the outdoors, it was mind-blowing to me. It's this huge, like hundreds of acres of woods and hills and mountains and lakes, and it's on the Mississippi.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
So me, Jess, and her daughter, who is 10, I'm meeting for the first time, are out there hiking for the entire day, hours, catching – I caught a – A cottonmouth water moccasin, like blew her mind, you know, catching turtles. Like it was just, we had a fucking blast out there. And I didn't want it to stop. I didn't want it to stop.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I had not been that happy in the company of another human being in as long as I could remember. Like I finally felt the connection with somebody. And this was just as purely as friends. But from that day forward, and that was, I do remember the date. It was April 20th of 2015. Jess and I became inseparable. Wherever I went, she went. Wherever she went, I went.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And, like, it just, people started calling us the NA Power Couple. We're not even together. I'm still married, you know. But I realized because of the way I felt around her that my biggest fear leaving Erin, will I ever have anybody that I can be comfortable around again? Will anybody put up with me because, well, we've been talking for several hours.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
You know I'm kind of a lot to deal with, right? So I had this fear that I wouldn't find love again, and I've got a terrifying fear of being alone too. So I wasn't convinced that Jess is who I'm going to go be in love with. It just convinced me that I am able to be happy in the presence of somebody else.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And so when I decided I was going to move out and move in with Thomas and take him up on that offer, Jess went with me. Now, we're still just friends. We're literally sleeping in the same bed and still just friends, which I know sounds crazy. I tried to kiss her one time. She cried. That was interesting. The next day, she kissed me. And then, you know, from there on, things were physical.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
But this is like months went in that gap. So then, you know, I told Erin, like, let's go ahead and do this divorce. I'm moving on, which is what she had told me to do to begin with. And so she was like, OK, neither of us wanted it, but it's what needs to happen, that kind of thing. And, um, Jess and I pretty much moved into Thomas's house and started building the life together.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Uh, like we were going to start brush fire and black rifle and retec in a garage behind his house. We're going to start the businesses back over. And we did. We were like, we actually did. And we're running an econ business out of his garage. July, I think comes around and, you know, Jess had met all the kids at this point. Um, all the kids love her. Uh, her daughter loved me. Um,
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Now, we haven't told Aaron that we're an item. And so that was a big landmine we were waiting on. And it ended about like you can imagine it would.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Okay. All right. So I'm just going to preface that. All right. We've come a long way since then. I've grown a lot as a human being. I was still sleeping with Aaron. And so when she found out I was sleeping with Jess, she sat Jess down and said, hey, just so you're aware, I'm still sleeping with him too. And Jess acted like she didn't care. Yeah. But in reality, it ripped her guts out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
So I think there were really two pivotal moments. And one of them actually goes back into active addiction. And we'll get into this much deeper later. But my last six months out there, I did not want that life. I had been tired of it. And I had two options. I was going to get sober. I was going to die. And I didn't want to die.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
and jess and i used to pray a foxhole prayer multiple times a day and it wasn't something along the lines of god get us out of hell together and we'll come back for everybody left behind so in 2019 he did get us out of hell together eventually i left first but uh later that year we were a few months sober at the time and my best friend overdosed and died and um we hadn't yet
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
been called back to Memphis to keep our end of that promise. But we did go back to Memphis to bury him. He had no family left, so we raised money using my social media presence to cremate him and have a service. And we gave the overage because we raised like four times what it actually cost. We gave the overage to the Shelby County Drug Court.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And something happened in our brains at that point in time. We realized that, you know, we can use social media to get some cool stuff done. And it felt really good to be able to help people that are still out there struggling with the demon that we had escaped. And then, of course, as that progressed, we did get called back to Memphis
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
save the ones we left behind and uh once we started that dude he mentioned purpose in the very beginning of that and that's that's what it comes down to um is i found my purpose i found my calling i found the reason god put me on this earth and i have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that what we're doing today is what god wants me to do for the rest of my life and so i hope that answers the question yeah yeah wow wow thank you
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Man, that's not really an easy answer, that. I've lived in 14 states. I lived in three states in first grade alone. I lived in three states again in ninth grade. So I was born not far from here, actually, in Nashville, my dad was stationed at Fort Campbell. He was, I think, a first lieutenant, first to 506 back then.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I was a real high-risk pregnancy, so when mom went into labor, they rushed her down to Nashville. I was born here. But we left before I was even three months old. I think Virginia next. And then Fort Benning. My little brother was born there. And we lived, I think, in Phoenix City, Alabama, just across the Chattahoochee from Fort Benning. Or we may have lived in Columbus.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And then Dad left the Army not too long after my little brother was born. Went to Pfizer Pharmaceuticals.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
We're not not close. But, you know, Cody has an awful lot of very well-founded resentment towards me for everything I did over the years. demanding all of my parents' attention because I was such a pain in the ass. And I think I probably, in a lot of ways, crushed his hopes and dreams for his life. Now, he does a great job of hiding that resentment, but it's still there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
So, yeah, me and my brother are close. I love him. He's my little brother. But even though he lives, you know, 20 minutes up the street from me, we don't see each other like every day or anything like that. Man. It's a lot better now that I'm clean. You know, the longer I've been clean, the more he believes this time is real. How long have you been clean? A little over five years.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I've been off the streets for, we're closing on six years now. I had a couple of alcohol relapses that first year. So my actual sober date's October 4th of 2019. No kidding. Yeah, not a drop of alcohol, no dope, nothing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Yeah, I was looking at the relapse that ended with the rest of my story. I actually started with Dalmore. No kidding. I was a big Scotch fan. That was just an alcoholic for a long time. Really?
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
right before the turning point she had mentioned you woke up in a with blood everywhere so what was that well to this day we don't know um i woke up in the empty lot next to 1428 woodward street which is a very significant address that's the house that she was describing it's full of bullet holes where you know we've had friends die in that house friend shot in that house uh I had disappeared.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I went into a blackout drunk. I wanted to get out of that life very bad, and I knew if I kept going back to her dad's where I had a soft place to land, I was not going to. And so I decided to just go all out and either die or hit rock bottom. But it was going to happen that week, one or the other.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I mean, I got nose to nose with a real young gangster disciple who had a pistol to my gut and told him to pull the trigger. I mean, I was begging somebody to kill me. And that was on Hemlock Street, so two blocks over from Woodward. And that was the last thing I remember before waking up the 26th of May, 2019. And that empty lot just covered head to toe in blood.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
When I came to, like, I was coughing up blood, and I figured I must have been puking blood because I could still taste vodka. So I knew I'd been drinking a lot. And then as I got up, like, it was all over me. And so I didn't know how badly hurt I was or what had happened, and there wasn't a cut on my body. So to this day, I don't know what happened. And as I realized where I was...
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
the window to buy dope from is right there. And I looked over and Daphne or Crecia or whoever's in the window and it, my body is wanting to go to the window and get dope to wake up and figure out what to do. And I just couldn't do it. I could not take another step in that direction. Um, I couldn't remember anything from the proceeding several days. Um,
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
madison's father nick i had been helping trying to mentor and get him into a better life he'd recently gotten out of prison um and had no idea that we were shot off he was murdered the 19th of may i was the last person to talk to him and he was killed for kicking a roommate out that i told him he needed to kick out before we would let maddie come spend the summer with him um
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
So I immediately took that upon myself that it was my fault and I went and drank at it and it began my progression to rock bottom that week. I found a phone that day and called my dad and he told me to just come home. And I didn't know how the hell I was going to get there. Long story short, I ended up going to Georgia. I got on a Greyhound bus. I didn't get high that day. I was done.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
By myself. And I told Jess, I was like, you can either come with me or I'm getting my shit together and I'm coming back for James because this is over. We're not doing this anymore. And we'd had similar conversations a couple times before. I would go to detox and tell her, you're coming, or I'm leaving. And she'd come. She'd show up.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
You know, we'd been through this a few times, and then every time it happened, somebody would die. Somebody would get murdered. There'd be another overdose, and we'd relapse. And this time I was done. I was getting the fuck out of Memphis. I couldn't stay. And so I went to Georgia, and... I'm a control freak. I always have to manage everything, manipulate really everything at this point.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
You know, I had to be in control of, well, you've heard my story, everything. And my attempts to exert control over things I shouldn't have any control over has historically fucked my life up in epic proportions. That part of my brain, I think, broke that day. I didn't know what was about to happen. I had absolutely no control over anything. I had... the clothes on my back, and that was it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I was okay with it. For the first time in my life, I had no idea what was going to happen tomorrow, and I didn't care. And the feeling of freedom that I had is something I cannot put into words. I was okay in that moment. I was okay not knowing what's coming. And that is the peace I have wanted since I was 13 years old.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
to not be in control and to be okay with it and i finally found that that day um it was on the tail end of all that misery you just heard 18 arrests i don't even know how many friends dead and gone um you know i've been stabbed i've been shot at uh lost everything but i finally reached a point where i just don't care anymore i'm okay I'm okay. And a week later, she hit the same point.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I got on a Greyhound bus back to Memphis, got that $700 truck and James, and started the drive back to Atlanta. And I remember I took a picture in the rearview mirror of that truck of Memphis in the rearview. And I went and made some, you know, stupid emo dramatic post on Facebook, like, I'm leaving this city in the rearview for good.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
and uh and we laughed about it you know and like not even 20 minutes later i looked at her i was like dude we got to go back she said what are you talking about like i don't know i don't know something's our work's not done in memphis and that was like just clear as day not like an audible voice but clear as day a message god was sending me is my work was not done in memphis
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And we laughed because what work did I have in Memphis? It was just death and destruction for the last five years, man. But that was kind of foreshadowing of what was to come. You know, I go to my parents. I get a job at this data company. Just a bullshit job. I haven't worked for anybody other than myself in 10 years. Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
But I was looking at the bigger picture and, you know, even though we lost everything on paper, I still retained a lot of data and a lot of expertise in the marketing area, digital marketing in particular. I still had a lot of email lists. I still had a lot of IP. And so I'm looking at, like, what am I sitting on right now? What do I have in front of me? What can I rebuild with?
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I decided to get a job at this data company and see what I could learn about how they're manipulating data and running data intelligence for large corporations. And I meet this guy named Robert, and he's my boss. We didn't really get along because he was convinced I'd been hired to replace him. He didn't know about my background.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I mean, it never has really. You're exposed to alcohol everywhere you go. That's the way I feel. It's everywhere. And if you can't be comfortable sitting this close to your favorite single malt scotch in the world, you've got a problem.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
He just knew that I had worked for Fortune 500 and had a college degree. I was getting paid next to nothing. I was working crazy hours. I'm driving a truck that I can't register. I don't have a title to it. I bought it from some dope boy who stole it from his mom. But I'm clean. Things are going really well.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I landed a deal to pitch a data concept, essentially, to Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, oddly enough. on how to use data to predict the likelihood of a rare disease to do their digital marketing and Robert and I kind of Had an open conversation about the dislike between the two of us around that We go to New York and we have the conversation over beer.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
All right, so I've relapsed now This was like in August I think of 2019 and I'm still sticking things out of this data company. I'm still trying to figure out how they're doing. I tell Robert what I've got as far as my email lists and all the different strategies I used to use to get firearms products around Google's stupid rules.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And we just started having this ongoing conversation about how we're gonna figure out how to do what this company does. I don't think we're gonna do it uniquely to the firearms industry who has so much trouble advertising. in the walled gardens of Facebook and Google and all that. We continued the conversation October 3rd of 2019. I relapsed again.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
got totally transparent with Robert about my background, about everything. And we're still living with my parents. Like, it's not comfortable. I'm sleeping on a couch. Jess and James are upstairs, you know, in twin beds. Like, they're nearing retirement age at this point. They weren't planning on having their 37-year-old son and, you know, his new family moving in with him.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
But they opened their doors to us, and I was determined to make it work. And Robert told me when I opened up to him, he's like, look, I don't get it. I'm not an alcoholic, but whatever I can do to help you through this, I'm here for it. And I've really called him task on that promise. And we haven't stopped since. I went to AA.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I did not want to go to AA because I was still convinced at this point that I was special. And that I wasn't like all these other crackheads and junkies and drunks. That I'm going to recover different. I don't have to go to meetings. So reluctantly, I went to AA on October 4th of 2019. And I shared in a meeting. And this Marine pipes up. His name's David Gibson.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Come to find out he's got a background not too dissimilar than mine. And we talk. And he shares some words of wisdom with me. And I get a sponsor and I start working steps. And, you know, Jess and I had it in the back of our heads this whole time that when Brandon died, little Brandon, we were going to relapse. That was our reservation.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
You know, kind of like you held onto that bag of coke for so long. Like, it's there. You're going to beat it, but it's there if you need it. Kind of that. Like, we had that in the back of our head as, I'm going to stay sober, but, you know, if I need to get high, I can do it when Brandon dies. Because we knew it was going to happen. And, um, December that day came.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I realized I hadn't heard from him. And we had gone through this exact same scenario 18 months prior with his mother. We realized we hadn't heard from her and nobody could reach her. And so we went and did a wellness check and found her dead and decomposing. And so 18 months later, I see the same thing playing out with Brandon.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I sent, um, I called one of my employees from retag who I'd stayed in contact with over the years. He'd watched my rise and fall over and over again. And I told him what was going on. He said, get me an address. And he went and checked and Brandon had been dead a few days. And in that moment, That would hurt. It still hurts because Brandon should have made it out with us.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
You know, he had nobody. One of the letters his mom wrote when she killed herself
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
mentioned something to the effect of she she knew that he'd be okay because he had us looking out for him now and i failed to do that not only did i fail to do it i left him there to die and um and that would cut me really fucking deep man um just because of the totality of our story we didn't really have time to get into a lot of brandon but
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Uh, he changed the way I look at a lot of things and I wouldn't have been able to get off of dope if it wasn't for him, even though he went back out. Um, we all did, but, uh, the one thing that didn't happen in that moment is we didn't want to get high. Neither one of us did. Um, I called my sponsor and I called Brian Owens and he talked to judge Dwyer.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Um, judge Dwyer was the drug court judge who had terminated me from his program. gave me a $200,000 bond and tried to send me to prison. And Dwyer offered up their nonprofit that we could fundraise for to bury Brandon because he literally had nobody left. And I used my social media presence to raise the money to bury him.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And we went back to Memphis and, you know, we had him cremated and then held a little memorial for him and gave the money we'd raised to the Drug Court Foundation. And we found some weird healing in that. Not just the act of memorializing him, but the fact that we were able to raise money to care for somebody else that we don't even know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
You know, just using a social media page, which at that time was nothing but shit posting. But it lit a spark in our minds. And then... As luck would have it, my sponsor was taking me through the steps very quickly, and I was getting ready for step 12 right about then, which is to be of service to those still struggling.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And something clicked in our heads, man, and we were like, we want to do this, and we want to find ways to raise money to help people who are fighting that battle. And I actually had the idea, probably high on crack back in 2017, to start a nonprofit called... Flanders Fields. You know the poem about Lieutenant Colonel John McRae and Flanders Fields where poppies grow? I don't.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Okay, it's a poem about World War I, about a field of opium poppies called Flanders Fields and the Battle of Ypres in Belgium. But it's got lots of imagery in it. There's dead people. You know, there's beauty rising from the ashes. There's opium poppies, which is what heroin comes from.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
i wanted to make a non-profit called finders fields to help vets battling opiate addiction you know and um time goes by um i did figure out with robert's help how to replicate my data set across the entirety of the internet to very accurately predict who's about to spend money on a gun purchase or a gun accessory purchase and i took that to market and black rifle
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
which had originally been an e-commerce company selling parts, is now a company doing advertising for Leviathans in the gun space. And it took off pretty quickly. Well enough that after that little data company was acquired by a Fortune 500, and Robert was acquired in the acquisition with golden handcuffs, I was able to poach him away to bring him over to Black Rifle.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
In March of 21, we filed to start Flanders. And the very first thing we did, oddly enough, was fly Sergeant Deaton back to fucking rehab. He had gone out and gotten addicted to crack and heroin just like I was. He went from paying pills to the same shit I did. And was, oddly enough, facing a lot of gun charges, too. It's weird how that one played out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
But anyway, we did our first good deed as Flanders Fields. And we're still waiting on IRS to approve it at this point. And in July of 2021... Um, our Marine Corps intelligence, uh, NCO hits me up about black rifle, about what we're doing. He finds it intriguing. Um, and, uh, so we started dialogue and I don't know, maybe on the 15th, he calls me and it's like, you want to do something crazy? Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Hell yeah, I do. I'm bored, you know? Um, We had, at this point, moved into our own house. We've got all the kids back. I think two of the kids I shared with Aaron have moved over to Georgia with us at this point. Lily and the twins stayed. And life's good. You know, we've got way more than we need, which is why we started the nonprofit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Because historically, every time Jess and I have more than we need, we start making bad decisions with the excess. Except this time I'm working a program of recovery. And anyway... My answer to him was, hell yes, I'll do something crazy. And he goes, all right, cool. Well, I'll hit you up the next day or two. We're going to get some people out of Afghanistan.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I was like, I'm sorry, you said we're going to do what now? He was like, yeah, the Taliban's taking over Afghanistan, and we're going to save some good guys. I was like, I don't know how I'm going to help that, but okay. I ended up getting a call about a week later and thrown into this app called Signal, which I had never heard of.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I'm in chat rooms with all sorts of crazy professions, active duty, you know, three letter agencies. And they're wanting to know if we can use Black Rifle's data sets to do anything in Afghanistan, to vet people, to find missing people, to plot safe ground routes, to spy on what somebody's consuming on their device.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And the answers to some of those were yes, the answers to other ones were no, and the answers to the other ones were like, I don't know, but we'll find out. Um, he ends up sending over a list of, it came from a Lieutenant General. I don't know if I should name, name the guy, but Jack Britton is the Marine NCO that pulled me into this. He owns, uh, thecybersamaritan.com. Really good dude.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Just, just a damn good human being. He was volunteering at the time for the National Child Protection Task Force. Sends over this list and, um, It's a list of 13 families that are stuck in Afghanistan being targeted by the Taliban for capture or kill. And he wants to know, can we get them? Can we find them? Can we make contact? Is there anything we can do?
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And it's like a list of WhatsApp numbers and social media profiles or any other relevant selectors they had. And so I started combing through breach data because a lot of what we've built out on the Black Rifle side is collations of breached data from, you know, like you hear about it, like Park Mobile had a huge breach and all this information gets out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And so I started cross-referencing, like, who may have appeared in a breach. And the first family I had on there, their last name is Pardisi. And I started finding a lot of activity between that WhatsApp number, a Facebook account, and then I got down to a Hotmail email, and then that linked back to a number at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, or Fayetteville.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I didn't know it was Fort Bragg at the time. I called it, and the guy that answered it spoke English, said his name is Pardisi. And so I'm like, what the fuck? So I hung up real fast because I was a little freaked out, you know? Then I realized, like, I'm not doing anything nefarious. Just call back and tell them what we're doing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And as it turned out, this was the now an American citizen brother of the guy we were looking for. And he had direct comms with him. So not only is this missing person no longer missing, we know they're alive. We know exactly how many kids they have with them. We know where they are. We know they have a tie to the US military. And so they're good to go, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
So we make contact with people inside the airport. I've been handed lists of phone numbers. It's kind of like Scott did with Pineapple Express. Well, we were running the same lines on a lot of those. And I called the airport. I told these people to go to Abbey Gate. You know, we had them. I think they had a yellow flag they were going to hold up. And this Brit pulls them in. Like, they're saved.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
We just saved 11 lives. Like, I'm dumbfounded. I had no idea what I was doing. Wow. But it happened. And that really kind of tricked me into doing the rest of Afghanistan because the feeling I got from that initial success that was such a low-lift effort, but now they think I'm a hero. The family still checks in with me to this day. They tell me happy birthday all the time. Anyway, I was hooked.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I was like, I got to do this more. And so we went, as we tend to do with all things, way overboard into Afghanistan, all right? Yeah. We're working multiple other angles through NCPTF. I end up in direct comms with a driver in Kabul. One thing leads to another, and I have a ground team in Kabul now. We're able to move people all over the place. We were getting people into Blackgate.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I ended up in chats with Scott Mann. Oz Geist. That's how I met Sarah Adams. And right at the same time, I started getting, because of Black Rifle's success and because of the gun industry's general disdain for criminals and druggies, I started getting kind of open about my background. You know what I mean? And I had the exact opposite feedback that I was expecting, especially on LinkedIn.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Like, people... not only appreciated my openness, a lot of people were like, oh, you know, I used to fight that too, especially from the firearms industry itself. I was actually kind of surprised. So I'm in these chats with all these people who can certainly pull up my background and figure out exactly who I am and what I've done. So it's good that I'm already being open.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
As we get closer to the 26th of August, things are getting real dicey in Kabul. Um, like we've had, we've had Afghans get shot on the other end of the phone with us while we're trying to guide them in. I've been given access to this geoscent reporting tool where we're able to see real time gunfire around the airport, where the checkpoints are. We're navigating like from 8,500 miles away.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I'm in my basement in Georgia telling people how to get into the airport. I'm giving them contact with a driver that can get them through the 82nd and Blackgate. Um, Jess is on the phone with Afghan women. They're screaming and crying and praying, and Dari and Jess is praying in English, two totally different religions, but just trying to get the same thing done. It was a very surreal experience.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Wow. Um, I'm less than two years clean at this point in time. And like, I'm in direct comms with all of these special operators and like dudes that are literally on the ground in Afghanistan, guys that are, uh, across the border in Dushan Bay. Uh, we had people in Abu Dhabi, um, uh, at the humanitarian city up there. Um.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Like literally within 45 days time, I've gone from running my business and trying to find some purpose in life. We're waiting on the IRS to approve Flanders. So I can't do a lot other than fly my old buddy to treatment. And now I'm in chats with like super duper bad asses. And.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Yep. I guess I actually can relate to that more than I thought I could when you first said it because I used to do that with heroin. When I was trying to quit, I would – I would keep a little bit knowing it's there. It's there. If the withdrawals get to be too much, if today gets to be too much, it's there. I can do it. The problem, of course, was that I always did it. So I do get that. Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Like right in the middle of this, somebody finally checks our mail and the IRS had approved Flanders Fields as a nonprofit on the 15th of August, the day Kabul fell. So now I've got all of this going on, but now I have a mechanism to raise money because Flanders was chartered to help.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
house homeless veterans did not say anything about american veterans we've got all these allied members of the afghan national army that we're trying to help we've got former commandos we're trying to help jess at this by this point time has her own little small entourage of former afghan female police officers um
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And then when the bomb goes off at Abbey Gate, you know, we couldn't get anybody else inside the airport. That was it, it was curtains. But we've already moved all these people from the sticks of Afghanistan to Kabul, trying to get them into the airport and evacuate them. And so the need became immediately apparent for safe housing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And in these signal chat rooms, there was all sorts of people freaking out about the legality of this, the legality of that. Do we need to do something with the Foreign Agent Registration Act? What's the Logan Act? All this crap I've never heard of, nor do I give a flying fuck about. I'm barely two years away from being a criminal, so I don't care at all.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I'm going to find out if I can lease an apartment in Kabul. I'll be back in 10 minutes. So I call my guy back at Fort Bragg. He's like, yeah, my cousin's a real estate agent. What do you need? I was like, I need safe houses. So next thing I know, I'm signing a lease in Dari, all right, or Farsi or whatever. I don't even know what the fuck it was. So we're signing leases in Afghanistan.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
We start putting families in these safe houses because we can't get them out of the airport anymore. And my dream of Flanders Fields and helping homeless and addicted vets has now morphed because my weaponized ADHD went for shiny object syndrome in Kabul, Afghanistan. We ended up, like no bullshit, before it was over, we had 68 safe houses in Afghanistan. We had them in Kabul.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
We had them in Kunduz. We had them in Jalalabad. We had them in Helmand. We had them close to Torkham. I'm not sure how close. We had Mazar-e-Sharif. At one point, we were housing 650 former members of the Afghan military. I blew through my kids' college savings. But this whole time, it's just we're learning how to get shit done real fast, real fast, make shit happen. We're making contacts.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And my life had purpose. And before I know it, I've got two years clean. That's the longest I've had clean since that relapse in 2011. And I'm starting to realize if I maintain a purpose, maybe I actually can stay clean no matter how much money I make. So we've dumped like all of our personal savings into Afghanistan.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I'm making money just to give it to the nonprofit so that we can continue doing what we're doing over there. We had a lot of very early successes. We had a lot of really crappy things happen too. I ended up –
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I think it was November of 2021, I got invited to Fort Bragg to USASOC, United States Army Special Operations Command, to come talk to a roomful of 3-3 Green Berets about how we're doing this. Like, I'm literally a crackhead, and I'm being asked to come to USASOC and talk about what we're doing in Afghanistan. Damn. They had their own little NGO set up. I think it was called Team America.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I can't remember what it was. But I met a whole bunch of guys up there. Jeff Diardia, do you know him? Mm-mm. Okay. And, oh, it was hilarious when I got there. You know they do the background check at the Little Welcome Center? So, like, I think I'm fine because I'm there with –
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Command Sergeant Major Fais Wafa, one of the Afghan commando guys who had headed up a whole bunch of the commando stuff. I'm there with him and then with two former 3-3 SF guys. And I think I'm going to be fine. And I'm watching the MPs across the counter as they're running my shit. I'm like, oh, no, I'm not fine. And so one of the MPs is like this thick white girl covered in tattoos.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Well, back to childhood. What kind of stuff were you into as a kid? Dude, I had like the most idyllic childhood ever. from my perspective, uh, and outside looking in. Um, I did Boy Scouts, you know, I tried to play sports to impress my dad, but I sucked at all of them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
So I start flirting with her. And then she looks down at her screen and looks back at me and goes, I know what you're doing outside. I was So I'll walk out there. She's like, what are you doing? I was like, I'm trying to help with the Afghan evac. What do you mean? She's like, cut the shit. What is up with your background? I was like, I don't know what you're talking about.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
She's like, what the fuck are you doing here? And so come to find out the way they had entered all of those charges, which I beat every one of into the NCIC, it has me show them with like 14 felonies or some crap. I'm like, no, I don't have 14 felonies. I beat all of those. And she's like, well, do you have proof of that? And I got smart with her. I'm like, yes, I always keep it with me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Come on, let's go to the truck. And she said, well, is there anybody you can call? And so I called Division 8 Drug Court, who had terminated me, but we had started rebuilding that bridge with. Brian Owens gets on the phone, and I don't know if he pretended to be the judge or if they got Judge Dwyer on the phone, but they confirmed I do not have any felonies.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And so they ended up letting me go into the base. to do this little class at USASOC, which was fucking cool as shit. I still can't believe that actually happened. Yeah. But I tell you that story for a reason. The way God works in all of these little details...
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
If I hadn't started getting open about my past with all of the people in the EVAC community before they work with me, I'm like, I want to make sure you know who I am. Most of them already follow me, so they knew who I was. They already know that I talk very openly about all this shit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
But if I hadn't been open about that, that would have had to be right there in front of CSM Wafa and all these other guys. If I hadn't gone back and fixed the bridge with Drug Court, I wouldn't have been able to get on post. And all of these things just kept working together. It's kind of like you see in those numbers repeatedly, you know? The little God winks, they just kept happening.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
2021 was a blur, all right? Jess and I have been working with Randy Searles, another Green Beret who helped Scott with a couple of his books, put all of this into a book. So like it's actually all written out with all the stories from the Afghan stuff. I don't want to try to get into all that here because I really want to talk about what we're doing in Memphis. What's the name of the book?
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
It's called We Fight Monsters. Yeah, it's called We Fight Monsters. And we're launching a Kickstarter to help get it across the finish line at some point this month, probably before this actually airs. But having been on here and just said that, it's going to help a ton. So I hope people go look up the Kickstarter.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Um, I was, I was really good at, at being an outdoors kid, you know, hunting, fishing, uh, land nav, or orienteering, as we call it in Scouts. I did Scouts. My dad was our Scoutmaster, um, until we moved to California and Scouts got weird out there. So we stopped, but, uh, I was almost Eagle, whatever it was, Star or Life, right below Eagle Scout. Um, I loved anything and everything outdoors.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And it's going to go into detail about our background, what we did in Afghanistan, Ukraine, Haiti, Mexico. We've done some weird stuff in several places at this point. But it's a roadmap for how to get good shit done in very weird places and odd circumstances and against all odds, which is really what we pulled off in Afghanistan. Man, that's amazing. And that's how long, Silver?
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
How long since— I hit two years right around the time I went to use the SOC. We ended up the next month— It's quite the redemption. It gets crazier. It gets crazier.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
The next month, we get invited to Capitol Hill to meet with members of Congress and a lot of other soft guys, all right, and our— Childcare canceled the morning of her flight, so we bring Ava. So there's pictures of Ava entertaining former agency case officers, senators. Like, she was the star of the show up there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
In D.C., we started tightening up these circles of people that we know and work with because we've got a reputation at this point as being folks who can get shit done in unorthodox ways. You know, I... If we have something that needs to get accomplished, our goal is to find a way to get it done. And I don't want to worry about stupid stuff like legality until after the fact.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I hope that never comes back to bite me in the ass. I've gotten lucky so far. Right before Christmas, Jess gets a message. We started shutting down the safe houses because we couldn't afford them, you know. Or not just shutting them down. We were trying to find work for the guys or find them a pathway to somewhere else, get them out, get them taken care of.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
But instead of keeping that house open and moving somebody else in, we just terminated the lease. And we started doing that in December. Jess gets this message the day before, the day after Christmas from this girl and starts reading it to me. I'm like, nope, we're not taking it anymore.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
The next thing I hear is screaming and sobbing coming from Jessica's phone. I'm like, what the fuck is that? This girl has sent her a voice note in real time of the Taliban beating her father in front of her mother. And she tells us about herself. She's Shia Hazara. She's in college. She was 19 when the collapse happened, and she wants to finish college.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Her dad was a commando, served with our Green Berets since the inception of the commando corps, served in the ANA four years prior to that. Like, this is somebody we've got to help. And just basically – she basically told me, I don't give a shit what you say. We're helping them. So she moved them into a safe house. That girl lives with us today in Memphis. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
She started college two weeks ago in Memphis, Tennessee. She is today probably the single most protected individual in the city of Memphis, hands down, by both sides of the law. It's been absolutely amazing to watch. It took three years to get her here, but she smuggled herself alone through 14 countries, through the Darien Gap, into Mexico and then we started helping again in Mexico.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I don't even know how. I ended up with contacts in the Mexican government as part of all of this weird stuff we've done. We got sent down to Mexico during the evacuation out of Ukraine. And so I had contacts in the Mexican government that helped us get her from Guatemala through Mexico. And then friends that I've made at CBP helped get her lawfully into America.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I made the CBP friends when we responded to the Evaldo massacre. Wow. Yeah. And I would love to – I do talk about all these in the book. I would love to sit here and talk to you about them. What do you mean she's protected by both sides of the law? Bro, everybody loves her. The gang members, the cops, like both sides of the law. Know her, love her, appreciate her, watch out for her. Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I loved going on bike rides, mountain biking, catching animals. That was like my obsession for a long time was reptiles, venomous snakes, alligators, literally catching alligators.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
ex-cons like everybody in memphis knows who she is and and they will not with her you know she's just the most cared for person in the city of memphis right now wow yeah what's her name arizo her dad and siblings are still stuck in pakistan and that sucks you know lost any and all ability to get people moved but you know all told in that effort i mean we helped
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I mean, I directly got about 250 people into the airport before we were no longer able to get them in. And then after the fact, we worked a lot too. And I want to touch on all these crazy stories just to illustrate the network of people we've got that are helping us do what we're doing in Memphis is staggering. It's not just
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
addicts and it's not just vets and it's not just cops and it's not just federal agents it is people from literally every walk of life that has come alongside an effort to help people who could never ever repay them and this method that i guess you can call it that we're using it's kind of scott's idea we we did it in ukraine we did it in ecuador to evacuate some american medical students that were stuck
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
We did it a little bit in Haiti to save a guy that was kidnapped by a cannibal gang. We did it twice in Mexico. We've used it in Uvalde. We used it at Q Club. We did it again with Task Force Lahaina. These grassroots movements that you hear Scott talk about all the time, they're real. They're very real. And I think the time for Americans to stop paying so much attention to
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
to the division that our mainstream media peddles, that time is now, because it's not real. It's manufactured division. And I can tell you this as a white guy that goes under the blackest streets of South Memphis, where everything revolves around race, and I'm able to get done some amazing things. I'm able to... I'm out there fighting narcotics trafficking.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Not by putting people in jail, not by shooting people, by meeting people where they're at, And I'm able to take food off the table of drug dealers and have them help me do it. I have been able to get convicted human traffickers, help us get women into treatment and out of that life now. And it's not because I'm special. It's not because I'm from those streets.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Sure, some of it is because I'm from those streets and they've seen me do very bad things and they've seen me recover. But a lot of it is just – it just comes down to human connection. It comes down to what you and I are doing right now, having a conversation and giving a shit about where the other person is coming from.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I think the last one I caught, I was 18 or 19. When did it start? How young? Probably 11 or 12. These weren't big alligators. I mean, they're little, you know. We lived in Jackson, Mississippi for seven years. That was the longest stretch in childhood I ever lived in one place. It was Rankin County, Mississippi, outside of Jackson, on this big lake, man-made lake called the Ross Burnett Reservoir.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
You can't always, but I'll tell you what we've had great success with. Drug dealers are humans, just like CIA case officer, a SEAL is still a human. They've got a particular skill set, but they still have things that are very human about them. And relationships are one of those things. There's somebody that is important to that drug dealer.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
There are usually multiple somebodies that mean a lot to him. He still has a soul, and he still has to earn a living. And if you understand that not all of them are necessarily evil, and if you understand that there is that human aspect to all of them, you have an opportunity to find a way to get through to them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Now, it's not going to surprise anybody listening to this to hear that a lot of drug dealers make good entrepreneurs, all right? Obviously, they're businessmen.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
We've been able to take that approach with some of them, you know, demonstrate some of my business success and prowess over the years and say, look, if you will consider a different way of life and put this shit down, I'm going to mentor you. I'm going to help you. That's worked sometimes. Sometimes they don't give a shit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
They're going to keep living the life they're living, and you've got to find a different way to reach them. Well, if you figure out that that dope boy's mom has been out there on the hoe track for the last 30 years selling her body or his sister or his baby mama, and you go get to them, you get that one some help, man, you've got a friend for life in that dope boy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
He may not stop selling dope, but that's the only way he knows how to make a living. or if that's the way he enjoys making a living, but you can reach him, you can make some level of impact, you could start going after their customer base. And we did that successfully on one trap house. Actually, it took multiple methods on this one, the one on Woodward, the one where I should have died.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
That's how we shut that house down. You know, we put one of the dope boys through CDL school. He went back to selling dope. We helped him open up a car detailing business. went back to selling dope, we ended up getting help for several people that he was real close to and he loved, like family. Even though he was selling them what they were killing themselves with, he loved them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
We got them help and that caught his attention. And so the totality of those opened him up to a conversation and he agreed to shut the trap down.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
So it's going to depend on whether or not we have history with that dough boy. And if I don't, I've got to become known to them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Murder, overdose. One natural, but a lot of them died. But the majority of them are still the same people. It's like we never left. They're still there doing exactly what they were doing the day I hit rock bottom in that empty lot. And they don't want to be. They don't. They don't know anything else. They were raised there. They were taught if you need something, you get it off the block.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
You know, you do what you got to do out there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
It depends on who it is. Like today, they love to see us because they know we're there to help people. You know, they know we're out there trying to bring hope, recovery, economic opportunity. We started up a skills training workshop, like a woodworking shop. We're trying to bring opportunity to the hood.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
to one of the deadliest zip codes in America, where, as I mentioned earlier, young men have a higher chance of being dead or incarcerated than they do to be in school or have a job, much less be in their kids' lives. These are things that have to change. You can't change that being the most violent place in America without addressing that. That is what has to change.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And it was full of alligators and water moccasins. And, like, it was the greatest place ever for a little boy to live, you know. And so we moved there when I was seven. How would you catch them? Nut. I'd use a nut. And babies, you know. Like, I wasn't doing a crocodile hunt or jumping onto the towel. Did you ever have a mom come after you? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And so we change that by bringing hope out there. So when they see us coming, they're happy, man. Now, maybe we have cheated a little bit because we're doing this where we hit rock bottom and they do know us. And that is important because they need to know I'm not the police, right? Otherwise, I just get shot. You walk up to a trap house and say, hey, man, I want to shut this house down.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
No, you're going to get shot. You've got to use a little more tact than that. And you've got to show up like every trap house. How do you show up? I just walk up.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Well, I wouldn't just walk up to a trap house with an opening line and say I want to shut this down. It is a very long process. What's the approach?
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
The initial approach is going after the addicts. Get them help. Because every dope boy has an addict or two or five that are pains in his ass. And when you're selling dope and you have somebody that's shot off real bad, they're a risk to your operation. If they get rolled up, the cops are going to offer them a deal to flip. And so that person is a threat to your existence.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
You want them to get off of dope. You don't want to lose them as a customer necessarily, but you want them to go to rehab and if they relapse and get back on dope, oh well. And so we started by going after the addicts that frequent those houses. And that's not a threat to anybody.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
No dope boy in their right mind is ever going to get upset if you are getting the worrisome prostitute crackhead off the street. They're going to love it, actually. And you're going to build some trust with them by doing it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Oh, because they see us. I mean, there's only two white people going out in the hood doing this. Well, it's more than that now. But they know, and we'll hold events out there. Like, we'll feed the hood. We will buy Christmas presents for all the kids in the hood. Thousands of toys. We've done that two years in a row now.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And while that may sound like handouts and enabling people to make poor decisions with their money, buying drugs instead of presents, yeah, that I'm sure happens. But it wasn't James' fault when Jess and I bought drugs instead of Christmas. You know, it's not those kids' fault. And so even though there is a little bit of handout involved in the events that we do, it's building trust, man.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
These people are seeing and realizing you're there to actually help them. You're not there just to go put somebody in jail, you know, or shoot somebody. You're actually there trying to meet a need, meet these people where they're at, and then show them that they still have worth as human beings. Because I can tell you, when I was out there towards the end, I didn't feel human.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I wouldn't make eye contact with anybody. I felt substandard to literally anyone. I felt so insignificant and worthless. And I came real close to ending it more than once on purpose. I tried more than once. Do you have conversations with these guys? Absolutely. Absolutely. I want to talk to them about their hopes and dreams.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
But the funny thing is, my mom would go to bat for me with the neighborhood moms because I was— I mean, an alligator. Oh, no. So, one time I did almost get eaten by a big old female. They'll build these mounds of, like, I say I almost got eaten. Alligators aren't really that aggressive, but it scared the shit out of me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I want to talk to them about where their life diverged from the one they had always envisioned. And the sad part is that in a lot of these cases, you find out it didn't. They're living the life they envisioned because that's all they're ever taught. It's all they're ever shown. It was all that was ever modeled for them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
You have like generational legacies of dope dealing in some of these neighborhoods.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I didn't want to try to make a comparison between soft guys and dope boys, but I was thinking about that when you were saying it. Because their identity is completely wrapped up in that. Completely. It is their whole sense of worth and value. is wrapped up in the fact that they're a dope boy and they got money and they have control, they have power.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Because the reality is, especially when we're talking on the trafficked women's side of it, if you've got that sack of dope, you have whatever you want. You can get whatever you want out there. No questions asked. And that is a hard thing for some of you guys to let go.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
When they start seeing it happen to somebody they love, though, their sister, their child, their baby mama, their cousin, their mom, their eyes open up a little bit and you've got a window of time to make some impact there. Young kids getting shot out there, that happens all the time too and it breaks everybody's heart. Nobody wants to see that shit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And those are opportunities to go in there and have conversations. They all know and accept that their means of earning income is not sustainable and that it will send them to prison. And so trying to break it down to these guys that prison is not a normal part of life. Don't have that on your 5, 10, 20-year plan. Don't put prison as something that's going to happen.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
You can actually control whether or not you ever go to prison. That's like a revelation to some of these guys.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Yeah, and how sad is that? How sad is that? In fact, I'll give you an example. I'm not going to say his name, but years ago in the Tramp House on Wilbert, they used to give the biggest dope boy on that block a hard time because I had done more time than he had. I've never even been to prison. All mine was jail time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
They'll build a big old mound of vegetation, and they use that to incubate their eggs, I guess. Well, we found one, and we were stomping through it trying to find babies, you know. And the whole thing starts vibrating. We're like, what the hell is going on? And out shoots this 10, 11-foot-long, full-grown alligator. that was, I guess, had buried itself in this mound. We thought it was a nest.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
But they used to give him a hard time because I had done more jail time than he had. When was it ever a badge of honor to do more jail time than somebody else? It's not. It shouldn't be. And so these mentalities that you're having to break down out there, they've been in place for generations.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Oh, yeah, absolutely. Now, it's going to depend on who it is. Everybody's individual, and some of them are going to be way more closely guarded. But I've seen tears shed by a lot of these guys, especially when it comes down to things like fatherhood, being present in your kids' lives. Yeah. And if you can get them to talk about childhood, that usually rips open some wounds, some painful ones.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Because I don't know if this is unique to the neighborhoods in Memphis where we operate or if this is an across-the-board thing in inner cities, but sexual abuse is very common in childhood, even incest, incestual abuse. And that's not something that gets talked about in that community.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And if you can create an environment where they will talk through childhood traumas, you really get another in with these people. And again, it's just that thing of you have to make human connection. And that's why I think... Well, I forgot where I was going with that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
You've got to establish human connection, and in the communities we're working in, that's not necessarily a popular thing to do at scale publicly. So you've got to create an environment where you can have one-on-one conversations with these guys.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I keep saying men, it's women too, but you know from your own experience, most of the calamities we face as humans are driven by bad men actors, right? And so my focus is always on the males out there. And we've got women that will work with the women too, though. But trying to reach them and just... Get to the root cause of why things are the way they are.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I think at the end of the day, most of it does come down to lack of economic opportunity and an acceptance at scale of violence, drug addiction, drugs, and human bodies as currency.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Yeah. We got Wyatt and who? Wyatt and Justin. Justin. They're going to have a blast. They're going to get to see this in real time. I'm going to take them to 1428 Wilbur Street, the house that used to be full of bullet holes. There is a woman and her three children who I helped her get custody back of living in that house that just celebrated Christmas in there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
She's a year and something sober now. Trafficking survivor. The women that used to sell dope out of that house, I've got them housed in another old trap house around the corner. And it's like I'm taking the most – I keep saying I. I mean we. This has not just been out there. We have like a literal army that's out there doing this with us. How many of you guys are there?
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I don't even know at this point, man. So at any given point, we're housing around 75. And we're working with roughly 200 people. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Now we've gotten north of 350 people off the streets through detox, into rehab, through sober living and back into the workforce. I don't know that all of them stayed clean.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
It was not a nest. It was, there was an actual giant alligator in the middle of it. And we fell over. We're in the swamp. And yeah, I thought I was going to die. Holy shit. I don't know if I ever tell my mom that story, but I remember my buddy Bo Goodson was with me when it happened and we thought we were dead. We thought we were dead. I'll bet.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I mean, I know not all of them stayed clean, but a lot of them did. So we've got a pretty sizable team out there. And then we've still got all these people from the EVAC communities, the Afghanistan and Ukraine that are pouring resources into this too. Guys like Scott. Scott Mann's on our board. General Hicks, who's A-10 barrels down there, is on our board.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Travis Peterson, retired master sergeant. He was an Air Force guy and an agency contractor too. He's on our board. We've got a gunny from the Marines. And then all of us have some level of trauma that we've had to deal with.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I think that's kind of the key to building these teams out is you have to have somebody that's overcome trauma if you want them capable of doing anything really, really cool for no reason other than to have purpose.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Well, we had this real estate developer who had bought up a couple of them at tax sales, and every time she tried to do something out there, they would, like, steal her car, you know, or cut her catalytic converters off. So she donated those houses because we're actually able to go out there and do whatever we want. The house on Wilbert, I bought.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I bought it from my friend, Drennan, who was shot six times in that house. His wife died in that house. That was one of those relapses right before Rock Bottom was when she died. I bought that house from him, and the drug dealer that made his living in that house is who convinced him to sell it to us. No shit. Yeah. Now, he failed to convince his partner.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
his partner shot somebody six times another somebody no three times the day we shut the house down coming out of my house after it was legally mine he shot somebody he's back in prison now where he belongs that was actually the guy that kidnapped her over the wedding room evil evil evil person you know we deal with the worst that humanity has to offer but
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I can count on one hand the number of truly evil individuals I've ever met. And it's low. Even in the child predator space, they're not as evil as you would think they'd have to be. Which I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Is there a lot of that going on down there? There... So we've... We've recovered several dozen women from sex trafficking, prostitution. Two of them are minors. And I hate to tell you this, but both of them were pissed we recovered them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
What, so were you, were you tight with your brother back then? We were very different as kids. Cody wanted to be an actor. He wanted to play basketball. He was actually decent at sports. And I was just wanting to play outside. So, yeah, we hung out all the time. I mean, we fought like big brothers and little brothers do, but nobody else was going to fuck with my little brother.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Yeah. Yeah. You know, they're slaves to dope, man. And in that age demographic? You heard my story when I was 15. There was no getting me sober that early. I hadn't suffered enough. Just like Jeff said, you got to suffer sufficiently to choose something different. And while you and I may hear that, you know, a 15-year-old being sold for sex, that sure sounds like suffering to me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
It's not enough for them sometimes, you know. Now, I don't give a shit. It's still a crime. I'm still recovering you. And anybody that was involved in your trafficking is going to go to prison. But it doesn't mean the victim is going to stay sober. You know what I mean? So how many houses are there?
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
We've got a total of 10 houses in Memphis, and I'm really excited to tell you this because I've not announced this publicly because we're still waiting on paperwork. There is a 76,000-square-foot nursing home behind one of my blocks, immediately behind it. It's been abandoned for 20 years, and last week we tracked down the owner and told her we want to turn it into a treatment center.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
which will make it, I think, West Tennessee's largest treatment facility. So you guys have Morgan County and DC-4 over here in this area. West Tennessee has nothing. The lady told us that not only is she interested in donating the property to us, she wants to actually assist in raising the money to renovate it and oversee it. I'm going to go ahead and say... Did you say 76,000 square feet?
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
76,000 square feet. Hundreds of rooms. It sits on five. It's massive. Massive. And so I think that's our next move is our own treatment facility. Because right now I'm having to work with community partners who I love. I'm so grateful for all of them, like Alliance, Serenity, CAP, all the treatment centers. We don't have anything that can do it all in one house in that side of Memphis.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
It's certainly not this size. This is in the middle of the track. I mean, you're sandwiched between the Ho track and the Dope track right there. It's a perfect location to do this. And I'll tell you this, a lot of people might hear this and think, well, that's really cool. That's great. It doesn't really affect me. That's not accurate, man.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
This crap affects everybody and it's happening in everybody's backyard. I'm talking about fentanyl and human trafficking. You might not see it the same way that we see it out in South Memphis, but this is happening everywhere. And violent crime spills out of big cities. There's no way to argue that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I can tell you from experience, when we shut down the trap on Melrose and when we shut down the trap on Wilbert, violent crime on those two streets ceased that day. Literally that day on Wilbert because somebody got shot that day. But you get what I'm saying. It is the sole source of all the mayhem that happens anywhere near there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
We work with certain law enforcement agencies in Tennessee who have tons of data on this and are able to back all of this up. But 90 plus percent of the violent crime in Tennessee goes back in one shape, form or fashion to dope. And so if you remove the drugs from the equation, so much of that violent crime goes down. And that's something we all want. It's good for everybody.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I always stood up for him. So, yeah, we were close growing up until we moved to California. That's when things went sideways.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Um, we've turned two very big ones, four smaller ones, and that's been through, well, I hate to use this term with you because you're a SEAL, but direct action. And what I mean by that is not what you mean by DA. And what we're doing, we're going direct. Ben is going directly to this guy to talk to him, and we're going to try to turn this thing around. So two big ones, four small ones.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Now, if we're talking about court referrals, because we do work with the drug court program, we work with Veterans Court, we work with the DA's office, they send people to us all the time. And if we're counting those who have already been justice-involved, right, they've already been arrested, It's in the dozens. Now, they may not have had a choice. There wasn't an agreement reached.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
They were court-ordered to stop their behavior, but they did succeed in turning their life around. There are dozens of those. Dozens. Wow. And so it's easier, obviously, to do it if you have the law backing you up. But my goal out there is to keep these guys from going to jail if they're fixable and definitely keep the addicts from going to jail.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Because if you look at the way we've fought the war on drugs for the last 40 years— It's an abject failure by every metric measurable. We've made no progress. In fact, it's worse. Overdose deaths are higher than they've ever been. Now, I know, and you know, that's in large part because of fentanyl and the issues at the southern border with it just coming right across.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I moved there when I was 14. And so I was in Jackson, Mississippi from age 7 to 14. And, I mean, I'd already lived in I don't even know how many states prior to that. So I had no stability. I was constantly moving, constantly being the new kid, constantly reinventing myself, you know, learning how to make new friends. And so I got really used to that. And I was actually pretty good at it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
But the status quo has to be challenged. We're not prosecuting our way out of the war on drugs. We've tried it for 40 years. We're not prosecuting our way out of the war on human trafficking. It's not working. I'm not saying we stop prosecution. I'm not saying anything in favor of decriminalization or anything like that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
What I am saying is we need partnerships like the one I just described where we do work with courts. We do work with law enforcement. But we also work with the guys on the other side of the law. We work with the junkies. We work with the addicts who are in the gutter actually enduring this shit. And we help them get better.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
We help the other guys who are literally sometimes just in it to put food on their table. We help them find a better way out too. And I think by working that kind of I like to imagine it like this. This is a vice, you know, fighting from the top and the bottom at the same time. We can actually get some big shit done.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And if we have more time, we could talk about how we did exactly that in Afghanistan. We got big shit done, how we did it in Task Force Lahaina with the Maui fires, and we got big shit done. It's the same method. We're working from the bottom up and the top down. But that grassroots side is something we have complete and total control over. I don't have to wait on a bureaucracy to make a decision.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I can just move right now. I don't have to wait on legal to approve something. You know what I mean? And honestly, when you're dealing with an issue like human trafficking, veteran homelessness, anything where addiction touches it, I have seen more times than I can count a delay of hours result in death. Literally just hours ends up with a dead person. A month ago, we had two double funerals.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Siblings die within hours of each other. Oh, man. This has to stop, man. We're losing a generation of American youth. Fent is the number one killer of people, I think, under 55 now. And if you want to talk about that from a national security standpoint, recruitment's at an all-time low, and we're losing a generation of warfighters. Like 300 a day. That's kind of scary. Damn.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Nothing more, nothing less. That's some big, big impact. We have no plans on slowing down, man. We want to take what we're doing in Memphis... I want to quantify it and validate it by getting that city off of the top five deadliest cities list. And I'm going to blueprint exactly how I did it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Every relationship we made, every agreement we went into with the street gang or with law enforcement, and just write every bit of it out and see if somebody else can replicate it in their city. Because I'm positive they can. I'm literally just a crackhead. And we've pulled this off in South Memphis. You know, like I'm not that special. I think this can be replicated. I think it's scalable.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I think it's viable. And if nothing else, I've seen a lot of families get put back together. I've seen a lot of lives get saved. I've seen a lot of people become productive members of society. And that's enough for me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I still am. But, yeah. that seven year stretch of being in one place, like I built a life. And that was half my life at that point I had spent there. And so we moved from Jackson to Orange County, California. Yeah, I snapped. I just lost it. I've always been an anxious person, especially today.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Wow. It's our duty. You know, you remember we used to pray to God if he'd get us out of hell together, we'd go back for those who left behind. He got us out. We're together. We got to go back. I don't have a choice.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Oh, yeah. Yeah. So Jacob worked 17 of the 21 funerals in Uvalde with us. He made a lot of the surviving kids smile for the first time in a long time. Jacob helped renovate the house at 1186 Melrose. Jacob had to jump. I hope his mom's not listening to this. Aaron, I'm sorry. Jacob had to jump under floorboards to hide from a drive-by on Webber Street. But, yeah, they're involved.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
James and Ava come everywhere with us. They love it. Lily has had a great time going out and meeting people in the hood. Madison has come out. They all have. They all love it. You know, the twins, they're 14. It's kind of cool sometimes. I think the only one that hasn't really gotten terribly involved is my oldest son, Jackson. He's in college, you know, doing his own thing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
He's very focused on school, and he's still working full-time too. For all that we put our kids through, they turned out okay. They really did.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
We got really lucky. Wow. And huge, huge props to Erin for that because she shielded a lot of them from a lot of bad.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
uh definitely look for the kickstarter uh for we fight monsters by ben and jessica owen that would be huge um if y'all want to check out the website it's we fight monsters.org um we've got our youtube channel youtube.com slash it was at monster fighters um just check us out or look me up on facebook linkedin follow me i got a patreon too patreon.com slash ben owen
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Thank you for the opportunity to be here, man. Seriously.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Dude, we could have gone another eight hours.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
So you brought up psychedelics. Huge proponent.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Yeah. Psilocybin saved my life. I was going to actually tell this today, but we didn't get a time. She doesn't even know this. I tried to kill myself in her house and then told her somebody broke in and robbed me. I cut myself to fucking pieces. I mean, but I never could have hit an artery. And I guess it's because of all the dope I shot.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
So, microdose and psilocybin. Microdose. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Now, see, it's a weird – like, I can't do that now because I'm in recovery, you know, but it got rid of that suicidal ideation. But despite being in recovery –
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
ayahuasca psilocybin there's so much research that needs to be done with all of these things that needs to be available yeah especially i i'm going to link to demographics that people don't link often but i think to combat veterans and sex trafficking survivors i've not come across a sex trafficking survivor to date that has not been a witness of extremely horrific violence yeah um
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I think there's something to be said for the fact that this is happening in our hometown, like where they live and sleep and eat and have to re-assimilate into society. So I want to see more psychedelic research done in that demographic. I really do. But it's tricky because not every addict is going to be able to responsibly do psychedelics. We're still talking about drugs, you know? Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
But there's a lot of us that can't, you know? Damn. And in a controlled environment, I think it's...
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
the outcomes from it if you've read any of the studies which is well read as you are i'm sure you have the um i just went brain dead sam not mayo but which one stanford yeah yeah they've uh i had a a marsock buddy we worked with during the evac that was part of uh i forget which one and then everybody swears by ayahuasca everybody swears by it yeah i've done that i did i began
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I've heard a lot of good things about Ibogaine. I wanted to do that coming off heroin, but when I was still thinking I was special, you know, I just couldn't afford it because I blew all my money. But, yeah, huge proponent of Ibogaine, psilocybin, ayahuasca, all of them. Yeah, me too, me too. Yeah, have you read up on neuroplasticity? A little bit. That shit's fascinating. It is so fascinating.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
uh like more so than usual i am who i am today i'm a very anxious stressed out person back then i think is when it really came to a head i had discovered that girls are animals too and so my obsession switched from catching reptiles to females and i had a girlfriend that i'd been allowed to spend way too much time with uh for a 14 year old like i don't know how i convinced my parents to let me do this lost my virginity and everything
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
The way your brain literally will rewire itself and form new pathways with psilocybin. If you're doing the guided... Johns Hopkins, that's the one I was trying to think of. It's mind-blowing, the kind of shit that... Some of that stuff's over my head, Ben.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Well, you get to hear a lot more than Scott heard, but there's still so much more. There's so much more.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I would love to be back on. And I love that you put her on that camera, man. That was awesome. You like that? I do. Because if I'd told her she was going to do it, she either wouldn't have done it or she'd have fucked up. But you made her comfortable. And what you've obviously done with me, too. This is my greatest fear. Well, public speaking in front of a crowd is my greatest.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
This is my second greatest. Yeah. And it's not even, I was telling Darren downstairs, it's not even fear of really speaking. I'm afraid I'm going to be afraid while I'm speaking.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Have you ever done SGB? What's that? The stellate ganglion blocks? No. Okay. No. No. I was just wondering, because Travis and Joel on our board both do those, and you're very even-keeled and calm, much like, no, not Joel, but Travis. You guys, the way you talk, you're just, you relax people when you talk to them. And Travis has that same trait.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And when we moved, that was the end of the world to me. Nothing was ever going to be the same again. It was all the, you know, listening to Smashing Pumpkins and Nine Inch Nails and the world's going to fucking end because I lost my girlfriend and she's in Mississippi and I'm in California. And I just went nuts, dude. I went completely nuts. How so? You name it. Like, I went from...
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I was a straight-A student my entire life until I moved to California. Not just straight-A student. I mean, I was like an absolute nerd. I was writing letters back and forth to the president of Harvard from like 10 years old on forward. I wanted to be a cardiovascular surgeon.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I had led a clinical study at the University of Mississippi at 13 years old that ended up getting published in the Journal of Neurology. Like, I was an absolute nerd, all right? Goody two-shoes, never got in trouble. Didn't give my parents any problems whatsoever. Within a month of moving to California, I'm still on alcohol, getting drunk, tried meth, tried coke, shrooms. At 14? 14, yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Yeah, I actually spent my 15th birthday locked up against my will in California. And that's when things really started going downhill. So, you know, they caught me with weed. I don't remember how it actually happened, but... And I never liked weed. But it was just my way of acting out. I would have it, you know, and I got caught. And so they flipped out like it was, you know, heroin that I was on.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Because my parents were very, what's the word I'm looking for? Strict. Very strict, straight and narrow kind of people, you know, like never done drugs, none of that. And so they flipped the absolute hell out and sent me to rehab for weed when I'm 14 years old. Well, I get in there. And they make me talk to a psychiatrist. And I realized, like, I can just get dope in here.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Because I wanted to change the way I felt. That was the crux of everything. I did not like the way I felt. And I wanted to do anything I could to change it. I'd been drinking extremely heavily. I'd been caught stealing alcohol. I was taking open containers of alcohol to school, to high school, ninth grade with me. And the teachers there wouldn't do shit. They were afraid of the students.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
So I was nearing rock bottom and stole a bunch of dope from Christian. Do you remember that?
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Like, it was, the students literally ran that school. So I started talking to the psychiatrist at this rehab place. And remember, I was a nerd. I'd read the DSM. It was the DSM-IV back then, front to back. I don't even know how many times. What's that? I think it stands for Diagnostics and Statistics Manual.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
It tells doctors how to diagnose diseases, including mental health, or particularly mental health. You read that at what age? I think the first time I heard it, I was 12. Whenever the DSM-IV came out, I was reading it. Because... I wanted to impress my dad. My whole life was spent trying to become my dad or to please him or make him happy. And this is not any fault of his.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
He was not an overbearing father. I had perfect parents growing up. This was just internalized in my mind that... My life only had validity if my dad was proud of me, which he always was. So I started reading the DSM-IV because he was selling to doctors. I think he was a regional manager with Pfizer by this point in time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And he had a tremendous level of respect for docs, and so I wanted to become a doctor. And so I'd read this thing front to back, memorized the whole damn thing. I'm going to caveat this. I've killed a lot of brain cells since then. I'm not that smart anymore, but I used to be. I had near photographic memory. Remember I told you I got weaponized ADHD. That is real.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I go to the psychiatrist and I present myself as a textbook case of somebody with bipolar disorder. I'm not bipolar, but they went ahead and diagnosed me. They did diagnose the ADHD, which is real, and they put me on Ritalin. And since I had read this manual and knew the things to say, I went back and kept going back to this doc at the rehab facility.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
While in a drug rehab, I have gotten a doctor to prescribe me 120 milligrams of methylphenidate a day, Ritalin, which is like super therapeutic, like way beyond what any kid should ever be on. Needless to say, that created a lot of anxiety and paranoia and other symptoms. And so now they're treating me for those symptoms. So they've got me on Xanax, Valium.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I didn't even realize it back then, but I'm dependent on all of this shit. And life at home had become pure hell because, you know, I'm trying to get out of this rehab. And every time they let me go home, I do something crazy, like drink a bottle of rubbing alcohol and wake up in an ER with a catheter and don't remember shit. Like I don't know how any of it happened.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And so when I said my little brother has a lot of resentments, like that's why this started. And I'm taking all of my parents' attention from him. And it was his dream come true to move to Southern California because he wanted to be an actor. So he's in acting classes. My parents are having to go pick me up out of gutters or have the police pick me up because I've run from the rehab facility.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Like it was just, and it came out of nowhere. My poor parents, you know, just literally overnight this happened. How would you get the booze? Steal it. You'd steal it? I didn't give a fuck. And that's like the craziest part about this is I'm not a thief. Even during my addiction, I was making the money. I was blowing on dope. But at 14, 15, I just did not care. I did not.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I wanted to get in trouble. I wanted somebody to catch me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Oh, wow. So, yeah, you get all of them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
My dad was always our scoutmaster growing up. And so we moved to California. He got us back in scouts. And I've been like through, you know, little bitty Tiger Cub all the way up, you know, the whole thing. Dad's an Eagle Scout, Order of the Arrow, Ranger qualified, you know, super who a guy. And so he puts us right back in scouts. We get out there and we have our first camp out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And when we get to this place where we're camping... They ran all of us up, and this was like right before I went nuts. So I haven't gone nuts yet. I'm still dealing with the anxiety and mental health stuff, but I haven't started doing the drinking and all that. But that was like two weeks later.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
We get to the first camp out, and they ran everybody up, and the scoutmaster, because Dad's the assistant because he's the new guy, says something to the effect of, and remember, campers, no scoutmasters in tents with boys and no sharing sleeping bags this time. And my dad looked at me and my brother was like, get in the fucking car. We're going home. That was the end of that. Holy shit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Oh, God, no. No, he got us the hell out of there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Yeah, Ritalin fucked me up. I really think it did like permanent damage to, that's where the anxiety started really bad for me was with the Ritalin. Of course, it's my own fault. I manipulated the doctor into giving me like three times what anybody my size should have been on, but. I have a repeating pattern of doing that, manipulating circumstances and end up fucking myself in the end.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I was. My parents, I think, honestly believed I was going to go on to cure cancer or AIDS someday. Yeah. And like that clinical trial that I led, the methods we came up with in that are being used to this day to diagnose things like Parkinson's and stuff.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
13, 14, you know, with a neurologist at the University of Mississippi. I took first place in the Mississippi State Science Fair that year.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Oh, at Harvard. I just wrote him a letter, dude. I wrote the president of Harvard a letter when I was 10 and said I wanted to be a cardiovascular surgeon. He wrote me back and was like, that's awesome. It's too early to decide what kind you want to be, but keep writing me and let's stay in touch. So I had an open line of comms with the president of Harvard at 10.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I did the Duke tip thing where you take the SAT in eighth grade and scored like a 1380 or 1400 or something. I was a very smart kid. Wow. And I've definitely spit in God's face with the amount of brain cells I killed. But it is what it is. But yeah, so my parents, I feel horrendous for them to this day.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
If I try to put myself in their shoes now as a parent and I have kids that age, I have kids much older than that already. I don't know how my dad kept his job. I really don't. I don't know how he stayed sane because on top of that, he's dealing with my mom's physical health. She's got a slew of autoimmune problems. Like, I was just a really selfish little bastard, man. I don't understand how...
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I don't understand how they kept me. I'd have been investigating ways to give up custody of this kid to the state somehow, looking back on what I put them through, because it really did come out of nowhere. There was no lead up to this. It was just, bam, Ben's insane. Damn.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
So- We had this – I was reading – I don't remember – one of my dad's medical journals, like JAMA or whatever it was, and read up on this phenomenon called the subcutaneous silent period. Now, remember, I've killed a lot of brain cells, and this was 30 years ago, so I don't remember all of it. But basically – It is a silent period in your synapse, in your nerve conduction.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
When you touch a painful stimuli, your nerves actually go blank for a second. The signals to your muscle telling your muscles to contract. And what that is, it's before your brain can even process, I'm in pain, your nerves have told your hand to let go. So if you've ever reacted to something quicker than your brain, you can actually process what's happening. That's basically why it happens.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Well, I theorized that if this is true that in instances of diseases like a myotrophic lateral sclerosis or Parkinson's or maybe Alzheimer's, anything that affects cognitive function or nerves, there might be a delay in that. And well, we found out that was true, that there was a delay. And so that was, it's been tons of research have been done since on this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Like it's a whole field and I doubt I'm the first person that thought of it, but I definitely did my own study and it definitely made it into the general neurology. My dad connected me with this neurologist. I forget what drugs dad was selling for Pfizer at the time, but he knew the neurologist at the University of Mississippi.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And this is back before the Pharma Act passed, I think, which means the Pharma Act is because drug companies were essentially paying doctors to write their drugs. And so this is back when you could still give docs tons of money. And so I'm sure there was some grant involved. He's like, help my kid do this idea.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
So he got me access to all these machines, electroencephalographs and stimulus, and I don't even know what they're all called. I got to shock my mom. She was one of my test subjects. I had a couple of the Nero interns up there that were my test subjects. I mean, it was really cool. I had a great life ahead of me and just for no reason at all decided to piss it away.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
So it didn't actually get published until I was 14, maybe 15, and I was in custody in Utah when that happened. Are you serious? That's how quick it happened.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I think they sent it to me. They sent me. So there's a Netflix special out right now about these facilities in Utah. Like, that's how bad they were. You know, these wilderness camps in Provo Mountain. I think Paris Hilton went to one of them. Of course, we didn't know back then how bad they were. What do you mean? They, like, beat the hell out of kids.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
The one I was at got shut down for breaking some kid's arm. There were, like, sexual assaults that happened at some of them. What happened to you? So, actually, at that one, the one in Utah, nothing. The one in California, that's not quite true. I kept running away. I don't want to be there. I'd run away. I'd go steal some alcohol, and eventually the cops would find me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
One time my mom found me passed out in the middle of an intersection, a very busy intersection, in Rancho Santa Margarita. Eventually, they got tired of me running and kind of upped their game on keeping me inside. And memory's a little fuzzy on this, but somehow I ended up barricaded in a room with three female clients, and they got real pissed about that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And when they got in the room, they got me out and put me in a five-point restraint room, like 14 years old, and three grown-ass men beat the shit out of me. I mean, beat the ever-loving hell out of me. And at the time, I felt like I deserved it. What did they beat you with? Just open hands. Slapping the shit out of me. I don't remember any objects or fists, but they beat the shit out of me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I'm restrained. I'm in a five-point restraint. I can't even lift my head. So that sucked. And it definitely gave me... What's the word I'm looking for here? I had some severe trauma associated with rehab, and you can see how that might play into some problems later on in my life, my story.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
The end result of that was that they shipped me off to a residential treatment facility in Utah for 18 months.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I, of course, being the outdoors kid that I was, I still had the love of all those things. They sent me to fucking paradise in my mind if I could just get outside the fence. You know, there's like all sorts of reptiles and critters I want to go catch. It was outside of Ogden, Utah, so near Great Salt Lake. And I was definitely going to run.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I mean, I knew how to survive out in the desert, and that was what I, in my mind, that's what I was going to do. But the day I got there, I saw a track star that I had known from school in California who was also sent out there to try to run. And keep in mind, I can't run for shit. Like, I'm not a runner.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And three giant Mormon dudes tackled his ass, and they shot him so full of Thorazine, he didn't come out of the room, and they put him in for like a week. So I was like, I'm not going to run from this one. And so I got to work manipulating my circumstances again. I convinced another doctor that I was very, very bipolar and just needed to be medicated.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And then when they did that, I checked all the boxes and did all the stuff and ended up graduating from that place in nine months. Wow. But I was being medicated for a whole bunch of shit that wasn't even wrong with me, which presents all sorts of new problems. My judgment was fucked. Obviously destroyed my brother's dreams of finishing acting school out there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
My dad had to take a demotion with Pfizer to get us out of there, to get us out of California. Wow. He moved us back to Alabama. I think I was, I think I turned 16 right after they got me out. And so I've been out in front of my parents' roof for like a year at this point. My brother didn't really even speak to me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I do remember the day that I drank that bottle of rubbing alcohol, I guess the plan to send me to Utah was already in place because the last thing I remember before I passed out and then woke up in a hospital was my little brother going, hey, Ben, you ever been to Utah? So he's always been a little smartass. Jeez.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Right about to turn 16. I may have turned 16. I don't quite remember. You remember I mentioned the kid that stepped on an alligator with me, Bo Goodson? That was in Mississippi. We moved to Hoover, Alabama. And my first day at school, I ran into fucking Bo Goodson. The dudes, they had moved, and we just ended up at the same high school together, which almost fucked me up really bad.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
He gave me a bunch of Adderall that day. Keep in mind, I haven't touched any dope in a year because I've been locked up. And I ended up throwing it away. Thank God, because when I got home from school that day, my mom's like, let me see your wallet. And that's where I'd had it. She just had a feeling, that mom gut instinct. Yeah. So for the rest of high school, I was pretty good.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Dad got offered a promotion back to regional manager that would have required him to move to North Georgia, and he took it. And me being the petulant little unappreciative child that I was reminded him he promised me he wouldn't move me again and told him I wasn't going. Now, if my 16-year-old had said that to me, I don't know how I would react, but it wouldn't be the way my dad did.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I don't know how it played out. I ended up moving in with my aunt and uncle. They didn't make me move to Georgia with them. If I'm being honest, dude, they were probably just sick of me, my parents. They loved me, but they were probably really tired of me. I couldn't have managed me. So they let me move in with Aunt Sandy and Uncle Danny. And so that was my junior year.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
The summer between junior and senior year, I went and spent in Georgia at my parents' and then went back. And somehow, at the end of that summer, my mom and my aunt got into a pissing match about something. I think maybe it was about my girlfriend. And the end result was I got my own apartment for my senior year. I don't know. I didn't question it, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
But I actually did everything I was supposed to do. I would have graduated with honors. And I mean, I guess on paper I did, but I didn't get to walk at graduation because the month before I ended up, I got caught with how I call it school. But, you know, I graduated with honors. I got a scholarship to Auburn, math scholarship. And I had no desire to get a math degree.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Well, I hadn't killed all the brain cells yet. That was still to come. So I get to Auburn. And remember, I'd stayed sober. I did get caught with alcohol at school, but that was the only time I drank. It was like I got caught the one time I did it. That may not be true. I feel like it is, but it might not be. I don't remember. But once I got to Auburn, man, the brakes came off. It was over with.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Getting drunk as shit every day. I got so bad, I was, this was back in, you know, 2000. And if you go get apple juice at the store, they weren't plastic bottles, they were still glass bottles. I would pour it out and fill them with beer to take to class with me. That's how bad I got that fast. I was drinking, you know, two cases a day.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I got a job at Auburn that I was trying to work and trying to do classes. I started ROTC. um again just trying to be like my dad you know he did rtc at auburn um and so i sucked at pt like i hate running i was in terrible shape because i was drinking constantly and um the drinking just kept escalating like i I was getting really close to drinking myself out of college.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
My guidance counselors had called me in. And so my mom or my aunt one was like, well, he needs to go meet with the students with disabilities or whatever because I was diagnosed bipolar and I'm still being medicated for it. So I did that and they basically greenlit me to misbehave all I fucking wanted. And they have to make reasonable accommodations for me. It was a disaster.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I was such a manipulative little shit. Just anything I could get that gave me an excuse to do what I wanted, I was going to grab onto that and not let go.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Yeah. Growing up, my parents drank. Neither one of them had a problem. I knew both of my mom's parents died alcoholics, but it was never really beat into my head the way it should have been that I was playing with a loaded gun. It definitely got me early. I wasn't even old enough to buy alcohol. That was the crazy part. You mentioned having homeless people go buy beer for you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I definitely did that. I was never without beer. And it was just beer back then. I didn't do a whole lot of drugs at Auburn other than recreationally. That was back when ecstasy was still X. Whatever it is now is not. But making terrible decisions. I ended up getting a girl who was in her mid-20s, pregnant. And... My mom convinced her to get an abortion, which fucked me up pretty good.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I don't know that I've ever told that story publicly. You wanted to have it. No, but I didn't want to kill it either. If I'm being honest, this girl was on so much dope, though, the chances of that baby making it were very slim anyway. She was heavy, heavy into all the drugs. I was just drinking. How'd you meet her? Met her at a cigar shop in downtown Auburn.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Six-foot-tall redhead, and we liked the same music, and it just was off to the races from there. How did your mom convince her, do you know? I don't. I don't know. I was so drunk during that time period. This is like probably middle of 2001. But of course, since that fucked me up, it just gave me another excuse to drink. Did you go with her?
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I guess I did go with her. My mom came, too. Because I remember being in the parking lot. I didn't go inside. My mom went inside with her. My mom went inside with her. And I just went back. And, I mean, that was the end of me and her. She was a fucking psychopath. Like, ruptured one of my eardrums, beating the hell out of me one time. Like, she was just nuts. Just nuts. Just nuts.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I have a penchant for crazy women, I think. That was a rough summer, though. So it dawned on you in the parking lot what was happening? I mean, I knew what was happening, but the totality of it hit me. Went back home and drank myself into oblivion. She packed her shit and left, and that was the last time I ever talked to her. Does it still bother you? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I love children.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I love them. You know, I didn't have to ever do anything to harm one. I drank at that problem for 20 years after that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Damn. I mean, that's the kind of guilt I can't overcome. And I've accepted, I've come to terms with what happened. But... yeah not to get into a political conversation like abortion always turns into but i killed my child you know that's that's how i look at it and that's that's hard that's hard that's hard to cope with i mean i know you're not i know you said it still bothers you but
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Man, consider adoption. Consider adoption. Somebody out there will love that baby. Somebody will. I promise you that. I adopted one of mine. You know, I've got eight. Only seven of them are actually biologically mine. I do understand circumstances, and I do understand that that's a decision some people feel they don't have a choice but to make.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I would, if I had it to do over again, I don't know that I would have chosen something different, though. Just because of how everything was and how everything is today and... I don't know. I don't know. That's a tough one, man. That's a tough one. How fast did that decision happen? Very quickly. Like, within a week of finding out she was pregnant.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Yes. Yes, I did. I told my mom. That's how that happened. And I was scared to death because, I mean, even though I was in ROTC, like, I was still depending on my parents for a lot of money, you know. I had lost the scholarship because to keep the scholarship, I had to be a math major. And I did not want to major in math. I'm good at math. I love math. It's fun.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I like it because there's a clear answer to something. You know, it's very definitive. But I didn't want to work a job in that. So I didn't have a scholarship. So ROTC was like, that was, you know, I don't have to have my parents pay my bills. They're going to pay it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
but i was actually wavered into rotc because when i was right before we left mississippi i tore my acl playing football and never got it fixed so it was it was just a whole giant show and it all went back to me trying to manipulate my circumstances how did your i mean how did your mom react when you told her shock and disbelief shock and disbelief um
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
But at the same time, I don't think it surprised her. And if you just listen to the last half hour of my story, I don't think it surprised anybody else. I was not exactly known for making good decisions, and most of the bad decisions I made revolved around alcohol and women at that point in time. So it was bound to happen sooner or later.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Yeah, I no longer had a scholarship. And I was working, still dependent on my parents. I had this job at a service center. I drove a 67 Camaro back then. I've always loved old cars, and so I got a job at a carry service center in Opelika, Alabama. And it was the morning of September 11, 2001. I woke up puking my blood. I had drank a hole in my esophagus.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I was about to fail out of class a month into the semester, and I knew it. I had been in ROTC. This was my second year. And I was not good at it. I was not good at getting up early because I was always hungover. I was terrible at PT because I'm not good at running. I don't have any ACL. And anyway, I'm changing an alternator on a 73 Impala. No, 73 Monte Carlo at Carey's Service Center.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I walk into the break room to get a doctor prepper because I cannot stop throwing up blood and I just need something to calm my stomach down. And carbonation has a weird way of doing that. And I look at the TV and I see the second plane hit the tower. My dad's in New York when this happens. And it's like the world just stopped. Everything stopped.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
We found out Deb was okay, and I walked across the street to a recruiter and told him I just want to go ahead and enlist. It was a terrible idea. I'm in no shape to join the Army, right? On 9-11? On 9-11.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Well, I went to talk to a recruiter because I didn't know legally how that worked. I'm in ROTC in college right now. I'm wavered for a torn ACL, and so I wanted to find out what it would look like if I enlisted. And of course, the place, you know, the next day was packed. Everybody went to go enlist. And so they scheduled me for an ASVAB, and I just decided I'm rebranding myself.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Ben is no longer a college student. You know, I was, I think, a mechanical or maybe chemical engineering major at the time. I'd changed so many times.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
i'm gonna i'm gonna list i'm gonna get an army um and so they scheduled me for an ass fab uh i got a 99 on it um still had most of my brain cells thank god and i was an engineer engineering student so like all the the math and stuff on it was like super familiar to me uh they found me a slot um for 97 bravo counterintelligence sounded super cool and i was gonna go spend uh
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I think it's 17 weeks in Fort Huachuca, Arizona. I was going to get a security clearance. I was going to get a $20,000 signing bonus. And so, you know, I let my parents know, and the process drags out a little bit. It's a few months that go by, and I go down to Maxwell Air Force Base to do MEPS the first time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I'm there, and I meet this little brunette from Dustin, Florida, and get fucking trashed, right? And we hook up, and... I show up to do MEPS the next day still drunk, still drunk. And my whole life, my dad, I think, carried a chip on his shoulder that he was Ranger qualified, an infantry officer, never deployed because he served during the Carter years. I wouldn't say a chip on his shoulder.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
It was a regret he had. He always wanted to get to go do cool guy stuff. And I didn't want that to happen. And I fully believe that war was going to be over in six weeks. But, you know, in hindsight, looking at it now, like, holy God, I was dumb, right? That was America's longest war, and we just walked away from it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
But at the time, I was convinced that if I didn't do something fast, I was going to miss out on everything. And I only shot at impressing my dad after all these fuck-ups that I've got. This is how I could finally redeem myself in my parents' eyes. And I want to be abundantly clear. This is not something my parents put on me. They never made me feel like I was a disappointment.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
You know, they never made me feel like I had anything to prove. I put all of this weight on myself that I had to please my parents. And the only way I could do that is to become just like my dad. I held this man on the pedestal my whole life. I think a lot of little boys do that, you know, but I maybe took it to an extreme. Well, anyway. I'm telling... You know, we go through the duck walk.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
The dude looks at your butthole. You go check your feet. You know, all the shit you do at MAPS. And I get to that last little room where I'm picking my MOS. And I'm telling him about my dad. And he's like, well, you know, there's an infantry slot open. And my dumbass goes, yeah, do that. Do that. And so I'm listed as an 11 Bravo. And that... In hindsight, I hate running.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Yet again, I'm doing something that I'm not going to be good at or capable of, trying to impress my dad.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I've always put an inordinate amount of pressure on myself to perform. Always. Today. I'm doing that right now, actually. Like the lead up to this, you can ask Jess. I was terrified to come in here. I always have just put a tremendous amount of pressure on myself. I think a lot of that is because I'm the oldest, but...
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
it's also because i had so much promise as a kid i had so much promise and my parents were so proud of me and they stopped looking at me like that you know and you wanted it back i wanted it back um i didn't want to be a piece of drunk but i knew that's what i was and um Not just a piece of shit drunk, but like one that put his mother in a position to have to kill her own grandchild.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And that just ate me alive. And I would drink at that problem nonstop, you know, all the way up to the time I swore in. So I picked 11 Bravo spot.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Here's where it gets... This is how retarded I was. I was on mental health medication then. I had no ACL. So when I got to MEPS, I lied about literally all of it. No, I've never done drugs. No, I've never been in drug rehab. No, I've never broken a bone. Dude, I've broken like nine, literally nine bones and torn two ligaments at that point in time. I'm raging alcoholic.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I'm just at MAPS, drunk, telling them, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. Because they'd coached me. My recruiter had done his job. Now, he'd done his job to get me that 97 Bravo spot that would have got me a signing bonus. And I probably would have done just fine if I had taken that slot. But me, being me, I had to manipulate everything and try to finagle my way in.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I'm convinced of that. You cannot change that. That instinct is the Spirit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Because when we looked at the beginning, he's like, well, I don't have any infantry spots. I forget what the deal was. So... I decided to buck the plan again. Sorry, you were asking.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I badly wanted it. My whole life— At the beginning, or did that become— No, I had always wanted that. I never wanted to do anything other than infantry my whole life. And yeah, part of that is because I watched my dad and I looked up to him, but the other part is because of the job itself. I mean, fuck. Why did you go to college?
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Well, I wanted to finish and go in as an officer because that was what dad did. And that was definitely, I wanted to do that because that was the example he set. But I changed my mind because it was peacetime up until that day. And I was like, well, I'll become a mechanical engineer. I'll do chemical engineering, go to med school. I didn't know what the fuck I wanted, man.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
just wanted something i wanted to be something that i could be proud of and that my parents be proud of um but after september 11th i think i started channeling a lot of my anger and rage that i felt at myself at outward they like the bad guys the people that attacked america and i have to do something about this it's my duty as an american i mean i come from
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I don't know how many generations in a row served, but pretty much all of them. Like back to the French Indian War in the 1750s or whatever that was. My family served in every conflict this country's had. And so I definitely felt a duty to do it. But like with so many other things, I get to the finish line and I decide to fuck it up on my own, you know, and buck the plan.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
So unless there's 11 Bravo, I get to... Fort Benning, and there's like a five-week wait or something at reception battalion. It was ridiculous because of how many people were enlisting right then. Oh, and I'm going through alcohol DTs. I was incredibly physically dependent on alcohol.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Oh, and by the way, I DC'd all of my mental health meds, which I may not have needed, but my body is now used to, and so I'm going through withdrawal from these things at the same time. And I don't have an ACL. So this is why I kind of went, some people say that Ben used to be an infantryman. Ben enlisted in the infantry, all right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I get like, I don't know, 10 or 11 weeks into OSIT at Fort Benning, and my knee completely goes out. I can't tell anybody because I lied about it. So I'm acting like this is a new injury, all right? I had vertical fractures on the outside of my tibia. And there's no cool story that goes along with this. We were literally running PT doing the sideways run, and it just, that was it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And so I get to medical. They confirm, yeah, you broke your leg. You're going to get recycled. I'm like, that's super terrible. That's awful. I don't want to do that. And I'm like, well, that's what's about to happen. And they put me on crutches, I think, and it wasn't getting any better. So they finally bring me back in and look at it again.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And this time it's an actual doc, not a PA that's looking at it. And she's like, you don't have an ACL, and that is not new, and you better tell me what's going on here. And so I told her. She threatened me with a JAG referral for lying at MEPS. So I ended up discharged from the Army, honorably, but no benefits whatsoever.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Yet another example of if I had just stayed with the plan, I would be at Fort Huachuca becoming a badass counterintelligence guy. But instead, Ben wanted to do what Ben thought would impress his parents and ended up fucking everything up. So I enlist after 9-11, before the summer of 2002 is up.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I'm walking off of Fort Benning in my civilian clothes, carrying my bag, no phone, depressed as hell, feeling like an absolute, utter failure. And I remember getting... to a gas station just off post and the first thing it was by beer it went right back to it that fast you know i hadn't had a drink in however many months that was and i'm right back on it and at what point did you call your dad
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
So I called him. You know, they had pay phones in the little barracks courtyard area, the company area. And so my parents had a 1-800 number, and they had for a very long time. I don't remember why. So I was able to call my parents pretty frequently. But when they sent me to the – what are the – The return home unit, or I can't remember what it was called.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Usually you languish in that thing for like six weeks because they're pissed at you. Because either you're a quitter, you lied, you fucked something up, you're getting kicked out. And I wasn't any of those things, but I felt all of those things. And somehow they cranked me out of there in one day. I was in and I was out the next day. So I called my granddaddy, my dad's dad.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Korean War vet, president of a community college, and told him what happened. He lived in Phoenix City at the time. So he came and picked me up. And I don't remember how I got back to Auburn, but I just wanted to crawl in the hall and fucking die. I was so ashamed of myself. And I carried that chip on my shoulder for a long time. Looking back now, like, dude, I tried.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
If I had just not lied about my injury and done what the waiver, because apparently ROTC doesn't talk to active duty. So they had no idea about the ACL. ROTC knew all about it. So, you know, I did my best. I raised my right hand and swore in and then went and tried and fucking failed like I had so many other things up to this point. And it all came back to the same stuff over and over.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Me manipulating my circumstances, trying to get the outcome I think I want. rather than seeking, you know, maybe what God's will would be in those circumstances. Ended up back at Auburn, and things escalated pretty quick after that. Real quick. When did your dad find out? A matter of days or hours from when it happened. Did you tell him? Did your granddad tell him? Yeah, I told him.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I don't remember. phone conversations at all i was blackout drunk but i mean dad obviously knew i had no acl and also knew i was insane for enlisting and saying i wasn't on any medication and all the other things so i think he probably figured that was going to happen right um
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And so they, you know, when they discharged me because it was due to a pre-existing, what do they call it, EPTS, existing prior to service, I had to wait two years and have proof that I fixed it before I could re-enlist. And so my plan, and obviously this got back to ROTC too, that this had happened. So now they're pissed at me too. My plan was to do,
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
do the two years of college that I had left or whatever, and then go back in, which was ridiculous to think about because none of my actions lined up with that being my plan following this. I went back to the apartment my parents had stopped paying for in Auburn and holed up alone with a ton of alcohol and firearms. You a football fan? No, I'm not. I'm not either.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
The reason I was asked is there's an Auburn player that lived diagonally above me who went to the NFL and was actually a pretty big deal now. I'm not going to name him, but I almost killed him by accident, drunk, with a pistol in my apartment. So Auburn Police Department came out and took all of my guns. That was my first interaction with the police since California.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
They didn't charge me with anything, but they put all my guns in a box and... What were you doing with the gun? So I had a party at my apartment. I had a whole bunch of people over, drunk as shit, and I had this little Glock 26 that was unloaded, and I was sitting on the island in my kitchen.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I went to the bathroom to get a beer or something, and I come back and I look at it, and the trigger's out. And you know on a Glock, when it's cocked, the trigger's out. So I thought somebody had just cocked my gun, and I went to decock it. Somebody had put a fucking mag in it and chambered it around. So, yes, it was absolutely negligent discharge.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I never should have pulled that trigger without checking the chamber. But I wasn't, like, just drunk playing with a gun. Except I was drunk playing with a gun, you know. It's a miracle I didn't kill anybody. The bullet went through my roof, through his wall, and exited right next to his head on the couch. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that was... It's a miracle that nobody died.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I mean, I could have gone to prison right then. I remember doing a lot of LSD in shrooms over the next month or two. And basically had a psychotic break, I guess. I don't know. I ended up going back home to my parents, that girl Rachel that I met at MEPS. What do you mean a psychotic break? It was like a constant state of panic. If you've ever had a panic attack, they last a few minutes usually.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
This lasted for four days, and no amount of alcohol would make it go away. Psychotic break is probably not the right word, but something happened, and it was after I ate 10 hits of acid in two days. What got you into the acid? Um, oddly enough, it was the kid that, that had the chambered the rest of that pistol. Um, I just wanted to change the way I felt and I would do anything I could.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
You know, I had, I had done acid previously in California. Um, uh, but never to that extent. Like I just ate a ton of it. And then we went picking shrooms. I mean, I lived right across from the, the Auburn veterinary college fields where they have their llamas or alpacas or something. We'd go pick shrooms and, I've always been fascinated by psychedelics. We could talk more about that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
But the timing, time frame on all this is a blur just because I was so fucked up, man. Completely out of my mind. My apartment looked like a hoarder lived in it. There was no carpet. You could see nothing but beer cans. And Eventually, you know, I got evicted. I don't remember that. But somehow I ended up back in Georgia.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And somehow Rachel, that girl from Destin that I met a year prior, ended up in Georgia and my parents with me. I don't remember how that happened.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
This part right here, I haven't. I probably should. I honestly haven't even thought about this time period in my life until today in a really long time. I hate talking about the fact that I failed at being in the infantry. I hate talking about the fact that I failed at being a college student. My life is a constant series of failures up to this point.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
So I haven't really put a whole lot of thought into it. I remember I spent a whole lot of time down in Destin after I got back from Fort Benning.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
um I remember driving that 67 Camaro down to Destin a lot I remember drinking in Destin a lot um so I really don't know how many of those gaps my parents could fill in because I wasn't we weren't talking during that time period I don't think I think that they knew the wheels were falling off the bus man you know and
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
My mom learned a long time ago sometimes that she's got to love me from a distance to preserve her own mental health, which I can completely understand. I was having a lot of health problems from my drinking, though. I was throwing up a lot of blood. I lost a whole lot of weight. You hear about college kids floating kegs and drinking a lot of beer, and that's very common. But I was next level.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
When I say I was drinking two or three cases a day, I really mean that. So like 72 beers in a day. Yeah. I would hazard a guess I was probably walking around at a constant 0.2 or 0.3 blood alcohol content.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
as you'll hear in a little bit my frame of reference for that's pretty good um i usually could tell what i was at um it was bad though uh i wanted to die i really did um and i just i knew if i kept drinking i would and so that that's what i was doing that was your plan that was the plan i was gonna drink myself to death um Somehow I ended up back in Georgia at my parents' house.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
My brother was there. Some of his friends from high school were there. And I guess I had just shown up at their house drunk as shit. And I don't remember what happened, but I'm sure I picked a fight because I used to do that. And my brother had had enough and my dad had had enough.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I don't remember what happened, but I remember waking up in jail the next day with black eyes like I'd had the hell beat out of me. And I was the one that went to jail because I'm sure I was the instigator, you know. So that's my first time going to jail. They charged me with, I guess, two counts of domestic battery because it was my dad and my brother.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And then one count of felony terrorist threat because apparently I said some really dumb shit to the police. Yeah. They dropped those. I had an order of no contact from my parents. Oh, I had... I don't know if you've wondered this, but I'm drinking a very large amount of alcohol. You're probably wondering how I was affording that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Somehow, I had gotten credit cards and had paid them just enough to where I had a $30,000 credit limit. And I literally ran up like 20 grand in alcohol. So... I bonded myself out of jail with my credit card. I don't even know if you can do that today. Like, I think that might take cash. I don't know. I should know this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Anyway, I bonded myself out of jail, and I, you know, my parents had taken my car because I got pulled over going like 120 miles an hour. With dope and guns in the car, too. Never got caught for that. I just remember that. Had that girl from Florida in the car with me, though. Anyway, they'd taken my car and sold it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
After I get arrested for that, you know, I'm banned from going to my parents' house. I've got an order of no contact with my parents, my brother, and my brother's friend. And I somehow convinced a car dealership to sell me a vehicle and finance it. A truck. It was a 98 GMC 4x4. And I convinced an apartment complex to lease me an apartment, a nice one. I had no income at all.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
21 years old. And of course, I had no way of paying for this apartment, so the clock was ticking. And I'm still drinking like a fish. I end up meeting this guy named Rod, I think was his name, who did gutter cleaning in the apartments, and he offered me a job. Then he tried to pay me in meth, which was weird, but I took it anyway.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And so now I'm addicted to meth, squatting in an apartment with a vehicle I'm not paying for. You know, a year prior, I had been at Fort Benning trying to become an infantryman, and a year prior to that, I was in college kicking ass. And now I'm squatting and addicted to meth and a raging alcohol. Oh, and I'm Adam Bond. It went south so fast, or it felt like it did.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
It's going south much faster as we get more into this. Somehow I even had internet in this apartment, and I somehow had a computer in this apartment. I don't remember how I got these things, but I had them, and I logged into, you remember AOL Instant Messenger?
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Okay, so... I log into an old AIM account and my ex-girlfriend from when I was 12 and 13 and then again 16 and 17 from Mississippi messages me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
No, same time frame, but it was a different girl. Okay. Me and this girl, her name's Erin. You know, we've known each other since we were 12. I went to the same church. She actually wrote me letters when I was locked up in rehab in California, in Utah. She'd stayed in touch with my mom and had just been kind of like a constant positive influence over the years.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
When I moved back to Alabama, 16 and 17, we dated long distance. And anyway, she messages me on AIM. And, uh, she's like, has this been? And I'm like, yeah. And she didn't believe me because apparently she'd been trying to message me and kept getting one of my crazy girlfriends. And, um, so I'm like, well, fucking call me. So I pick up the phone, call her.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And, uh, we talked for five minutes and she's like, well, look, I'm, I'm married, but I'm about to get divorced. Why don't you come up to North Carolina? And I'm sitting there thinking in the back of my head, this bitch has no idea what she's getting into. Good little church girl, right? And, uh, I ended up, my credit cards are all almost maxed out at this point, but the clock's ticking.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Like I'm about to be homeless and my truck's going to get repoed. And so I get the truck and I start driving to Charlotte, run out of gas, my credit card's declined. And I convinced somebody to fill my truck up with gas. I make it to Charlotte. Long story short, she's pregnant. What do you mean long story short? I went up there. We spent two nights together. I get back down to Atlanta.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And what do you look like at this point? Absolute dog shit. Shaved head. It's cut everywhere because I tried to shave it with a Bic razor. I was thin as shit. Still a raging alcoholic. I looked like death warmed over. And meth. Meth, yeah. And a meth addiction. And meth. Now, she had no idea about the meth or the alcohol, any of that. Even after you met her?
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Even after I met her, she just thought I was skinny, you know? You don't think she looked the other way? She could smell it on you? Well, so she knew I was drinking. She was drinking too then, right? So that was acceptable because she didn't see what happens when I don't drink. I get sick as shit. She also didn't see me drinking at 6 o'clock in the morning.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
So I was able to hide it for a couple days. Now I remember how I had the computer. I had gotten a job selling merchant services, credit card processing over the phone to somebody. And so somebody provided me a computer. We had a deal go through, so I had a couple thousand dollars.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I went and spent that time up there in Charlotte with her, came back to my apartment, and I'm trying to figure out how to afford everything, how to start rebuilding my life.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Went to like a Holiday Inn, and yeah, that's what we did. And I go back to Atlanta. And it lasted two days? Two days. That's it? That's it. What ended it? Well, I had to go back to Atlanta. Oh, okay. And so what actually ended it was she said she's getting divorced. Her husband didn't know that part yet.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
He's about to because like three weeks after I get back to Atlanta, she realizes she's pregnant. And there's no way it's his because they've been sleeping in different rooms and blah, blah, blah. So she has to tell him and then she has to tell me. I may have misrepresented it. I'm not actually in the middle of a divorce, but I'm going to be now. And I ended up moving to Charlotte.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Moved in with her and her sister. I quit drinking cold turkey. I quit meth the day I left Atlanta. I've never liked meth, ever. I did it because it was there. Well, mostly because God tried to pay me in meth and I wanted at least something for my labor. So anyway, I quit drinking cold turkey and it almost killed me. I got pancreatitis. I lost 40 pounds in a month.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And keep in mind, I'm already pretty thin. I didn't have that to lose. And I almost died. They didn't know what was wrong with me because I wasn't being truthful with any of the doctors about how much I drank. And when I would try to be, they would discount it. They're like, well, you're young. There's no way you can drink that much. And so, of course, I took that and banked that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
See, even the doctor says I can't drink that much. Just in case I want to start drinking again. But I got sober, and I stayed that way. Jackson, our oldest child, was born. Aaron files for divorce, and I get a job in Charlotte after I heal up, and I can eat and keep food down, and I'm gaining weight again. I get a job. How long did that take? I was bedridden for 30 days.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Yeah. Well, it took about 60 to fully recover from it, all in. But I couldn't get out of bed for 30 days. And I didn't realize this then, but— What does the girl think, that you can't get out of bed in 30 days? Well, she knew I had pancreatitis, and I'd gotten honest with her about the drinking, too. Why did you quit drinking? Because I knew I had a son coming. So that cleaned you up.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
That cleaned me up, yeah. I didn't want to be a piece of shit, and I didn't want to die anymore. I wanted to do right. And she was supportive? Oh, yeah. She knew when we got together, you know, because she'd been there through California and Utah. She knew I had battled addiction. And she knew I battled – well, she thought I was bipolar. We all thought I was bipolar still at the time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Why? I don't know. She never told you? She just—I was her one. I was her one. And— you know, from my perspective, I'd had nothing but crazy psychos all the way up to this point. And she like wants to have a family and cook me dinner and be sweet to me. And she doesn't, you know, get mad and hit me. And it was great from my perspective too. You know, it seemed great.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And so I quit drinking and we got through that. I got a job. She had a job. She was in school. Um, Now, are you talking to your parents at this point? I didn't talk to them the whole time I was sick. They didn't know where I was. They just knew that apartment. My mom came and saw me the night before I left and just sobbed because I looked so bad. When did the restraining order lift?
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
so that case got adjudicated they gave me diversion they dropped the felony terrorist threat and they gave me diversion which i completed uh through community service at the red cross in north carolina they let me move my probation up there um so it got deleted there's no criminal record associated with it like it's it's like it never happened as soon as i took that deal the restraining order was lifted but my parents and i had already been talking because after i moved to charlotte
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I didn't know this, but Lauren, Aaron's sister, had called my parents to say, you know, hey, just want you to know Ben's here. He's trying to get sober. He's alive.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Aaron's the girl. Lauren's her sister. So my parents knew where I was. I didn't know they knew that, but I thought I had just gone no contact. And that was my plan. I was going to go no contact until I could come back with something saying, here's what I've done. You know, I'm not a piece of shit, see? And so I was looking at getting back into school.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I was working this job as this guy who did electronics recycling. He was paying me like $7 an hour or something ridiculous. But... As I'm watching the way this business operates, I notice a lot of stuff goes in the dumpster that looks like it's probably valuable, like computer servers and hard disk drives and all sorts of stuff like this. I started talking to them about it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Come to find out the way their business operates, they do asset recovery. So if you lease, let's say you lease these lights and these microphones from somebody. Well, the person you lease them from is writing that off. And then when it's done with, they're supposed to throw it away. or give it to an electronics recycler. So the guy's explaining to me, all of this stuff's already paid for.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I don't give a shit. It's going in my dumpster. And I was like, well, could I list it on eBay and take a cut of it? And he's like, go ahead. Your idea's dumb, but go ahead. The idea was not dumb. I started, like, printing mine. It was going really well. And my parents decided that I had been doing good enough to go back to college, and they were going to help. We had a kid now.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And so I moved from— How did they feel about the kid? They were just overjoyed.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Not at first. But the fact that it was with Erin, and my parents have known Erin since she was a little girl. They know Erin's mom. They thought this is the turnaround Ben needed. And I did too. I really did. I think we all thought that the hopes were high. Let's put it that way. Ben finally has some stability.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I mean, I talked to Aaron a lot about it because it ate me alive, dude. It ate me alive for a long time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Probably should. It's one of those things that kind of blocked out until I started telling him my story, you know? It's just, it hurts. I can't go back and change that. Do you think you'll talk about it now? I think I need to. I think I need to. I think I needed to a long fucking time ago, too. How will you bring it up? Oh, I got a really good excuse now. Hey, Mom, guess what?
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
All that slip on the Sean Ryan show, we should talk about this before it airs. Yeah. I know, so I guess it wasn't entirely true. We did talk about it once and my mom told me that she went inside with Amber and Amber was much further along than she would have been if it was mine. Now I don't know if my mom told me that to make me feel better or to make herself feel better or if that's reality.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I doubt very much that Amber's alive for me to track down and find out. So I had forgotten that. We did talk about that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Oddly enough, that ex that I went nuts over hit me up on LinkedIn like two months ago. I guess it was a year ago. She said, hey, I'm getting divorced. What are you doing? I was like, I am not getting divorced, and you can get out of my fucking DMs. I've had a few exes pull that. It'll pop up, tell them they're getting divorced. Hell, even Aaron. Anyway.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
It does a lot. I used to get drunk about that a lot. But I think part of me was using it as an excuse. It does bother me. I can tell. But I would take any excuse I could just to not have to be responsible for my behavior. And I think we run into that with a lot of addicts and alcoholics, especially in the veteran community. And that's maybe a controversial topic.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
But I think in society's efforts to understand, especially what combat vets have gone through, we might have incentivized some of them to adopt a victim mentality.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
So the ATF 444 was a GCPSU, Afghan Special Police Unit, and we evacuated, well, we tried to evacuate some of them and failed, but we did get his brother to America, and he gave me the patch when we resettled him in Houston. Man, that's awesome. Yeah, so they were like the Tier 1 trained version of cops in Afghanistan. Do you have any more of those patches? The 444? Yeah. I don't. I don't.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Well, and I think for most people that would be okay, but when you're dealing with an addict or an alcoholic, victims don't recover. Victims die. And that's the stark truth. And so I don't know what the answer is to that, and that's a rabbit hole I just took us on, but it's a fact, man. You know, we're trying to get... Anyway. Keep going.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
We're trying to get vets who are battling alcoholism and addiction out of the gutter and to take responsibility for their lives. I'm going to preface this with I don't know what the answer is, but I do know what part of the problem is. And we have all of these veteran-specific recovery groups and these veteran-specific rehabs. These are great. Somebody's getting paid out the ass to make that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And the only way they stay open is if they keep convincing vets they're going to recover different and keep getting vets into their programs. Veterans, especially combat veterans, do need special treatment when it comes to certain things. You know, when you're talking about combat trauma, moral injury, yeah, yeah, that is something very niche and you need specific help from veterans with that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
But when we're talking about alcoholism and addiction, bro, you recover just like everybody else does. The same 12 steps that have worked for 90 years are going to work for you too. You just got to work them. And not everybody has to go through 12 steps. Plenty of people get sober without that stuff. But it's the ones that think that they're in the room, as we call it, terminally unique.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And it is terminal. If you think you're special and different than another addict or alcoholic, the chances of you being able to lean on their experience, strength, and hope to get better, it's cut infinitesimally small because you're nullifying their experience and thinking it can't help you just because they don't have some of the other experiences you have.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I don't know that I'm the right guy to take that conversation to the masses because I'm barely even a veteran. And I'm definitely not a combat veteran. But I'm just speaking from experience. We've seen this time and again with vets that want to hold on to that, what makes them special. And they are special. They're less than 1% of the population. They're special.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
But when it comes to getting off dope or putting down a bottle, no, you can't be special in that regard.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
The line gets blurred. And understandably so, but it's still there. And it's still a massive impediment to vets that are trying to get sober. They've got to shred that or shed the victim mentality. And it's hard. It's hard to tell somebody that. We're into trafficking survivors too. The same mentality and the same incentivization to maintain victimhood gets pushed on them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
We've been looking for some because I've lost this hat two or three times now and flipped out about it. And you found it? Found it, yeah. But I need to find some backup patches. So if I find one, I got you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Yep. And your identity becomes wrapped up in that. You lose sight of who you really are.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
When that role is over, you lose your entire sense of who you are.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I'm dumbfounded, honestly. Like, I thought I had a collection of some pretty cool shit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
But we do it to ourselves, though. We do it to ourselves. It's a self-imposed prison. Yeah. And once you realize that, you're free to redefine, you know, to identify, to find that thing that gives you purpose. How do you say his last name? Fetes? Chris Fetes? Fetes. Fetes. Chris Fetes. You and him had a great conversation about that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
about finding purpose in life after any of those roles that used to identify who we are. And that's really what it comes down to. And I've noticed that to be especially true for vets. So while I just had a rant about trying to get vets sober, I've got something positive to add to that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
You take a veteran who is struggling with alcoholism or addiction and you find them purpose, bro, they're going to change the world. I mean, fast, too. You've just got to help them find that purpose. Let's move on. All right. So we're in Charlotte, North Carolina. Aaron has had Jackson, my oldest child. I'm sober. I'm working. I've started up this side hustle on eBay that's going pretty good.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And my parents decide that, you know, since Ben's a father now and is getting married, Ben needs a college degree. And I was very excited to hear that. I don't know why my parents decided to show back up for me the way that they did, because I never in a million years could have expected this from them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
But they put us in a house in Huntsville, Alabama, and basically made sure all of our basic needs were covered. And I took out student loans, and Aaron and I both went to college. School went really well. I was working during school. I was kicking ass. 3.8 GPA. I'd switched to business because engineering, you know, with everything I had going on just wasn't going to happen.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I needed to graduate quick and get a job. And yet again, I decided to follow my dad's footsteps, surprise, surprise, and set my eyes on a job with Pfizer. Because I loved the life he'd been able to provide for us, you know, even though I didn't appreciate it at the time. So I wanted to go follow in his footsteps at Pfizer. kicking ass in business school.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
My granddaddy, the one that picked me up from Fort Benning, was, oddly enough, battling a myotrophic lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehrig's disease, and was nearing the end of his life with that. You know, it's always terminal. And it's very rare for somebody to get it at his age. He was in his 70s. And my grandmother, his wife of 50 years, had Alzheimer's, and they were both getting close to the end.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
That was one of the reasons we moved back to Alabama, was to be close to them. And I've always been extremely close to both of them, my grandparents. I mean, they were probably my two favorite people ever.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
um and uh grenadine died um he did get to meet jackson um and uh i started drinking again um and really what i did was kind of up i i said i was going to quit for a year let's walk it all the way back you started drinking again
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
There really is not a decision-making process involved in this one. You're sober for a year at this point? I was sober for a year. And I told Aaron and Lauren back in Charlotte that I was going to quit drinking for a year. This year has passed and now I have an excuse. My favorite person on earth just died. A normal person can drink over that. I'm a normal person now. You see?
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I put the alcohol down for a year voluntarily. That makes me normal. That was the fucked up thinking I was using. And I knew full well in the back of my mind I was not going to be able to maintain. Where did you go? Just a gas station right up the street. Yeah, yeah. I started drinking again. And oddly enough, I did hold it together. I mean, I was making all my classes.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
So, you know, I've got a nonprofit called We Fight Monsters, and a guy that we did a lot of stuff in the Afghan evac with, General David Hicks, he's got something like 3,600 hours in an A-10, and he gave me that barrel. If I remember correctly from his Kandahar deployment, it's shot out, which I think that was the most violent deployment he had. So it's ended some lives. Wow. Yeah. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
My kid was well taken care of. My yard was perfectly manicured at the house my parents were paying for. I was making it, you know, I was working two jobs sometimes. Over the breaks, I would work 12-hour shifts, seven days a week for 30 days straight in a factory, making good money, but drinking. And I'm,
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
My parents found out, I guess Aaron had told them, or maybe they found a beer bottle or something, I don't know, and just raised holy hell over the fact that I was drinking again. And I broke it down like, I don't see what the problem is. Look at all of what I'm doing despite the fact that I'm drinking. Like, what's the big deal? Obviously, my parents know what the big deal is.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I'm a raging alcoholic. It doesn't matter what I'm able to maintain. I'm only going to maintain that until I can't. And the day when I can't is going to come. It always does. Aaron ends up getting pregnant again. We're still in college. Jacob's on the way. And we had a huge blow up about my drinking. And so my petty response to that was like, fine, I'll quit for two years this time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And that's what I did. And so I put it back down. And Jacob was born. And life was great. I was going to college. I was doing really good. And then I get sick again. Like the pancreatitis had came back when I quit drinking or something. We couldn't figure it out. The doctors couldn't figure it out. I lose a shitload of weight. I...
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I end up going over to my parents' house in Georgia, and they take me to some specialist over there who figures out I have literally pickled my gallbladder. I drank an organ out of my body. So they removed the gallbladder in 2005 and then realized I'd done a lot of other damage to my GI tract with the drinking all the times I've been throwing up blood.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And so they do another operation called a Nissen procedure called which is supposed to be for reflux, but they were trying to undo damage I'd done. I was supposedly the youngest person in the state of Alabama to ever have that surgery done. But I'd stopped drinking. I'd had two abdominal surgeries, which are extremely painful.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And so they had me on a lot of pain pills, which I don't know that I was addicted to them, but I sure loved them. And I was taking, like, as prescribed. You know, I wasn't taking extra. But I definitely developed a taste for opiates during this time period. I ended up graduating college and get hired on Pfizer as a sales rep. They moved us to Memphis. That's how I ended up in Memphis.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
The drinking culture at Pfizer or really anywhere in corporate America, it's not a great place for an incognito alcoholic to be. And I was not doing meetings. I just stopped drinking, right? So, you know, it was just a matter of time. And it started pretty fast.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
right back to drinking every day, right back to drinking at 6 o'clock in the morning, to the point that they figured it out at Pfizer training and put me out on short-term disability for being an alcoholic. I'm like, that seems retarded. The way this works at Pfizer at the time, if you're on short-term disability, you still get paid and you're not allowed to work at all.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I thought that was the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life. I was excited to be working. I came out of Pfizer training with like one of the highest test scores ever. They hired me to sell pain management meds. And an inhaled insulin that ended up bombing a couple of years later. But I excelled in the training. Like all that medical love had come back.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
So that is one of, I think, seven. They got seven barrels, right? The GAU-8? I don't know. It's from the Big All Canyon. So when you call in Cass, that's what is shooting.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I've got a job explaining to doctors the pharmacokinetics of, you know, different drugs. And it was awesome. I wanted to work. And they wouldn't let me because I had this drinking problem. And we've just moved to Memphis. We're in a new city. We don't know anybody. And I did get to work a little bit out in the field and do my actual job before the chips all came falling down on this shit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I ended up getting, I want to say alcoholic psychosis, but it was worse than that, Wernicke-Korsakoff's. It's supposed to be permanent brain damage from the amount I was drinking. And it was so bad that the neurologist that was telling us about this told Erin that she needed to start taking videos of me and the kids so that I would remember them because pretty soon I'm not.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
My brain is turning into Swiss cheese from the amount of alcohol I'm consuming. And that if I ever drink again, I'm going to die. And I refused to accept that. I backed off of my drinking because I was having very bad memory problems. Very bad. Like, it was frightening, scaring the shit out of me. Like, I did believe the doctors that I might have the memory thing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I didn't believe I was going to die if I drank again. This was in early 2007. I'm not wanting to accept I'm an alcoholic. You know, outside looking in, bro, you were 25 years old or whatever I was, and you drank an organ out of your body. Like, that's a clue, you know? If you're any age and you drink until you're puking up blood, you're not a person that should drink.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
So, outside looking in, I think the whole world knows Ben's a raging alcoholic. Everybody but Ben accepts this. And I was still obsessed with the fact that, no, I'm just, I'm a real man. I can drink. And, um... We ended up at my parents' house. It's Easter Sunday of 2007. And they tried to do an intervention with me. And I wanted absolutely nothing to do with that at all.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
You know, got two kids in the house. I'd gotten off disability at this point and been in the field absolutely kicking ass, like overselling quotas left and right, setting sales records. Like, I deserve a goddamn drink. Y'all can fuck off. You know, I'm off to a hotter start than my dad was. That's the way I'm looking at this. And so I left the house real pissed off.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I hit Scottsboro, Alabama, going about 130, and the car flipped. single car accident, I was buckled, and my seat broke on the second or third flip, and I went out the rear windshield, going over 100 miles an hour. And I remember flying through the air, and I had time to cognitively think, I need to make sure I land on my feet.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And right about that time, my face hit the grass in the media, and I had road burn all over my head. I bounced, flipped end over end several times, I ended up breaking my pelvis in three places, which if you're not familiar with pelvic fractures, it's extremely dangerous. All your organs sit in your pelvis.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Oh, yeah. We brought you a humidor, too. We made it. Seriously? Yeah, so it's down there in a box next to that barrel. We opened up a wood shop in Memphis to teach homeless vets woodworking and gang members and anybody else coming off the streets. And so they made you a humidor out of black walnut and curly maple that was grown or felled and milled in Memphis.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
My left leg, the one that I'd screwed up in the army and in football, was completely demolished. Half of my tibia is now bone filler. They had to reconstruct the tibial plateau. Plate's in there. That's a few other broken bones. That was it for me. I got sober that day. And it would have stayed it if I had just done. This is 2007.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
If I had done in 2007 what they've been telling me to do since 1997, which is go to fucking meetings. Like, you're not special. This is a problem lots of people have. You go to these meetings, they make you better. If I'd have been willing to do that, I'd have stayed sober for me. It's your Sunday, 2007, and me and you wouldn't be sitting here right now. Um, I, uh, I decided to leave Pfizer.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I was going to do everything other than go to meetings, though. I was not going to drink. I even quit cigarettes. I quit every mental health medication they had me on. I was drunk when I wrecked the car. I was also on Klonopin, which was prescribed to me. I was also on Xanax, which was prescribed to me. Why I'm on both of those at the same time is beyond me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I'm on, like, 100 milligrams of Adderall a day. Like, I'm on all the dope. State Trooper saw how fucked up I was and was like, pretty sure you're taking some stuff you're not supposed to, but I'm not charging you, you know? And I was like, that's it. God just winked at me. I'm taking it. I'm taking it and I'm fixing my life. So I quit smoking cigarettes. I quit all the meds. And I got sober.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I decided to leave Pfizer because the drinking culture was too bad. And as good as I was doing there, I should be making a lot more money. And so I started looking into getting a job in medical device sales. And that ended up being exactly what I did. I got a job selling medical devices. I interviewed for several. One was in women's health space.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
One was in trauma selling the exact plate that was in my leg. And then cardiac is where I found my passion. So not a cardiovascular surgeon, but I'm getting to sell cardiac devices in the cath lab to cardiologists and electrophysiologists. I'm getting to nerd out on all this cool stuff. And I was making money hand over fist. I think I made like 230 that year at 25, 26 years old.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Like I was doing really good. And then we had a company-wide meeting in Chicago. And I hadn't, like Pfizer does all these functions. It's impossible to not be around everybody being drunk when you work at a pharmaceutical company. Medical advice is a little different. Territories are much more spread out. And so I hadn't been exposed to that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
We had the meeting in Chicago and I realized I'm in the same fucking environment I was at Pfizer. Except it's even worse. They were like harassing me for not drinking. And I ended up getting into it with our VP of sales, pretty big, pretty bad. And I was like, I can't, I can't stay here.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And that was just as well because they started telling us to commit Medicare fraud, change billing codes so they would cover our devices and some other stuff that I knew was extremely illegal. I asked a question, and they terminated me, which was fine because I wanted that to happen anyway.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Now, a few years later, they ended up getting fined, I think, $21 million by the Office of the Inspector General for exactly what I asked a question about. So, whatever. What was the question?
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
is it not Medicare fraud to change this diagnosis from palpitations to conduction delay unspecified, knowing full well that, yes, they mean the same thing, but Medicare will only pay for conduction delay unspecified, not palpitations. And I sent that in an email with those exact words. They knew I was firing shots at them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Like, I'm telling you, I know you are breaking federal law right now, and I'm not going to do it. And I want you to reply to this email and tell me in writing that you want me to do it. Two of us sent that email. My buddy actually... was the whistleblower that got a few million dollars when they got fined. I went back to that little side hustle I had because I wanted to start my own business.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I wanted to be self-employed. This is the only way in my mind I could stay sober the way Ben had to stay sober, which is I need to just work for myself and create my own culture at my job. And so I ended up – I ended up making a lot of eBay listings of some computer and server gear that I'd had laying around. But it's dawning on me. Like, I just went from making a lot of money to zero income.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
My wife is a stay-at-home mom. I have two kids. You know, I'm T-ball coach. I'm Cub Scout leader. Like, I got a lot of responsibilities and no money coming in. So I'm going through my garage trying to figure out what can I do, what can I do, what can I do? And there's a broken flat screen TV in my garage. I was like, I'm going to find a screen and fix that thing and sell it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Because this is back when a 37-inch TV was $2,000 or whatever they were. And I get on eBay and there's literally no screens for these TVs anywhere. And I'm like, well, that's weird. There's no aftermarket parts available. Me being me, always thinking of a hustle, I took the TV apart and listed all the parts on eBay for sale. It was working because I knew they worked.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
The only thing that was wrong with that TV was the screen was broken. Wake up the next day and there's 400 bucks in my PayPal account. I had sold every part out of that TV that was basically from a dumpster overnight. And so I went to a TV parts place in Memphis, a TV repair shop in Memphis, and asked them if I could buy broken screen TVs from them. And they're like, why would you want to do that?
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I told them, they're like, we need a new source for parts. That's a great idea. And so then next thing I know, I'm buying broken TVs from every repair shop in Memphis. I'm running ads on Craigslist and buying broken TVs. I started this business in my garage in 2009. That's when everything fell apart with the medical device companies, 2009.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And by 2011, I had a 7,500 square foot warehouse and a dozen employees. Wow. It grew quick, man. I had my first website built. I got on Shopify in 2010 or maybe 2009. They had like 34 employees and were renting space from somebody else. They didn't have their own office back then. You know, Shopify is massive now. And so... I stayed sober that whole time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I didn't even start smoking cigarettes again. I'm off all the mental health meds and I've realized there's nothing wrong with my brain. I'm just a high stress person that does have ADHD and high anxiety sometimes. But everything was going really good. My dad, well, let me back up. We had Lily. Aaron wanted to try again for a girl. And so we got her, Lily.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And Aaron is not great at taking medication on schedule. So birth control being one of those. A year after Lily was born, we had twin boys. So three kids in a year. But I don't care. I mean, I'm making good money. Everything's going good. I'm excited. My dad ended up getting cut from Pfizer a couple years before that. And he'd gone into business with one of his old buddies.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I guess they were having some financial problems. They moved into the house next door to us. My dad actually worked for me briefly. And I don't remember exactly when it was in 2011, but some stuff happened between my parents, and I don't want to get into it, but the whole holding my parents on a pedestal thing It kind of got ripped away. But you don't want to go into it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And the really bad part about that is that nothing bad happened. It went okay. And so me and Erin decided that, you know, maybe I wasn't an alcoholic after all because she'd missed drinking. You know, Erin's not an alcoholic. Like, she was a social drinker, and she missed it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
The next six months, you know, I'm enjoying my single malt scotch and smoking cigars and making crazy money at this TV parts business. You know, I'm on top of the world, dude. And then, I want to say it was like November, December of 2011, a leg starts acting up. The one that I got the plate in. And it swells up and it's like just nasty, gnarly looking.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I ended up having a methicillin-resistant staph infection that had recurred. Now this had happened before. It came back and it was really, really bad. Like they were talking about potentially I was gonna be an above-knee amputee if it moved anymore and I'm freaking the fuck out. They got me on a lot of pain medication. And I'm drinking again, you know, and that's not a good combination.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I wasn't abusing the pain medication, but I have a really high tolerance to opiates, and we've already established I'm bad about manipulating doctors. And so I convinced my doctor that I needed a lot more than I needed. And so I was physically addicted to prescribed pain pills. Which ones? Percocet. At first. Percocet at first.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Speaking of above-knee amputations, I actually had an amputee living on my couch at this point. He had come back from Iraq, lost a leg, and ended up addicted to oxycodone prescribed by the VA. We'd given him a job, got him off of our couch and moved him into the house next door to us. My parents had moved out. And he had been clean, like he went through rehab and he's rebuilding his life.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I'm being an absolute asshole at work. And I realize it's these fucking pain pills. And so I flushed him down the toilet and he saw me do it. And he looked at me like I was a crazy person. I was like, what? I literally just cussed out a guy that spent $90,000 with me in the last 18 months. I can't do this. And he goes, he just laughed. And then it hit me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I am physically addicted to these things, and I'm about to find out what it means to be dope sick. And sure as shit, I did. About eight hours later, I could not move. And then comes Sergeant Deaton with a little blue pill that he got from the VA, and that was the first time I ever took one of the 30-milligram Roxy's, and I was better like that. I say better.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I was addicted to something much, much stronger. So it started out with the prescribed pain pill habit, and it progressed to somebody else's prescription, and then it progressed even worse than that. To what? So I went back and forth with the pain pill addiction for probably all of 2012. It made me realize this drinking problem is getting worse quickly.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And so I went to rehab, detox, anyway, in Georgia. On your own accord? Oh, yeah. I wanted it, you know. But I still had this air of entitlement about me. You know, I own a business. I've housed a homeless veteran. I give them a job. You know, I only drink single malt scotch. You know, I'm bougie. And so I had to go to this expensive-ass place where Steve Rivon and Burt Reynolds got cleaned.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I wasn't going to file it on insurance either because I also have started up Black Rifle and Brushfire Tactical and these other tactical e-commerce brands. I don't want my name. I don't want anybody knowing I'm an alcoholic. You had already started all these other companies? 2012, yeah. I started those up on Shopify. This was before Shopify said you can't sell guns on here.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
So what was Black Rifle Co.? It was a gun e-commerce. So not actual firearms, just parts, accessories, and ammunition. Most of it was drop shipped. We would warehouse some of it and ship it out in just like their damn TV parts. And what was the other company? Brush Fire Tactical. We had several of them. We had two testicles tactical, which was hilarious. What did they sell? It was all the same.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Every brand sold the same stuff. I was playing with branding to see which one I can get to go viral.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Yeah, 100%. And the progression happened—sorry, I was so stuck on telling you about the drugs and alcohol, I forgot that part— At Retek, that was the name of the TV parts company. And it was doing really well, but I don't give a shit about TVs. I love firearms. I was trying to figure out how to spin this into firearms or muscle cars or something that I'm passionate about.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And so I discovered drop shipping. How many companies were you running? Like five at any given time. But they were all running out of the same thing. And the way I look at it, so even though they're different entities, the business model is very similar for all of them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Now, tactical and TV parts are different, because the TV parts, you're having to buy truckloads of broken televisions, literal 53-foot truckloads. A lot of labor goes into testing and stripping. But then after that, it's just pulling parts off of shelves, sticking them in boxes, shipping them to the right person. That second half is identical for the gun parts.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Pull a part off a shelf, stick it in a box, make sure it gets the right person. So I'm able to use the same labor as far as the fulfillment side goes. And we'd learned about drop shipping in the TV parts because you can drop ship electronics. That's where you're selling something you don't even have.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
You're buying it wholesale from a third-party warehouse who then ships it directly to your customer. It's super convenient. You take the margin, right? And so we'd gotten into that some on the electronic side of things. And then that was what we built, Black Rifle, Brushfire, Triple T, all of those brands around was the drop shipping model.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And it was really, I was just wanting to see on the branding side, like, and it was weird. All the products are the same. All the staff is the same. But there were, like, diehard customers of Triple T that would get into arguments on social media with customers from BlackRock. Like, it was hilarious. Like, it's all me. Like, what are you doing?
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Anyway, and it was weird because, like, I'd make prices higher on one and then lower on the other and watch it. I don't know. It was fun. It was like a game to me. But it went really well for a long time until, like, mid-2012. The drink was getting out of hand. And I was like, I'm going to pay cash out of pocket to go to this bougie place in Georgia where Burt Reynolds got sober.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I'm there six days. How well are you doing? Are you a millionaire? I had gotten a buyout offer that was over $2 million. I did not take it. I should have. I should have. I had over a million in inventory, well over a million in inventory. I bought a 68 GTO, restored it with the kids. We converted it to electronic fuel injection. It ran like a scalded dog, man. We had it cammed out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
It was such a badass car. How were you at being a dad? How was I with being a dad? So my kids had never, at this point, never seen me drunk. Not once. Never seen me smoke a cigarette. I'm still coaching T-ball. I'm coaching soccer. I'm leading Cub Scouts. I don't sleep much. Back then, I would be good on four or five hours. So I was like dad of the damn year.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Not just to my kids, but to other kids in the neighborhood, too. I was doing great outside looking in. Aaron knew the reality that I was really, really struggling.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
They actually never saw me drunk at this point. They never did. So when would you do it? All the time. But here's the thing. I would converse just like this without slurring or anything, legally drunk. So I take that back. They saw me drunk. They never saw me actually drunk. I was drinking all the time, but they wouldn't necessarily see me like they'd ever see me with a beer.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I was drinking scotch. And I was going through two bottles of McAllen 12 a day at this point. And it was getting bad fast, so there were like— How's your wife? Does your wife know this?
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Oh, yeah. And she knows it's getting out of hand again. What's she saying to you? like begging me to go get help, begging me to go to rehab. Can we please tell your parents? Can we please call your parents? Can we please tell your parents?
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
So after the kids go to bed... There is no more speaking without slurring. I am blacked out, like plastered after kids go to bed. I also can't get out of my bed in the morning without drinking because if I do, I'm puking up bile. So I have to have a drink just to get out of bed.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
But once I have that first drink, I'm just as normal as I am right now until I have too much, which doesn't usually happen until the kids go to bed. I do want to clarify, the only reason the kids never saw me sloppy is because Aaron shielded them from a lot of this. The woman deserves a fucking medal.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Like, she hid so much of this, which is a double-edged sword because in a couple years, it's going to catch them really off guard when I start getting in trouble. But she never let them see that. So they were very sheltered and shielded from it. So even though it was happening, they never saw it. But, I mean, I was pretty— And you're on opiates. Those were off and on.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
The infection came back two or three times, 2011, 12, and 13. And each time that it comes back, it's going to get worse. The drinking is an immediate problem because I'm puking up blood again. And so we finally did tell my parents. My mom came and got me, and she took me to this place in Georgia. I'm supposed to stay there for six weeks. The whole thing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I'm going to do medical detox, um, and stay for rehab, you know? Uh, and I've been to plenty of rehabs already up to this point. Like I skipped a few in here by accident. Um, before Aaron, this is going to be the first time I've gone since Aaron, since I had kids. Um, six days in Aaron calls and the business is falling apart. Nobody is able to run it without me there. Um, Which is 100% my fault.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I did not build a business that could exist in my absence. And I knew that. And part of it was fear because I was a control freak. And part of it was I was too busy drinking than teaching somebody to run it in my absence. So I leave detox. I completed detox. I leave without going to the rehab, which I knew was a bad idea. But I also didn't have a choice. I guess I had a choice.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I just made the wrong one. I left. I went back to work. And three days later, I walked into the ER at Babs East, puking out blood, talking probably more slurred. But according to them, I set the Tennessee Ambulatory State Record, Tennessee State Record for ambulatory BAC. I blew a .46, denying I'd been drinking. And I almost bled to death. Jeez.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
They were very afraid I had given myself something called esophageal varices, which is pretty much always fatal. You literally hemorrhage from your esophagus from drinking and die. I lost a lot of blood. Nine days in the ICU. And... I tried my best to get a handle on the drinking after that, but just not drinking. I still wasn't going to go to meetings. I don't need that shit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
The infection came back. I mean, my health was absolute trash. My inducible liver enzymes were like triple the upper limits than normal. I had some other blood work way off, and so the infection came back. back on the damn pain pills and Deaton has moved back to Maine. So my, my connection with the rocks is gone. Uh, I had an employee that I had recently hired who was out on bond for drug charges.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And, uh, obviously before I hired him asked what and why and all that. And I decided to give this guy a shot. None of my employees knew how bad things were with me. Um, Or how bad they had gotten with the pain pills. Obviously, they knew the drinking had gotten really bad because I was passed out in my office and shit. But I'd hid the pain pill thing from them pretty well.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
So, as long as they weren't spilling alcohol, they thought everything was good with Ben. I ended up buying pain pills off this dude. And it gets, like, really expensive. Like, I can't keep sneaking this much money out without Aaron noticing. And he... He ended up getting me heroin one day. And I hate needles, which sounds crazy because I'm covered in tattoos. I've gotten these since being clean.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And the first time he got it, I snorted it, and I did not get the feeling I wanted from it. And he shot me up.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
and then later that day i shot myself up and within a week i had a 600 day heroin habit he shot you up how did that conversation go i was like i hate needles so you gotta show me how to do this and he got my hand where i don't even have veins anymore but i used to have huge veins and he shot me up um and so that progressed very very quickly what did that feel like
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
You want me to give you an honest answer? Yeah. I felt like getting a hug from God. Like the most peaceful thing I've ever felt in my entire life. Instantly. Instantly. That void that I always have inside me that I've been trying to fill since I was 13 years old, that emptiness, it was gone in an instant. It was gone. It was warm. It just, it was euphoria.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I didn't need anything else after that. I had arrived. And the entire journey getting to this point, I had been trying to find ways to change the way I felt. And for the first time in my entire life, I didn't want to change the way I felt after I hit that. I was hooked immediately. Um, that was, uh, it was right around Halloween of 2013. And Erin knew something was wrong.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
She knew something was wrong. She didn't know what, um, Andrew ended up getting arrested again, and so I had to go meet the dope man to get my own heroin because I'm obviously physically addicted. I can't afford to be sick. And that's what took me to South Memphis. Old man Stan, this old 70-some-odd-year-old black dude that sells heroin in South Memphis.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And so I'm making, you know, two, three trips a day out there to buy dope. Yeah. But I kept telling myself, this is going to be the last time. How'd you meet him? Andrew took me to meet him right before he'd gotten arrested again. So I'd already met Stan. Now I'm approved to go to the Dope Man by myself. What's the neighborhood like? Oh, it's Altra Hood.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
If you've watched any of my videos online, that's South Memphis, man.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
so just to give you some context on south memphis uh the infant mortality rate is higher than most or many third world nations um it's one of the deadliest zip codes in the state of tennessee which is one of the deadliest cities in america um statistically young men in south memphis are and this one breaks my heart they're more likely to be dead or incarcerated than they are to have a job or be in school
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Now, I didn't know any of this when I first started going out there. And actually, I hated South Memphis for the longest time because of what it was doing to me. I wasn't looking at what I was doing to it. You just touched on it. I'm pumping that much money a day into the dope economy out there. I have harmed that community with the amount of money I spent out there with bad people.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I kept telling myself, like, this is it. I'm going to stop. And that's what I'm doing. That's like $200,000 a year. Stan told somebody he made $200,000. And it didn't last a year. Just off you. Just off me. Just off me. It didn't last a year. It lasted 10 months this time. I hated myself. I hated everything about myself. I wanted to die.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
But more than that, I wanted to get sober and be there for my kids. And so I punished myself. I had enough money. I could have bought ounces of heroin at a time. I was going through like two, three grams a day. I could have bought ounces at a time. And instead, I'm making three trips getting a gram at a time every day. I can't believe it took me as long as it did for me to get pulled over.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Like a white guy driving a brand new Tahoe or a brand new F-150 or a brand new, or not brand new, but a 68 GTO. Multiple times a day. Like, it's very clear what I'm going out there to do, you know? But I wouldn't buy a bunch at once because I kept telling myself, this is it. I'm going to quit. This is it. I'm going to quit. I'm going to taper off. I'm going to taper off.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
It's just insanity took over my thinking. Why did you want to quit? Why did I want to quit? Yeah. I never wanted to be on it to begin with. That one time I got that hug from God and I was hooked. Never had that feeling again. Never felt that good again, but I couldn't stop doing it. But it was taking me away from my kids because I'm spending an hour and a half a day or more driving.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Never happens again. Well, you constantly have to increase the amount of dope you're doing. You can get pretty close to it again or you can get it again. But it's taking more and more dope. The more dope you're adding, like, the chances you're going to kill yourself keeps climbing. You know what I mean? And so I got to the point where I was shooting a gram at a time sometimes.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I mean, that's, like, I don't know how I never OD'd. You never OD'd? Never. I've always had a really weirdly high tolerance to things. So...
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Yeah. Yeah, that I did. But I wanted to stop because it controlled every aspect of my life. I couldn't even sleep without getting dope sick. Did your wife know? Well, it started in Halloween. She figured it out end of June. How'd she figure it out? She found a box of syringes in the garage. I was not very good at hiding things. She'd known something was up.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I mean, like, our business is falling apart. I bounced payroll. That's never happened. I look like somebody coming out of a concentration camp. I looked like death. I weighed like 130 pounds maybe, you know. And I'm not drinking. So she knows it's not that. She knew something was up. She found that box of rigs that day and lost it on me. I've never seen her that upset in my whole life.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I hopped in the GTO and went to where I go for comfort. South Memphis. And, uh, I'd waited just to punish myself until I was good and dope sick. I wanted myself to suffer. I had this sick self-hatred because of the situation I'd created. Where did she go? To her dad's down in Mississippi. And, um, I'm going, I don't know, 70, 80 miles an hour down East Parkway in Memphis and I ran a red light.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I T-boned an F-350. And, uh, spun and I hit a light pole and the inside of the car burst into flames. I'm pinned underneath the steering wheel. My face hit the steering wheel so hard that my teeth, I had to pull my lip off of my teeth. Like they'd gone all the way through it. I've got bones sticking out of my foot and I'm engulfed in flames.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I had a fire extinguisher in the car for that exact scenario, should it ever happen, and I deployed it. Nothing happened. And I threw it out the window, which I guess alerted somebody that was out there that, hey, there's a live person still in that vehicle.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And this panhandler that I'd been giving money to for like the last two, three weeks every time I drove by runs over and gets me out of the car and runs over and gets, I had cash in the passenger seat, and he brought it to me. Like smoking bills. My pistol permit and my USA debit cards were in my pocket with my driver's license and all that. They melted. Like in my wallet, they melted.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I did not have a burn on my body. Wow. And nobody else saw this almost, dude. But he definitely was there. Like, yeah, I've always had people like, I was an angel. I'm like, I don't know. Because he gave me the money. I had it in my hand and I started with bones sticking out of my feet. There's rounds popping off in the backseat of my car because it's in flames and it was full of ammo.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I'm trying to hobble down the street to make it to the dope man's house because I'm like a mile away. The ambulance gets there. They tackle me. Take me to the hospital.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Still trying to get heroin. I'm still dope sick. Look, this is the thing. If you've never been dope sick, you don't understand it. You will do literally anything you have to do to prevent it. It is the most terrifying experience a human being can go through. both mentally and physically, but especially mentally. It's bad.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
It's just, when I think about that day, I understand women who sell their bodies to feed their addiction. I'm trying to walk down the street with my car in flames and bones sticking out of my foot to get my fix, you know. I ended up getting a, $35,000 insurance check for the GTO. All the evidence of everything bad I'd been doing burned in the car. So I got no trouble that day.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
You know, tons of awesome stuff. Some Title II stuff, sub guns, suppressors. And I'd started pawning my guns so that I could maintain my habit and try to keep the business from folding. And so when I got that check, I went and got a lot of guns out of Hawk, got them back. And obviously I bought a lot of drugs too. Geez.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Erin came back from her dad's after I totaled the car, but left again because I wasn't getting any better, you know? And I was trying everything I could to taper off of the heroin and do it on my own. And, you know, going to the firing range is one of the things I used to like to do to try to blow off steam. And so I think it was July 28th. I burned out of money, mostly.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I go to the warehouse with... I had a little fire range behind my warehouse, or inside the warehouse, it was long. I had a sub gun, two suppressors, like an AR and an AK maybe, and maybe a handgun. Then I went and blew off some steam, and I waited until I was dope sick again, because I refused to buy heroin until I was sick, because I'm trying to taper myself off of it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And so I'm trying to, you know, it's insane the way I was, but in my head, in my fucked up thinking, it made sense. And so I'm on my way home. I went and got dope. And I wouldn't let myself use it until I made it home. That was part of the punishment that I was doing to myself. I'm a mile from home, and I get lit up by the cops.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And I'm in a beat-up pickup truck with six grams of dope, a machine gun, and two silencers. And you would have thought they pulled over Pablo Escobar. The traffic stop moves from this gas station to my house because they feel they have cause to search my home. They think I'm selling machine guns. I'm running guns and dope for the cartel.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
One of the detectives came over and told me they'd talked to Fort Campbell and they know I'm a disgruntled veteran and I stole all of this. What are you fucking talking about? Like, the receipts are the shits of my house. I'm sick as hell, handcuffed in the back of the car. Our little cove, I had a house on the golf course. Like, outside looking in, I was doing great.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Our little cove had 30-some-odd vehicles in it from five different agencies before this was over. I had the DEA, Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, Shelby County, Memphis Police, and the ATF. I had showed the ATF how to read their own paperwork for my form, whatever it was, for my tax stamps, for the suppressors and the sub gun. And this goes on like 12 hours. I mean, it's hot as fuck.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
I'm in the middle of an asphalt cove, sitting in a cop car with no AC, handcuffed, dope sick, watching them come out of my house, taking my entire life savings in the form of firearms from me. One of the guys with the organized crime unit that was there told me early on in the day when this happened.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
It's like, if you're telling me the truth, and these are your guns, and this is your dope, we're going to work something out. And 12 hours later, they finally realized I'm not Pablo Escobar. Those are my guns. I legally hit every one of them, and I've never been in trouble in my life. So they take me down to...
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
It's a place off of Shelby Drive in Memphis where they're like, all right, here's the deal. We took all the shit from your house. You're not getting your guns back. 53 firearms I took from the house. You're going to snitch. You're going to go buy drugs, and we're going to watch everything. You're going to wear a wire or something. You're going to give us some drug dealers. I was like, sure.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And sure as shit, they took the handcuffs off and gave me my keys to my pickup truck. So I had no intentions of following through and snitching on anybody. I never wanted to go to South Memphis again. I get in my truck, I crank it, and I shut the door, and I feel something. And I know immediately what it is. They have left dope in my vehicle.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
And so my decision to never go to South Memphis again changed right then and there. I went right back to South Memphis. I bought more dope. But I'm not going to use it until I get home. It's now 9, 10, maybe 11 o'clock at night. I'm in the exact same spot I was earlier in the day, and blue lights were behind me. I get pulled over twice in the same day with the same amount of dope.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
This time they do take me to jail. And they hit me with, I don't even remember how many counts, It was absurd, like just wild. Possession with intent to manufacture, sell, and distribute for crack cocaine, for heroin. Sixth possession of a firearm during the commission of a dangerous felony.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
All in all, there were like 14 felony counts that they had gotten me on, which is ridiculous, like if I'm actually being honest, because I didn't commit a felony. I wasn't selling drugs. There is no dangerous felony. Whatever. I had drugs and guns. I'm not supposed to do that, I know. But I think my life's over at this point. They took me to jail, obviously. I had to call Erin, obviously.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
She filed for divorce, I think on her 10th anniversary while I was in jail, which I had that coming. I had destroyed that poor woman's life, you know. They end up, my dealer, old man Stanton, Comes and bonds me out because I had spent so much with him. He's convinced I'm going to continue to.
Shawn Ryan Show
#178 Ben Owen - Inside the Life of an Addict
Somehow they mixed up paperwork in jail and they let me out when they hadn't brought all the charges on the other case against me. And so I bonded out of jail and immediately had a felony warrant. for the first traffic stop. Apparently they only booked me in on the second one and forgot to add the first one. So they add those on and put out a felony warrant for me. And so I go on the run.