INDEX
» Struggle to fight heroin a reality in Lodi, county
» Heroin trail: From Mexico’s mountains to veins of Lodi addicts
» Lodians talk about their dangerous dance with the needle
» Methadone treatment more than heroin replacement
» Acupuncture helps heroin-hooked moms, babies
» Lodi police officer journeys into nether world of heroin
» The ancient origins, different forms of heroin
» From the beginning: The chronology of heroin use
Lodians talk about their dangerous dance with the needle
By Julia Priest
News-Sentinel staff writer
She found it awkward trying to stick the needle in at such an acute angle. The skin on her neck was creepy, and stretched away when she tried to hold it with her fingertip.
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julia priest/News-Sentinel Lodi Detective Dale Miller adjusts the handcuffs on a suspected heroin addict following his arrest. |
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She craned her neck to get a better view in the mirror, but then her target moved. She was trying to pierce the skin and the wall of the jugular vein just below it, to let the heroin flood into her brain and make the day bearable for just a few more hours.
She pushed her chin up, eyes still on the mirror, and felt around with her free hand — the other contained the syringe — pressing on the skin, feeling for a spot and poking with the needle.
The needle tip found purchase and she closed her eyes and pushed, meaning to deliver steady pressure to the plunger of the little plastic tube. She squinted, anticipating the flood of relief that would come through the needle. And then she felt the needle break off inside her neck.
Karen Moreno had been a heroin addict for more than 20 years.
She started using drugs when she was 12 years old, with family members and friends who came to the house. At first it was alcohol and cigarettes. The alcohol helped when she had to think about the things that little girls should not have to think about. It dulled her mind. Later, older friends from school in Sacramento offered marijuana, and methamphetamine pills — “cross-tops and mini-whites.”
She turned 18 and moved to Lodi to get away from her family and its influences. Later, though, Karen fell in with men who used heroin. She wanted to use it, too, to feel what the thrill was, the high.
She felt a rush of affection and excitement as a man tended to her, carefully prepared the drugs, and then gave her the drug. It felt like care-giving to her.
“The first time I tried it, I was in love,” she said, and she didn’t mean with her man.
She meant with the feeling, which she recalls as an indescribable euphoria.
“In that instant, I loved everybody. I didn’t have a care. I didn’t want to have a care.”
She speaks of it, decades later, with a longing only lovers know.
“There is nothing like it in the world, and you can never have that feeling again, no matter how many times you use.”
She spent her life trying, and that is the wicked truth of how an addict is born.
ESCAPING A NIGHTMARE
She vomited then, as first time users usually do. Her body spoke, rejecting the toxin that flushed through her veins, but her mind was already swept away.
“I threw up over and over,” she said. “But I didn’t care. The feeling was so good, I didn’t even notice.”
Today “Ruth” is a competent, confident full-time medical worker and mother of four. She prides herself on her neat appearance, and from her carefully plucked eyebrows, to sleek pinned French braid, her spotless freshly pressed pink and aqua scrub top, it is clear she takes care of herself.
She supervises a half dozen techs under her, and spends a lot of time with her husband and four school-age children.
But 13 years ago she was lying in a pool of her own vomit, curled in a fetal position on a concrete jail cell floor, trying to catch her breath between paroxysms of vomiting and shuddering with violent cramps that wracked her whole body. She was kicking heroin, cold turkey, in jail.
She swore that was the last of it, and for her, it was.
She had started using as a way to get through her shift at a Lodi restaurant where she worked. The manager and some of the cooks would shoot heroin right there in the office. They told her it was a “good way to get through the shift.”
An occasional user of marijuana and alcohol, she “partied” with her friends while at school growing up in Lodi. She was deathly afraid of needles.
“It took my mom, three nurses and a doctor to hold me down to give me a shot when I was a kid,” she said.
So, for her first injection, he squeezed her eyes shut, stuck out her arm, and turned her head away while her boss injected her.
“I threw my guts up right away,” she said. “But I didn’t care.”
It started with just weekends, then began to be on weekdays. That turned into every day, and the line blurred. The border between several times a day and all day long was impossible to pin down.
At first, there was denial, but that was followed shortly with resignation, and the realization that doing heroin was no longer a choice. It was a need.
“I knew I would get really sick without it.”
It would start with the runny nose, then the aches, then the vomiting and cramps.
“You keep trying to get that same rush again, and you never can. What they don’t realize is you can only go so high — the next place is called OD, and a lot of times, you don’t come back from there.”
Before heroin, and after
Kevin Woods likes to show his “before” picture. Before he found the Salvation Army and before he decided to turn his life around. Before he stopped using heroin and cocaine to balance his brain chemistry in a disastrous shot at self-medication.
The picture shows a stark thin face with scraggly mustache, unhealed scabs and skin sores common to heavy drug users, whose nutritional needs are the last to receive attention.
The eyes look like those of a feral dog caught raiding the garbage can. Prowling, hunted, unsure and ready to run, with no fight left in them.
That was before.
Today, Kevin sports a healthy girth beneath his fresh navy Polo shirt with the red shield logo on the pocket. His skin is tanned and clear, and his goatee meticulously trimmed. His eyes are bright and generous when he talks about the life he used to live, and that he now sees from the other side as the director of the Sacramento Street Archway Shelter.
Woods was a drug addict. His penchant was for the heavy stimulants — cocaine and methamphetamine — but he would also use heroin when he was in jail, on any of the many counts of petty theft, possession of stolen property, and traffic violation warrants that landed him there.
Woods leans back in his hobnail-trimmed leather desk chair.
“I was a speed freak, but I used heroin in jail because there wasn’t much to do in jail, and I knew I’d go crazy.”
He described how he would get the drugs in jail. Visitors would smuggle them in, and inmates would be able to purchase the drugs with their “commissary” money.
They were allowed $40 a week on the books, to purchase cigarettes, candy or the like, and Woods’ mother — “the great enabler,” he called her — would put the limit in his account and then another $40 in the account of another inmate Woods had chosen.
“I’d pick some little guy I knew I could beat up,” he said.
Then he’d take out his own money and have his accomplice do the same, so he could buy $80 worth a week.
There was a shortage of medical quality needles and syringes, though, so often they had to improvise.
They’d get pins from basketball air pumps smuggled in, or the points of ballpoint pens and sharpen them against the concrete walls or metal sinks.
“That was really painful,” said Woods. “You’d stick it in, and then when you pulled it out, there’d be this huge hole, so you had to hold your thumb over it to stop the bleeding.”
The basketball pin was a last resort, but if that the only means available for delivering the drug, that is what they would use.
Heroin wasn’t his first choice, but that didn’t mean he could give it up without a struggle. He’d plan on spending two weeks vomiting, shaking and sweating as he tried to get off the opiate and back onto cocaine and speed on the outside.
Woods sees addicts as clients now in his office. When they tell him, “You don’t know what its like out there,” he pulls out his “before” picture. It speaks more vividly than any sermon. With the photo as a calling card, he has an in. He can connect and try to get through to the addicts who know they are caught in the trap and want to get out but are too afraid to try.
An addict in Hale Park
Sunny held his face in his hands and began to sob.
At 43, his life was reduced to finding drugs, using to keep from getting sick, and finding money to get some more the next round. He was thin, with ashen skin and red-rimmed eyes. His hair was straggly and lackluster, and hung past his shoulders as he bent his head.
Thirty-eight minutes ago, he had been feeling fine. Maybe more than fine, he felt well. He was kicking back in Hale Park, and he had just shot up. Wrapped in plastic and wadded in a tissue clutched in his fist, he held a tiny dark brown brick not much bigger than the push tip of a ballpoint pen — a gram of black tar heroin.
And then he saw the familiar figure of narcotics detective Dale Miller walking toward him. He didn’t know it, but Miller was there just to ask him a favor, to offer him a chance to talk to someone, but Sunny was nervous. He knew the amount he was holding was good enough to get him a felony arrest for possession with intent to sell.
Too savvy to try to run, he sidled up to Miller, who was out of the car now, and tried to distract him with small talk. He tried to ease his body between the cop and his car, but Miller had seen it all before. He wasn’t distracted by the hype’s slick patter. He watched his hands. And he saw Sunny drop the wadded tissue down next to the tire well, and subtly move away from it.
Too late. The detective picked up the package, and as he opened it, Sunny saw his mellow evening dissolve into misery.
The officers arrested him and took him to the Lodi Police Department.
After taking his property for inventory, they brought him into an interview room, offered him a cola, and let him sit. He agreed to talk with a reporter.
His pupils were still constricted. Miller held up a wallet-sized laminated card with a series of graduated black circles on it — a pupillometer. He had done this enough to be able to call the size of his prisoner’s pupils, but used it to support his report which would go to the district attorney.
In normal room light, Sunny’s pupils were about 3.5 millimeters in diameter. The reporter’s and the detectives were about five.
“How long have you been using drugs?”
“Since I was 12 or 13.”
Sonny said he started with marijuana, and then tried crank (methamphetamine). He snorted it at first, but it irritated his nose and made his throat raw, so he started injecting it.
“I got addicted to the needle.” he said.
Crank made him jumpy and irritable, and a friend suggested he try something more mellow. He offered Sunny heroin, and helped him get his first high.
A small amount sent him into a peaceful happy place, where he wanted to be able to stay.
Like most addictions, the purpose of this one was allow him to not be where he was.
“You start with a dime, (about one-tenth of a gram) and then that isn’t enough,” Sunny said. “And so you go up to a quarter (gram), and then you build your tolerance. But its never enough. There is never enough.”
He was crying now.
Where is your friend now?
“Dead. They found him dead, He OD’d about six years ago.”
Sunny has a 13-year-old daughter.
“If someone was to offer my daughter dope, I’d hurt them. I’d hurt them real bad.
“I’ve been clinically dead a couple of times. I got too greedy and did too much.”
Sunny has been in prison, and is on parole now. This arrest will likely send him back, and he knows it.
“This time I‘ll really kick though. Its my chance to get clean and stay clean,” he vows, but statistics don’t support his promise.
What would he say to anyone who wanted to try it now?
“If you want to spend half your life in jail and the other half sick, welcome to it.”