Ken Clowes, community initiatives assistant at Butler County Community College, welcomes everyone to the Growing Hope edition of Hope Nights at the Butler Art Center in March 2022. People in the recovery community learned about the mental and physical benefits of gardening and made windowsill greenhouses to grow their own lettuce and parsley. Butler Eagle File Photo

JOSEPH RESSLER

Learning about the brain and its chemistry helped Ken Clowes overcome his drug addiction, and now, he wants to share that knowledge with other people.

He said that by understanding the science behind why certain drugs have addictive properties and effects on the brain helped him learn of other ways he could activate those chemicals and escape addiction.

“Having an understanding of what was going on in my brain and when I quit ... it was a light bulb moment,” said Clowes, who is the Community Initiatives Center assistant at Butler County Community College. “’Oh, that's why I'm stuck.’ We talk about dopamine, endorphins, all the things that drugs work on in the brain.”