Terry Scott
Terry Scott is the head counselor at Stay Free counseling services.
By Ebony Bailey
After being subject to abuse when she was younger, Terry Scott began to turn her life around when she became a certified drug and alcohol counselor in 1995. Since she started counseling, she’s had thousands of clients from Southern California.
She is currently the head counselor at Stay Free counselor services, a non-profit that provides counseling services to youth and adults seeking treatment.
“I had a little of issues that I had to work through,” she said. “So once I got my life together, I felt that I needed to give back.”
Scott says that recently there has been an influx of treatment seekers from people of her generation -- the baby boomers. While growing up, several of the baby boomers in the area had parents who were subject to drug abuse, she said. This in turn promoted drug abuse among the boomers themselves.
“Now more of us are trying to get our lives back together,” she said.
Growing up in South Central, Scott has noticed a lot of changes in terms of the types of drugs people were addicted to.
In the 1970s, with the mass amounts of drugs flooding into the area, many people were subject to drug addiction, and most of the addicts were on heroin and crack cocaine.
“People got violent from Heroin and Cocaine addictions,” she said. “The robbed, they stole, and they killed.”
She says that the addiction has shifted from heroine and cocaine to marijuana in recent years. The fewer addictions to heroine and cocaine in the area has resulted in less violence, Scott said.
“There are more gangs now because there are more people,” Scott said. “But there is definitely less violence.”
The site: