Local woman tells tale of her struggle to kick heroin habit - NashuaTelegraph.com

Local woman tells tale of her struggle to kick heroin habit - NashuaTelegraph.com

Sunday, January 9, 2011
Local woman tells tale of her struggle to kick heroin habit
By JOSEPH G. COTE
Staff Writer
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heroin-related deaths
Nashua Police Lt. Scott Hammond said it’s often difficult to prosecute heroin dealers when their customers overdose or die on bad heroin because those customers almost always have other drugs in their systems, making it impossible to pinpoint heroin as the cause of death. That also makes it difficult to estimate how many people in the city have died because of heroin, but police have investigated 13 heroin-related deaths in the past three years, Hammond said. Here’s the breakdown.
2008: 4.
2009: 3.
2010: 6.
Stacy wanted to die, but the dope never stops calling.
During each of her half dozen daily drug runs to Lawrence, Mass., every time she used someone else’s needle despite what diseases they may have had, through all the tearful phone calls to her mother and bouts of “dope sick,” Stacy just wanted it to stop.
“At that point, I wanted to die. Every needle, I hoped for it,” the 20-year-old Hudson resident said in October, barely a month removed from her last shot in a 7-Eleven bathroom on the way to rehab.
Among so-called hard drugs, there are four substances that are used most in the Nashua region, according to experts: cocaine, crack cocaine, Oxycodone and heroin. While heroin isn’t the most popular among those – cocaine still holds that dubious honor – heroin is regarded as the most dangerous.
Police have investigated 13 “heroin-related” deaths in the last three years, a scary number in a city of Nashua’s size that are at least partially attributed to a single drug.
“Heroin has been on the increase in our area in the last few years,” Nashua Police Lt. Scott Hammond said. “I think it still falls below cocaine, but the difference is the danger. It’s totally different than coke.”
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Stacy’s downward spiral, a brief and delicate recovery, and finally a relapse, was swift.
She grew up one of four kids in a fairly wealthy Hudson home. Her childhood was largely normal – lots of family vacations, good grades in school.
Stacy first tried marijuana during her sophomore year in high school. The debate about whether weed is a “gateway drug” will rage on, but for Stacy’s mother, the answer is clear. The drug opened the door to everything else for her daughter, she said – namely, four years of heavy drug use, inestimable damage to her body and a miscarriage, as well as damaged and destructive relationships.
“It definitely started there. The weed changed her drastically,” Mom said. “It definitely led her into other stuff.”
Stacy’s mother said pot made Stacy angry and paranoid. She suddenly wasn’t living with the same funny, outgoing teenager she’d grown used to.
“She was so withdrawn and thought the world was against her,” Mom said.
Stacy smoked pot throughout high school, chasing a high that would chill her out and calm her down. It was a high that got ever further away as her intake, and tolerance to the drug, grew.
When Stacy enrolled at Plymouth State College, it was, ironically, as a criminal justice major. There, she began experimenting heavily with other drugs, chasing the high that she got less and less frequently with marijuana. There wasn’t much she didn’t try – LSD, cocaine, mushrooms, every pill imaginable.
Stacy would try something new each weekend at parties, and continued smoking tremendous amounts of marijuana. Soon, she stopped going to classes and dropped out before completing her freshman year.
She worked for a government agency for a while after moving back to the Nashua area and liked the work very much. She was dating and living with her boss there, and was fired when they broke up. She turned to selling marijuana to pay the bills and feed her own habit.
Soon, she was moving about a “Q” – a quarter of a pound – every couple of days. She got the drugs on consignment from her dealer, meaning he gave her the drugs on credit, essentially, and told her how much she owed him. She would sell enough to pay him back and smoke the rest.
“I had like an ounce to my face,” Stacy said.
But it wasn’t until the second half of 2009 that things got truly bad for Stacy.
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It began with abusive relationships with two men. One of them got her pregnant, and on Jan. 4, she had a miscarriage.
Stacy was living with her boyfriend at the time, and giving him rides to and from work. He started calling for rides home very late at night, and Stacy eventually learned he was hanging out with co-workers and shooting heroin.
She had to try it.
The first time she used it, Stacy snorted the brownish powder and was told what a waste that was. The potency is much higher and results quicker, she learned, when it’s smoked or injected.
But she was terrified of needles, almost a phobia. Her boyfriend told her she wouldn’t even feel it. She needed that high. She closed her eyes and he found a vein.
“And he was right. I didn’t feel the needle,” Stacy said. “Within five seconds, it was like, ‘This is what I’ve been missing.’ It was like you were untouchable.”
The plan that weekend had been to buy a gram of heroin, use it over the weekend and then return to real life. When the gram ran out about three days later, Stacy stopped and didn’t plan on taking more.
Then came the dope sick.
The withdrawal, Stacy said, is an indescribably uncomfortable, unbearable sense of restlessness, like her “blood was tingling upstream.”
She started “kicking,” constantly flicking and shaking her arms and legs. She described the feeling as the buzzing, tickling sensation that comes when you whack your funny bones, but without the pain.
She was sweating, but shivering, incredibly nauseous and constantly running to the bathroom, but “it’s mainly the kicking” that made being dope sick so miserable, she said.
The only thing that helped a little bit was being in the shower.
“I sat in the shower and cried,” Stacy said.
Eventually, she fell asleep with the shower running, and when she woke up, “I was on the run.”
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The ruthless and, too often, immediate physical addiction to heroin is one of the most dangerous and gut-wrenching aspects of the drug to Hammond, a veteran narcotics detective in charge of the Nashua Police Department’s drug division. It’s a different kind of addiction, he said.
“It just really physically attacks your body,” he said. “And depending on the quality of it and your tolerance for heroin, you could be hooked for life.”
Stacy looked at heroin as she had any number of drugs she had tried during her time at college, something to try for a night or a weekend and then move on. But once the first few doses do their work inside a user’s body, sometimes there just isn’t a choice about stopping. All the logic and iron will in the world can sometimes flail against the basic demands of one’s body.
“The worst thing about heroin is it’s far more addictive,” said Brett Harpster, who handles the bulk of the county’s drug cases as an assistant Hillsborough County attorney. “It becomes a chemical part of your body that you need to thrive and survive.”
Many people make a mistake, Harpster said, and try a little marijuana or cocaine. But that same mistake can come at a much steeper price if that same person decides to try a little “H.”
“Heroin is much different, sadly,” he said.
That, to Hammond, is a frustrating and frightening aspect of the drug. Unlike other substance abusers using cocaine or marijuana to get high, many heroin users are driven back to the needle to feel normal, to simply avoid debilitating illness.
“That choice really gets taken away from you,” he said.
Many users aren’t “junkies,” Hammond said, but otherwise successful students, business people or parents. Others fall too far, and a heroin addict is more likely than a cocaine addict, for example, to turn to lying, stealing and cheating because they are so desperate for their next fix.
“They’ve got that monkey on their back, and they’ll do whatever they can to get that next fix,” he said.
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For Stacy, “on the run,” turned into an overwhelming decomposition of her body over the next nine months, along with many of the basic social limits she had grown up to follow.
Soon, the same gram that had lasted three days was one-third of what she was shooting in a day. She got over her fear of needles, because her boyfriend went to jail and wasn’t around to shoot her up.
She lost close to one-quarter of her body weight and tipped the scales at a little more than 80 pounds. That was because she preferred heroin to food. Besides, there was no hunger when she was high.
“The bag was more important than the food,” Stacy said.
Personal hygiene went out the window, too. Her mother remembers the sty that Stacy’s apartment turned into. She smelled. Her feet were black with filth. Her mother remembers most Stacy’s overwhelming lethargy.
Stacy had “a connect” in Lawrence, and a lot of people in the Nashua area knew it. Her cell phone rang constantly as fellow users looked to her to score heroin from her dealer in the Bay State. She would do it, often six or eight times a day, in exchange for a ride to Lawrence and a cut of whatever was bought. Sometimes that was half-fingers or fingers – a 10-gram bag – at a time.
If that arrangement wasn’t working, Stacy wasn’t above taking people’s money and stranding them. She threatened one person with a syringe of her blood, telling them they would get AIDS if she stabbed them, and took their drugs or money. She traded sexual favors for drugs – her boyfriend even sent her to do it sometimes – when they didn’t have cash.
She wanted to die, and ran that risk often.
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There are only a few places in New Hampshire where you can buy the needles and syringes that help make up the “rig” necessary to shoot heroin without a prescription.
Rigs also included things such as spoons and tourniquets, Hammond said.
But if it’s a Sunday, or late, users’ options are to drive to a Massachusetts pharmacy or use someone else’s rig. But when need it, Stacy said, driving to Massachusetts isn’t an option at all.
It was such a situation in which she resorted to using a friend’s rig. That person had hepatitis C. Stacy knew that and used the needle anyway.
“Physically, the dope sickness wasn’t worth the risk,” she said.
Stacy has since been diagnosed with hepatitis C, a viral disease that can lead to permanent liver damage in addition to many other symptoms.
The only thing she didn’t do while “on the run” was steal from her family, one of the few things from those long months she is grateful for. That would have destroyed the only connection to a civilized life she had left.
“I was so sick of it. It wore me out,” Stacy said. “I wanted to stop, and you just can’t.”
As it was, she spent a lot of time sleeping in her car. Then, that broke down, in the woods in Hudson near her boyfriend’s house. Her parents couldn’t deal with that and moved her into a small pool house on their property, but wouldn’t let her in the house unless her siblings weren’t home.
For a while, Stacy’s mom let her in the house in the morning to use the bathroom and then drove her to a homeless shelter in Nashua.
She needed her family. Too many times, she called her mother, crazed from the withdrawal, and bawled, begged for help, some kind of relief.
It made her mother sick – literally, physically sick.
“It was shutting me down,” Mom said. “You have no idea what it’s done to me.”
Stacy’s family tried everything to find her help, but ran into a brick wall because Stacy didn’t have health insurance. Private facilities wanted $10,000, $30,000, even $50,000 up front to admit her without insurance. Meanwhile, Stacy worked up the energy and will to call free programs, which had enormous waiting lists.
“That was the worst thing in the world, wanting help and not being able to get it,” Mom said.
Stacy’s father said the shortest waiting list he found was two weeks.
“To somebody in that situation, two weeks is a lifetime,” he said. “When they make a decision to go, it’s got to be right then and there. Two weeks later, they’re right back down the rabbit hole, and you’re not going to get them out. It was extremely frustrating.”
Eventually, Stacy was able to lie her way into a Massachusetts detox center. A woman working at a Bay State homeless shelter agreed to vouch that Stacy had been living there, giving her an in at the detox center.
“That woman’s a saint,” Mom said.
Her mother was just about at the end of her rope. She had considered everything, called in every favor she could, even considered tying Stacy to her bed for a weekend with the help of friends until one friend told her how dangerous the withdrawals could be.
Afterward, Stacy moved back in with her boyfriend and was soon rationalizing more heroin use. At first, she told herself she would use it just once more. Then said she’d use it once a week.
“And I was on the run,” she said.
Nashua Police arrested Stacy on Sept. 1 for traffic violations. Five days later, she got into another Massachusetts detox center. Her mother drove her there and stopped at a 7-Eleven on the way. Stacy shot up in the convenience store bathroom for the last time.
After the detox, she entered a 28-day rehab program in Dorchester, Mass., and has been clean since. She’s back over 100 pounds and her track marks are fading.
Now, she goes to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and sees a psychiatrist. She goes to an outpatient addiction support program three times a week and calls it the highlight of her week.
Stacy is living with her father, who has since divorced her mother. He said he’s confident she isn’t using, but is walking a tightrope trying to support her and at the same time empower her to be independent.
“I’m walking a fine line keeping a 20-year-old under as much control as I can, but she can walk out of here any day she wants and there’s nothing I can do,” he said.
Stacy was in trouble again when local police arrested her for DUI in early December and found heroin in her possession. She was held in jail pending a probable cause hearing, and her family arranged for her to enter a six-month treatment facility in Massachusetts in the hopes that she is released soon, her mother said.
Before her arrest, Stacy said recovery was hard, but getting easier than when she first came home. Then, everything reminded her of dope: shoelaces, someone’s veins, eating with a spoon.
But she had a mantra that she repeats each morning when she wakes up: “ ‘Stace, have you ever met a successful, truly happy addict?’ I don’t know one.”
“Now, I can finally sleep. It’s been a while since I had that,” Stacy said. “I don’t know. Live and learn. I lived. I lived hell on Earth. I lost myself, but when you get clean, you start to find yourself.”
Joseph G. Cote can be reached at 594-6415 or jcote@nashuatelegraph.com.