A heroin addict tells her story
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Tuesday 4 a.m. The 24-year-old addict shoots up the last of the heroin she had been mainlining all night.
The debilitating emotions she's had for two days return -- she feels trapped, unable to escape her self-loathing and loneliness, her heartbreak and hopelessness.
"I'm a disgrace! I want to be somebody!" she thinks. "I'm not getting anywhere, I don't have anything, it's getting worse by the day. I'm sick of it!"
She decides to get help -- again. Later that day, for the fourth time since she began using at 15, she enters drug rehab at Gateway Rehabilitation Center.
"I definitely want to stay clean and live a clean and sober life," she says in a telephone interview from Gateway a little more than two days after her last fix. Candid, well spoken and polite, without a trace of self-pity or rationalization, the Butler County native who now lives in the North Hills asked that she not be identified by name. She hoped her tale of addiction might prevent others from being lured by heroin's big lie.
For her, it began with marijuana when she was 15. She had been depressed with her parents' divorce the preceding year. And then her boyfriend gave her some heroin to snort.
"I didn't have to worry about my family anymore. I felt carefree and better about everything," she recalled. "I thought I would be able to only do it once in a while, maybe just on weekends, and nobody would know.
"But once I did it, the next day I said, 'That was fun. Let's do it again.' Pretty soon I was so wrapped up in it I was getting sick if I didn't have it and couldn't stop."
Like all users, she built up a tolerance and no longer got high but needed the drug to keep from suffering withdrawal symptoms. In search of that rush she once felt, she began shooting five or six $10 stamp bags a day. After about six months, her tolerance had increased so much she was up to a "bundle" a day, or 10 bags. At her worst, she was using 40 bags a day.
First Published May 15, 2011 12:00 am
