An excerpt from an article by Roll Call’s Rebecca Gale, “From Sex Worker to Hill Staffer“ 

“Drink a beer, smoke a joint. But lay off the crack, it will rot your teeth.”

That was the advice Natasha Guynes remembers receiving from her estranged father while she was high on crack and cocaine. At only 20 years old, Guynes had wanted to get as far away as possible from her family in Louisiana. Without any way to support herself, she turned to sex trafficking, and to self-medicating with drugs and alcohol.

At her low point, she realized that the advice her father had given her about laying off crack was “sick in itself,” said Guynes, whose drug and alcohol use landed her in a Washington, D.C., hospital over Thanksgiving weekend in 2001.

A week later, on Dec. 3 of that year, she entered a 12-step program, and this week, Guynes expects to mark her 14th year of sobriety. Since getting sober, she’s graduated from college, enrolled in a master’s program, and worked her way up the ladder as a staffer on Capitol Hill for Sens. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Ben Nelson, D-Neb. Now, she’s launching a nonprofit aimed at helping other young women.

Read the full story here.