Heroin's siren song: A force that's stronger than will or reason
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Marissa Veldman with her sister Kelsey's remains and several pieces of art done by her sister at the Veldmans' home in Shaler. Marissa was addicted to heroin and her sister died of an overdose the first time she did heroin. -
Neil A. Capretto, the medical director at Gateway Rehabilitation Center in Aliquippa.
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Their life circumstances, by many measures, couldn't be more different -- he's a middle-aged black man from a hardscrabble Mon Valley steel town; she's a young white woman originally from an affluent suburb of Austin, Texas.
But what they have in common -- heroin addiction early in life -- trumps what they don't. That's because heroin is as nondiscriminatory as it is destructive.
Theirs are cautionary tales of the all-mighty power of the drug. And with heroin's low prices, high potency and widespread availability hereabouts -- from the inner city to tony suburbs -- the threat has never been more manifest.
"The power of addiction is very strong," said Neil A. Capretto, medical director at Gateway Rehabilitation Center. "It happens to good people but the drug doesn't care."
Round Rock, Texas, a city of 100,000 that's 15 miles north of Austin, is one of the fastest growing municipalities in the country. Predominately white with a median household income of $70,000, Round Rock statistically emits security, hope, the American dream.
But it was there that Marissa Veldman, her older sister Kelsey and other teens plunged into drugs' depths.
"It was a very typical middle-of-Texas public high school except for that intense drug use," recalled Marissa, petite, fresh-faced, and appearing much younger than her 22 years.
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Her drug use began with marijuana at 13 and escalated to smoking methamphetamine, injecting cocaine and popping prescription pills. She was 15 when she began shooting heroin and did so for nearly three years. After getting off heroin, she drank heavily and returned to marijuana before finally getting clean when she was 19 after an intensive stint at a West Virginia rehab facility.
"I didn't know why I was doing the things I was doing. My parents are amazing, great parents. We didn't have any significant traumas as children. We were a very typical white, middle class suburban family."
Her sister, Kelsey, who was three years older, had used drugs but for years had also struggled with bulimia, an eating disorder. Marissa had been clean for about a year when in June 2009 Kelsey let someone inject her with heroin for the first time. She suffered a fatal overdose.
The death of the sister she adored crushed Marissa, who herself nearly died three times from heroin overdoses. Devastated, she began smoking pot again for a month until she realized what a friend told her was true -- she would never deal with her sister's death if she was wasted on drugs.
She hasn't touched any since. She and her parents moved to Shaler last year to escape haunting memories in Texas. She entered Chatham University in the fall as a transferred junior and is thriving there.
While she doesn't know why she did what she did, she's certain of one thing -- she never wants to do so again.
"I was miserable," she said. "I didn't like doing it, I didn't like the way I felt, I didn't like throwing up, I didn't like withdrawal and I didn't like reality."
Four decades before Marissa's addiction, a man living 1,200 miles away from Texas in the Mon Valley began using heroin at age 20. Now 59, he is making another attempt -- his fifth -- to stop killing himself with a needle and a spoon.
Recently, during a court-ordered, inpatient stay at Gateway, he sat in Dr. Capretto's office and recounted a life seeking elusive euphoria, experiencing gut-wrenching withdrawal, committing numerous crimes, and serving prison sentences -- a life misspent by addiction. Yet he still wasn't sure he would stop using.
The man, who requested anonymity, grew up the son of an alcoholic mill worker in a town that had lost 60 percent of its population in the decade before 1970. That decline portended the economic devastation that came with the collapse of the steel industry in the 1980s.
He followed his father into the mill but began smoking dope and drinking heavily and was fired. He started selling pot and experimenting with pills. Just out of his teens, he tried heroin. His brother, a heroin addict, told him to look past the sickness and search for the high.
"And that's what I did and I ended up liking it."
In 1974, he helped a dealer sell heroin until the man was shot in a robbery. The following year he began selling himself and his heroin use exploded.
"I'd stay in the house as long as I had it, sometimes two weeks," he said, his head down, his eyes staring into his past. "I just sat in the house, getting high, watching television."
His lengthy criminal record began in 1977, a cycle of arrests for burglary, robbery, selling drugs and sentences of probation, jail time, prison time and court-ordered rehab.
"I always looked at going to jail and being sick as just being part of what I was doing."
He overdosed in August, his second time, and nearly died. Despite that, "I woke up in the hospital after about a week and the first thing I wanted to do was leave the hospital and get high. ... I still haven't really made up my mind if I'm going to stop using. I haven't actually reached that point yet."
Dr. Capretto said that shows the drug's power.
"He's a good guy, he's a smart guy but he's a human. This drug gets ahold of you and it defies logic. It sends signals to your brian that override your survival mechanism and say 'You need this drug.' "
Marissa wears her heart on her flesh. On her upper left arm is a tattoo of her sister transferred from a self-portrait Kelsey painted when she was 21. On the right arm is a tattoo of a butterfly and the words "God takes care of old folks and fools," a favorite saying of a good friend who likewise died from a heroin overdose.
The tattoos are an homage to those she loved but can also be viewed as a reminder of how close she came to the same fate.
These days, she's content with living at Chatham, studying hard, visiting her parents on the weekend, watching football and no longer tempting fate. She's at a loss to understand why she was who she was in those dark days.
"I don't really know how to explain it because I still don't feel I can fully explain how I felt then," she said. "I was just miserable and crazy. But I'm not miserable now and I don't think I'm crazy.
"I just see things clearer and feel things and know my feelings are not going to kill me," she said, recognizing that it's OK to feel lousy sometimes. "It's normal and healthy. I guess I'm happy."
As for her male counterpart, so far so good. He's been in an intensive outpatient treatment program and is staying away from heroin. Before he was released from inpatient treatment, he said that knowing what he knows now, he never would have tried heroin that first time all those years ago. And he warned others not to do so either.
"I'm to the point right now, I've pretty much lived my life and just want to see my kids and grandkids do differently than me," he said. "Don't try it because if you try it and like it that's going to be the beginning of the end. It will be a never-ending cycle. Your life will never be the same again."
Marissa wants to do volunteer work to spread the same warning.
"I'm proof a little white girl from the suburbs can very well be shooting up in the public school bathroom because that was me," she said. "I'm smart and I have a great family but that doesn't mean you're exempt.
"You just can't ignore it and it will go away. It is a real threat."
And it's increasing. Dr. Capretto noted that prescription opioids such as OxyContin and the even more powerful Opana have created addicts ranging from those in their teens to middle age. Many whose prescriptions run out eventually turn to heroin because at $10 or less per stamp bag it is significantly cheaper than the pain-killing opioids that can cost $80 per pill on the street.
"Just when we think we've reached the peak of intensity of this epidemic it seems to reach another level," he said.
"It's insanity to think you can control the use of this drug consistently for any length of time. It's like thinking you can tread water in quicksand.
"Your future will be jails and institutions and the cemetery."
First Published January 22, 2012 12:00 am
