Her journey through addiction and recovery came full circle in drug court

An unusual story came to our attention recently. It starts in a Pierce County courtroom, with a teenager struggling with addiction and ends, for now, in the same courtroom, with a recovering adult, and an entirely different outlook.

Cody Nagle is 38 years old. Born and raised in the Seattle area, she started running into trouble when she was a young teen.

“Now that I look back on it, I thought I was such an adult," Nagle said. "It started the same as I think most young people experimenting with drugs and alcohol, smoking cigarettes, marijuana. And for me, it became this alternative to feeling very uncomfortable with the way that I looked, and acted, especially in social situations.”

Then came Nagle's first of many run-ins with the justice system.

“Shortly after my 18th birthday was my first real arrest, and it was related to my substance use and trying to find funds to fuel that," she said. "After that first arrest and conviction, I had 20 more arrests between then and when I finally found a way to recovery.”

Nagle cycled in and out of the justice system, from the time she was 18 until she was 26. In the latter part of that period, she found a partner, and had a child, but still struggled with addiction. Then, this moment.

“I have this memory of being in the car with my son, and he was looking at my arms, and I was bleeding out of a, out of a wound that was caused by my injection drug use," she said. "He was, like, maybe 18 months old, and he was crying like, 'Mommy, you're hurt.' And I have this, like, vivid memory of that, thinking to myself, like, what am I doing? You think that your kids can't recognize this, but gosh, like he was. I'm sure he doesn't remember, but yeah, my toddler crying about my my wounds was a hard one for me.”

That was 12 years ago. Nagle tried multiple times to recover — as an inpatient and outpatient — but it hadn't worked. Then, she was arrested a final time.

“I remember these three days better than I should, withdrawing on the floor of this jail cell and thinking, 'What's going to happen to my son, what's going to happen with my home,' all of these things that suddenly I had to lose," she said. "Then the public defender came to me with this opportunity to do drug treatment court.”

Pierce County justice officials gave Nagle a choice: Stay in jail for as much as six years, or enter a court-supervised treatment program. Something clicked for Nagle. She chose the program.

“I had a lot of things in my life, from my attempts to find recovery in the past that probably impacted my ability to do it finally," she said. "I had had some small times of sobriety and recovery, and so I knew what that felt like. So my life looked different than it had in the past. In the past, I had suffered from homelessness and I had been basically on my own. I had nothing and no one that I was accountable to. This time, I had my son and my partner.”

Nagle walked across the street from the Pierce County Jail to the treatment program offices.

“The woman looked at me and said, 'You've been to inpatient treatment seven times. There is nothing they can teach you that you do not already know. At some point, the decision is yours,'" Nagle said. "I don't know that I had ever realized that before. To me, going to inpatient treatment was like, getting a little more sleep, getting a little more food. They were gonna, like, fix me. And instead, this woman was like, 'You could go run a treatment program. You know everything there is to know about your condition. Really it was like somebody looking at me and saying, 'No one can do this for you anymore. It's you.' And not only, you have to do it, but you can do it.”

Nagle said she was told if she failed, she would get the maximum jail time. Thankfully, she made it through the treatment program. She said she feels lucky to have made it through her struggles. She knows many people don't, and that she wouldn't have, without the love and support she had.

Nagle pulled out of her dangerous spin in a big way. In 2014, in a ceremony in Port Orchard, she married her partner Erik, who had been there through her recovery struggles. Erik is a Senior Chief Petty Officer in the U.S. Navy. The following year, the couple transferred to the naval base in Norfolk, Virginia. Cody says being part of a 12-step community helped with her recovery. She looked for work with employers who wouldn’t check her felony conviction record. She found it, and inspiration and encouragement, working as a secretary at a small law firm.

“It lit a fire for me, and I ended up meeting another young woman lawyer and becoming friends with her and she was like, 'You can do this. Law school is hard, but it's not impossible,'" she said. "It's not as hard as the things you've already done.”

Nagle pursued and received her undergrad degree online, then got into the Syracuse University College of Law, then got an internship at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, where she was later hired as a public engagement advisor. This past February, she passed the bar exam in Washington, D.C.

Nagle and her family want to move back to the Tacoma area in the near future, so she applied to become a member of the Washington State Bar Association. And here's where this part of her story comes full circle. Earlier this month, she went to the Pierce County Courthouse, raised her right hand, and was sworn in by Judge Ed Murphy, the same judge who presided over her drug court program:

“You can have a tremendous impact on people's lives if they're willing to let you in and make that change, and people are held accountable," Judge Murphy said. "Like Cody said, there was a counselor that had just told her, 'Look, you're at a point where you're either going to die or you're going to have to accept making some changes,' and that, for whatever reason, was the right time, the right message that clicked and got her going, and you just don't know when that's going to happen.”

Nagle was heading back to the East Coast the day after I met her. Before we said goodbye, I asked if she had any last comments. She paused, then said this:

“I just think it's important that people know that we can change, we can become what we maybe don't even know that we could become. And it's important that we don't give up on people that we think are hopeless. I think it's easy for people in the public, especially in Seattle, and seeing the kind of crisis that people are going through right now, as far as being unhoused or suffering from substance use disorder, whatever it is that they're going through, mental health crises, it's easy to be scared and angry when you're looking at that from the outside.”