There is plenty that Timothy Fair doesn’t remember about his time as a drug addict, but there are some memories the 39-year-old criminal defense attorney will never forget.

Like hitting rock bottom.

It was around 3 a.m. and Fair was sitting alone on the bathroom floor of his apartment in Stowe trying to inject cocaine. The needle was old and dull. He was having trouble hitting the vein.

“There was blood spatters all over the wall, and I’m completely out of my mind, just trying to get it in, trying to get high. That I can say was the lowest point of my life,” Fair recalled.

Fair is a gregarious 6 feet 5 and solidly built. His size and commanding voice are assets to his clients in the courtroom. When he talks about coke addiction, he is direct and unflinching. He peppers his remarks with a rueful chuckle as though still marveling at how his life has turned around.

It almost went the other direction.

Several months before that night on his bathroom floor, Fair was arrested with 42 grams of cocaine in South Burlington. It was 2004. He thought for sure his life was over, and his drug use spiked.

But Fair caught a lucky break. And now, clean for a decade, his improbable path to becoming an attorney helps guide how he practices law and has made him an advocate for criminal justice reform.

A year before his arrest, Fair’s life was on a wildly different trajectory than being a drug addict or a lawyer. He was a professional skydiver spending winters in Arizona or Florida and summers in Vermont. He began as a parachute packer, learning the ropes and accumulating jumps. He worked his way up to be an instructor.

In the winter of 2003 he badly dislocated his shoulder 6,000 feet above Zephyrhills, Florida. It quickly became clear the injury would prevent him from skydiving again. Fair was devastated. He was nearing his 30s, and skydiving — his career and the animating force in his life — had been wrenched away.

That setback happened to coincide with the ready availability of very cheap, very pure cocaine, Fair said. A friend gave him a taste, and Fair was hooked.

“I liked it. I liked it so much I developed quite a habit down in Florida,” he said. Fair moved back to Vermont with a woman he was dating at the time, who he said was also addicted to cocaine.

“We came back, and we spiraled down,” he said.

Fair was living in Montpelier, trying to complete an undergraduate degree at Woodbury College, but he was leading a dual life. As a student he was selected to serve as a representative on the school’s board of trustees. At the same time, he recalls snorting lines of coke in his car before going to trustees meetings.

It was around that time he began smoking cocaine, which he said quickly led to cooking and injecting it. He split with the woman he was seeing from Florida, but fell right into a relationship with another hard-core drug user.

Fair dropped out of school and began what he described as a “horrible co-dependent relationship” that revolved around their addiction. He kept telling himself he would quit, but the time to quit was always next month.

He dabbled with heroin, but said it was never really his thing. Fair preferred the uppers — cocaine and amphetamines.

During that period, he recalls overdosing on cocaine at least four times: blacking out after ingesting too much, only to wake up to the people he was getting high with freaking out around him.

“I’m very lucky to be alive,” he said. “If I hadn’t been arrested in 2004 I’d probably be dead. I have very little doubt about it.”

After being arrested with the 42 grams, Fair thought he would be going to jail for a long time. He was charged with felony cocaine possession with intent to distribute.

As a child who liked to argue, Fair always dreamed of being a lawyer. It was an aspiration that remained in the back of his mind, even as action sports and, later, addiction made the law a remote proposition.

A felony conviction almost certainly would have precluded any future as an attorney.

“Instead, Judge Linda Levitt and the criminal justice system gave me one last chance,” Fair recalled. The state dropped the felony to three consecutive misdemeanors for possession of cocaine. He would serve only six weeks in prison.

“If my skin had been brown or black — I think about this a lot because it’s been a decade — I would probably just be getting out of jail now,” Fair said.

As evidence, he points to the recently overturned conviction of Shamel Alexander, a black man from New York City arrested in Bennington with 11 grams of heroin. Alexander, who like Fair was a first-time offender, was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Three years into his sentence, Alexander’s conviction was overturned by the Vermont Supreme Court because the justices found the traffic stop that led to his arrest was unjustified.

There were extenuating circumstances in Fair’s case. The investigation showed he was holding the drugs for someone else. But for Fair, who is also from New York City — and had nearly four times the quantity of drugs — the divergence between his sentence and Alexander’s is glaring.

“To say there’s no disparity in sentencing, it’s absurd,” Fair said.