Fighting Addiction, Pushing Prison Reform

Despite having lived a drug-addled, crime-filled, oft-imprisoned life, the truth of which most would try to hide, Ryan Leone is an open book. The 32-year-old, who was born in Boston but raised in Santa Barbara from age 3, struggled with learning disabilities in elementary school and started smoking pot with his skateboarder buds at 9 years old. By the time he was a first-year at Santa Barbara High, he was drinking every day, dropping acid regularly, having sex with older girls, and had been kicked out of school so many times he was sent to hardcore wilderness programs in Idaho and Utah. “I was just a bad kid,” said Leone, who wrote his book, Wasting Talent, in 2013 while doing a stint behind bars for his part in an international heroin ring. He is hosting a prison-reform fundraising night at the Lobero on December 4.

[UPDATE: According to the Lobero Theater, Monday’s event has been postponed.]

Those wilderness camps didn’t help. When he returned to Santa Barbara, the 16-year-old was snorting cocaine within two weeks, a full-blown addict and dealer by his junior year at S.B. High. Then he smoked black tar heroin with an older girlfriend who lived in Isla Vista, and things really went downhill ​— ​more expulsions, a week at an orphanage, back to Utah (the first ever to return, he claimed), and then, with GED in hand, off to a writing program in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he said he was forced to shoot up heroin for the first time by a paranoid drug dealer. “I had a needle phobia at the time, but with the gun pointed at me, I put my arm out and he pricked me with it,” said Leone. “That was a very life-changing event for me.” His deepening addiction led to homelessness, and soon he was in his first of more than 20 stints in rehab, paid for by his supportive yet freaked-out parents. “They spent half a million dollars on me,” he said.