What happens when someone who spent years deep in addiction finally turns their life around—and starts speaking out about the very policies they believe are making the crisis worse?
In this powerful Sundays With Seegers podcast-only episode, County Commissioner candidate Jake Seegers sits down with Port Angeles community advocate and entrepreneur David Rogers for one of the most candid conversations yet about addiction, recovery, public safety, and the failures of modern harm reduction policies.
“If I can start feeling happy inside a jail cell, what would my life be like outside if I wasn’t on drugs?”
Rogers doesn’t speak as an outsider. He openly discusses years of addiction, arrests, jail time, treatment programs, and the shame that ultimately pushed him to change his life. “Most of the people I know who are clean ended up arrested,” Rogers says during the interview, arguing that consequences—not endless enabling—often became the turning point for recovery.
Now nine years into recovery, Rogers is a husband, father of three daughters, business owner, mushroom farmer, and founder of the Olympic Peninsula Fungi Festival—a wildly successful event that brings thousands of visitors to Port Angeles during the shoulder season.
The festival has grown into the largest mushroom festival in the Pacific Northwest, featuring workshops, excursions, live music, cooking classes, vendors, camping, and a celebrated culinary mushroom feast.
But the heart of this episode is Rogers’ blunt assessment of today’s addiction policies. “I don’t think that should be something that we should be making easy,” Rogers says about open-air addiction and public drug use. “There needs to be consequences because those consequences start to make you reconsider your actions.”
From shocking stories about public drug use near the courthouse to deeply personal reflections about recovery, treatment, and rebuilding a life, this is a conversation that will challenge assumptions—and leave listeners thinking long after it ends.
