12/05/2025
Many thanks to our friend and former participant Ricky Austin for reflecting on his story with us. We love hearing about your recovery, job, and hopes for the future. We truly admire your perseverance and drive.
In one of Ricky Austin’s earliest memories, he wakes up in his family’s Baltimore home and sees the adults in his life using illegal narcotics, “shooting drugs in their neck.”
“I laid back down so nobody could see me,” he recalls.
Ricky, now 53, says he first tried co***ne when he was 13 and “Time went so fast. I look up again, and I was 17 and a full-blown ju@*ie,” he says. “By the time I was 19, all bets were off. I was done. I was strung out. That was it.”
But it wasn’t. Ricky learned about Prevention Point Philadelphia (PPP) when he moved to the city from Baltimore six years ago. First he utilized PPP’s HIV prevention supplies services program. Then he sought out the organization when the weather was frigid and living on the street was unbearable without relief. Then, after a lifetime of addiction, he asked PPP for help getting into recovery.
He became a PPP regular, going to its clinic for “the regimen of medicine that I needed. And they made it so easy.”
“It was a blessing to be able to come down here in the morning, when they open, and someone would be here. Where else do they do that?” he muses. “That’s selflessness, that’s unconditional love that you don’t see everywhere.”
Today Ricky is celebrating four years of sobriety. He lives in a recovery home, and he has a job he enjoys and much love for the organization that helped him get to where he is now.
“Everybody needs a Prevention Point in their life. Everybody,” Ricky says. “Every city, it should be mandated they have a Prevention Point. It really, really should.”
In one of Ricky Austin’s earliest memories, he wakes up in his family’s Baltimore home and sees the adults in his life using illegal narcotics, “shooting drugs in their neck.”&n
