written by Benjamin Hodges (B.A. ’08)
Minutes before, Allie Armbruster (J.D. ’20) had plunged a needle into a vein and pulled a pinch of blood into the barrel of a syringe. After it mingled with the solution of heroin she had just cooked up in the car, she pushed it back in, watching the murky maroon fluid disappear beneath her skin. Within seconds, the drug shot through her heart to her brain, and the rush knocked her out.
Someone called the cops after seeing the young couple slumped over in a parked car on a midtown Atlanta street in the middle of the day. But before police could restrain her, Allie grabbed her stash of Xanax, a popular prescription tranquilizer that enhances the effects of other substances. As the dog barked and the cops began to raid the car, she slammed about a dozen maximum-strength, immediate-release pills down her throat.
The cops were about to haul her over to Fulton County’s Rice Street jail for the second time in as many weeks when they realized she needed a trip to the hospital first.
Steeped in a potent cocktail of pills and opioids, she blacked out and has no memories of the next three days, including her hospitalization and bail hearing. She’s heard about what happened from others, though — a dazed and disheveled heap shuffling into the courtroom, eyes leaden and glassy, hair entangled in a knot behind her head, namedropping and mouthing off to the judge.
This was her fourth of five felony possession arrests, all stemming from the same problem: the inveterate disease of addiction that handcuffs, jail cells and rap sheets have rarely, if ever, cured.
Stereotypical narratives for addiction often focus on society’s less privileged: people from low-income, high-need communities with little to no education and long family histories of mental illness. But that’s not the whole story.
“Addiction can happen to anyone,” Allie says. “These drugs are so powerful. You can be the smartest person on the planet or the best looking or the richest or whatever, but they will take you down — and quickly. I had everything. It just doesn’t matter.”
Now a first-year law student with a merit scholarship and nearly three years clean, Allie lost everything, too, and clawed her way back from a life most of us can’t even imagine.
Nevertheless, she refuses to take credit for her incredible recovery. She says she’s studying law at Georgia State, and not doing time in prison, because of the people who supported her and gave her repeated opportunities to turn her life around — chances most addicts never get.
Allie grew up in Vinings, the wealthy south Cobb borough just inside the Perimeter, and went to high school at Pace Academy, one of the city’s most elite private institutions. Her father, Kevin, is a successful business attorney and a partner at a prominent Atlanta law firm with offices that overlook downtown from the 45th floor of a Peachtree Street skyscraper. Her mother, Belinda, stayed home to raise Allie and her siblings.
“I had a great childhood,” she says. “I have nothing to complain about.”
Absent poverty, a broken home and many of the other factors typically associated with drug abuse, Allie still found burdens and stressors in other places. Nerdy, awkward and skinny in high school, she struggled with her confidence under the strain of a high-achieving environment.
“When you grow up in that kind of setting, there can be a lot of pressure to be successful,” she says. “It’s sort of the flipside to growing up with a whole lot of privilege.”
To complicate things, the guy who most encouraged her to achieve was the same person she revered above everyone else: her dad.
“I wanted to be my dad when I was a kid,” she recalls. “I just adored him. He was my hero. But he also set a hard example to follow. He avoided saying so, but I knew deep down he wanted me to go to Princeton like he did. He coached my soccer and basketball teams. He stressed the importance of grades. I thought my performance in school and sports would determine my whole life. I constantly compared myself to other people and always felt I wasn’t good enough.”
Despite these doubts and fears, she shined through her junior year at Pace, where she discovered a love for literature, played varsity soccer and became the captain of the debate team. Her interests fit a career goal she’d been chasing since her earliest days: to follow her dad into the legal profession.
But a year and a half away from graduation, she started drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana when she discovered they calmed her anxieties and made her feel more comfortable in her own skin. While surveys of high school seniors in the U.S. show that about 33 percent use alcohol and about 23 percent use marijuana, Allie admits she indulged in them more than most.
“I already had an unhealthy relationship with substances — even then,” she says. “I thought they were fixing me emotionally and helping me to be social. I was already relying on them.”
Even though she still graduated cum laude from Pace, she had ramped up her drug use throughout her senior year, adding cocaine to her shortlist of preferred chemicals. As her apprehensions dissipated, so did her passions and ambitions. She changed all her friends. She stopped caring about grades and soccer and lost interest in debate.
“I think people knew what was going on,” she says. “I didn’t know they knew. But they knew.”
Growing more and more concerned for their daughter, Allie’s parents kept her on a short leash. They sent her to a therapist and a treatment program, but their efforts only put her drug use on a brief hold.
“I’ve always been a perfectionist to a huge fault — where failure scares me so much I don’t even want to do stuff,” she says. “But drugs allowed me to stop caring about being successful or perfect, and that was a huge relief. It was like a built-in excuse for not having to deal with myself anymore.”
And yet, she still made it to Princeton. There, instead of getting away from the habits she cultivated in Atlanta and experiencing all Princeton had to offer, she found some like-minded comrades with the same appetites.
“I didn’t see I had a problem because I rationalized that everybody else was doing it, too — and in my circle, they were,” she says. “It’s just that everybody else stopped, and I couldn’t.
“But that’s how addiction works. It sneaks up on you. All of a sudden, you realize, ‘Oh, I’m addicted,’ and you can’t even figure out how that could have happened because none of the steps leading up to it seemed like a problem. And then it’s too late.”
While she initially performed well at Princeton, she stopped attending class by the end of her junior year, and her grades tanked. Her addictions spiraling out of control, she fell into a deep depression. Then, with just seven classes left, she dropped out and made the long drive back to Atlanta.
“My dad stuck with me through all of this. He never gave up on me.”
A return to her old haunts. A steady grind of drink, smoke and blow. To keep her busy, a job with a roofing company, which she soon lost. To keep her company, a boy, who introduced her to heroin. A new habit of speedballing, the oft-lethal intravenous delivery of heroin and cocaine together — each drug complementing the other in an endless loop that has claimed countless lives. Eight years lost in the rubble of arrests, overdoses, jails and clinics.
Between 2008 and 2015, Allie overdosed four times, each requiring an emergency trip to the hospital to save her life. She got locked up six times, once for shoplifting to support her habit and the rest for possession. She did seven stints in rehab and saw the inside of nearly every halfway house in Atlanta.
“I was a crazy person, a sociopath,” she says. “There was no soul left. I was dead — not living, just existing.”
She hit rock bottom repeatedly, each time worse than the last. Her dad, Kevin, grew terrified of her and the company she kept. Her mom and stepdad bought a shotgun.
“Those years were a rollercoaster of hope, despair, worries and sleepless nights,” Kevin remembers.
“You end up doing things that are totally against your moral compass,” Allie says. “The stuff I did to keep this habit going — that’s not how I grew up and I don’t think it’s OK, but I was somehow able to justify it in my addiction. I never had any money. I had to steal all the time. Living like that sucks. It’s shameful and creates so much regret. It was hard to get past and come to terms with — the terrible stuff I did, the kind of person I was.”
And yet, it could have been so much worse.
After her first felony possession arrest, her boyfriend took the blame, and the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office dropped the charges and let her go. The boyfriend later died from an overdose, joining a tragic company of victims from Allie’s former life.
“All this death — it’s insane, and the worst part is I’m almost getting used to it,” she says. “Every time another person dies, I can’t help but think how it so easily could have been me.”
After another bust, Allie walked into her arraignment expecting a nasty sentence when the solicitor announced he was dropping the charges because of an illegal search. She got off with a pretrial diversion program following another arrest and first-offender probation another time after that — her run-in with the German Shepherd — despite her deranged behavior in the courtroom and the fact it was actually her fourth felony possession arrest.
Both sentences “dead docket” the cases, essentially suspending prosecution and releasing defendants from custody as long as they participate in supervision, go to treatment and stay out of trouble.
But in Allie’s case, it didn’t work out that way. No sooner had she walked out of jail on first-offender probation than she immediately drove back to the same midtown dealer and overdosed in her car. She had minutes to live when a fellow addict broke into her vehicle and used her phone to call for help. With paramedics coming to save her life, he ran off to pawn the phone — and then, months down the road, saw her again outside a familiar doorway.
“You’re Allie Armbruster. I saved your life,” he told her. It turns out they both shopped at the same dealer.
I think there’s a huge problem with punishing people who have a disease instead of giving them the option to get help. That being said ... I had to be locked up to get off heroin. I couldn’t do it by myself.
I think there’s a huge problem with punishing people who have a disease instead of giving them the option to get help. That being said ... I had to be locked up to get off heroin. I couldn’t do it by myself.
And then it happened: another felony arrest, this time in Cherokee County. With no lawyer and no one to bail her out — Kevin decided to stop bonding her out of jail after her first arrest — she earned a felony conviction and four months in the county lockup.
There, she detoxed in jail for the sixth and last time. Her fellow inmates watched her curl up into a ball and writhe around on the ground — arms clamped across her stomach, knees scraping against the concrete — and throw up in a metal toilet.
“I was in jail a long time — Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s,” she recalls. “When my parents came to see me, we had to talk on a telephone through a plexiglass window. It was hard on them.”
Kevin never missed a visit, though, and came to see her every week for four straight months. He mailed her books to keep her productive and occupied, too.
“My dad stuck with me through all of this,” Allie says. “He never gave up on me.”
Her parents’ decision to let Allie stay locked up played no small part in her recovery.
“Jail sounds hard, but it was easier than what we had all been living through for a long time,” Kevin says. “As strange as this may sound, I slept soundly for the first time in a long time knowing Allie was detoxed and safe.”
While conflicted about the idea of treating a public health crisis with police and penitentiaries, she realizes her time in jail gave her four months of forced abstinence from a drug that was quickly killing her. But for many opioid addicts, getting clean in jail is a death sentence. Once they’re released, they often return to their routine doses even though their time on the inside reset their tolerance. Many die within just two weeks of regaining their freedom.
“I think there’s a huge problem with punishing people who have a disease instead of giving them the option to get help,” she says. “That being said, going to jail for those four months got me off of heroin. In some instances, you have to separate addicts from their substance long enough for them to make up their mind they want treatment. I had to be locked up to get off heroin. I couldn’t do it by myself.”
She walked out of jail sober but not cured. Her parents made her get on Vivitrol, a medication that blocks the body’s opioid receptors, preventing addicts from getting high and helping them stay clean. She didn’t touch heroin for two years but soon returned to a steady diet of alcohol, Xanax, marijuana and cocaine.
After another trip to rehab, she curtailed those habits, too. But then, after months of sobriety, she thought she could safely go out for a drink, hoping her problems were behind her. She woke up at Piedmont Hospital days later following the worst overdose of her life.
“The person who called the ambulance said I was blue and foaming at the mouth, and the nurse at the hospital told me I was very lucky to be alive,” she recalls. “I have no idea how long I was out, but when I came out of it, I told myself, ‘I’m done, I’m so f---ing done. Either I’m going to get my life together, or I’m going to die.’”
While she’d made some progress and sustained brief periods of sobriety, nothing had been able to pull her fully out of the throes of addiction.
All that changed, however, when she started going to Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) meetings in October 2015. She got a sponsor. She worked through the 12 steps. She started practicing yoga, mindfulness and meditation.
“It’s just a straight-up miracle I’m still alive,” she says. “I have no other way to explain how I ended up getting sober because, of my own accord, I would have used heroin until I died.”
She enrolled at Oglethorpe University in 2015 and graduated summa cum laude two years later with a degree in English. Returning to a project she had started at Princeton, she wrote her undergraduate thesis on the collapse of the American Beat movement, which she attributed to the writers’ unsustainable reliance on drugs as a shortcut to the self-awareness and “beatific experiences” they sought to find.
“Going back to school was so crucial to my sobriety because it gave me something to be proud of again,” she says.
Sound, sober and with a degree in tow, she could finally return to her childhood dream, the courtroom. But to do that, she’d have to stare down her past again — all of it. Law schools tend to vet their future lawyers for legal troubles. With every application, she had to include her seven-page rap sheet and address her criminal history in her personal statement.
“Sending out those law school applications was one of the scariest moments I’ve had in sobriety,” she says. “They don’t have a whole lot of felons who come through law school.”
While other law schools waitlisted the girl with a 3.92 grade point average, stellar LSAT scores and a long criminal record, Georgia State was willing to take a chance on her.
The university didn’t just let her in, though. They also awarded her a Catherine C. Henson Law Scholarship, good for $1,500 a year until she graduates.
The subject can make her emotional — and for good reason.
“I love this school,” she says, eyes welling and voice cracking. “I don’t have to hide from my past anymore, and that’s been the biggest relief of my life.”
Unsurprisingly, she’s done nothing but excel. She just wrapped up her first year in May and earned the highest grade in Timothy Lytton’s torts class last fall. A Distinguished University Professor and the associate dean for research and faculty development at the College of Law, Lytton thinks Allie has a lot to offer.
“Allie’s struggle to recover from addiction has given her knowledge, wisdom and extraordinary resilience,” says Lytton. “She’s got our strong support. We’re already proud of her.”
Despite her longstanding desire to practice law, Allie didn’t know exactly what she wanted to accomplish with her career until going through recovery.
That hard work — doing the steps in A.A., getting sober, learning how to be an adult and reintegrating with society — led her to find purpose in her calling. Informed by her scrapes with judges and jails as a down-and-out addict, she wants to become a criminal defense litigator who can work to transform the prevailing mindset about addiction — and save lives.
“I feel like I’m in an amazing position because I’ll be able to talk to lawmakers and authorities as both a lawyer and an addict in recovery,” Allie says. “This is personal for me because I was given a lot of chances most addicts never get and was ultimately able to get treatment and turn my life around. I want other people like me who suffer from addiction to have the chance to do what I’m doing. That’s why I want to be a lawyer.”
Determined to be part of the solution no matter what, Allie has found allies among Georgia State Law alumni, such as Shawn Ellen LaGrua (J.D. ’87), a Fulton County Superior Court judge who founded a novel probation program called “My Journey Matters.” Providing supervision, counseling, job training and education in lieu of incarceration, LaGrua intervenes in the lives of young offenders to steer them away from crime and shepherd them through the process of becoming productive members of society.
Introduced to Allie by another Georgia State Law alum, LaGrua found her story inspiring and asked her to speak to a packed courtroom of My Journey Matters participants, mostly minors.
Though she had little time to prepare, Allie was ready to address LaGrua’s court before she approached the bench. Because, even as she was finishing up a rigorous first year of law school, Allie had returned to Pace Academy just weeks before to deliver a 45-minute speech to the entire high school: 450 students plus teachers, administrators and more.
It was her idea, but she still had misgivings.
“I speak pretty frequently, but talking to teenagers is still the scariest thing,” she says. “I’m just about the lamest person ever to come tell them to be sober. But I think it went really well.”
Sara Eden, a counselor at Pace, can confirm — partly because of the standing ovation and partly because of how many students came up to her afterwards to say how deeply Allie’s address had affected them.
“We’ve had dozens of ‘don’t do drugs’ assemblies here, many of them given by former addicts, but this one struck a chord,” Eden says. “The auditorium was completely silent. The students hung on every word.”
Her testimony moved someone else in the audience, too: a friend of Pace named Tom Johnson, the former CEO of CNN and publisher of the Los Angeles Times, who’s active in the fight against addiction.
“It was the most powerful speech I’ve ever heard, and that is no exaggeration,” says Johnson. “Many people were wiping tears from their eyes as she told her story. I sure was.”
Allie got off probation in February 2017. She has two years of law school left. She’ll be able to apply for a pardon to expunge her felony convictions and restore her civil rights around the same time she takes the bar exam.
When she sits for that test, she won’t just have a solid law education to rely on. She’ll be able to draw from, once again, those invaluable skills her recovery has taught her: communication, collaboration, persistence, accountability, self-awareness. Every time she uses them to clear another hurdle, she’s reminded why she’s doing all this — because few, if any, have ever picked up those qualities in a jail cell.
“My recovery allowed me to build character,” she says, “and more people need the opportunity to go through that experience, too — in the hope that, given the chance to recover, they won’t go back to prison or die.”
Given her intellect and diligence, her biggest challenge probably won’t be passing the written portion of the exam. Rather, it’ll be clearing the State Bar of Georgia’s Character and Fitness Committee, which will evaluate and investigate every aspect of her life to make sure she’s still sober and is who she claims to be. Even though she’s come so far, there’s still no guarantee she’ll make the cut.
She’s been expecting this. As soon as she made the commitment to get clean nearly three years ago, Allie started taking frequent, voluntary drug tests so she’d have a thick file of maintained sobriety to present to anyone should the question ever arise.
“When you set up voluntary drug tests for yourself, you’re creating a system that will catch you and alert others if you relapse,” she explains. “I’m terrified of relapsing. If I don’t stay sober, I will lose everything, and I’ll probably die. These are pretty high stakes for me.”
For Allie, the hardest part of law school isn’t the heavy workload. It’s balancing those arduous classes with her equally demanding and time-consuming commitment to stay sober. Bolstered by the people who saw her through when she was at her worst, however, she’s up for the challenge.
“If I ever feel discombobulated or like my life is in total upheaval, I know I have people who helped me before and will do it again,” she says. “I know my support system is in place, I know it’s going to work and I know I’m going to be OK.”
Few people could ever brave such a crucible and then find a way to draw inspiration from it. Tom Johnson sees that, too.
“I so admire those at Georgia State who reviewed her record, saw her extraordinary potential and accepted her,” he says. “Not many law schools would have the courage and wisdom to admit a person with Allie’s past mistakes. I predict she’ll influence thousands in a positive and constructive way.”
As she hoists her enormous black backpack bulging with books and heads off to study, contracts and civil procedure aren’t the only things on her mind.
She’s also thinking about how far her path will take her — the lives at stake, the systems that have to change, the law school scholarship she hopes to fund one day for addicts in recovery like herself.
“Being here — this is what I’ve always wanted, but I thought I’d lost the ability to do it when I was getting high and going to jail,” she says. “I’m so happy to be back.”
Photos by Gregory Miller