Under the influence

Heroin use in Sussex County, part three, By Becca Tucker Raoul didn’t like what was happening to his girlfriend. He didn’t know where Diamond was half the time, but he knew she was either high or trying to score heroin. He tried to dumb himself down when he was with her by smoking pot, but she’d nod out mid-sentence for 45 minutes at a time while her Newport cigarette burned a scar in her hand. The person he’d known since middle school “pretty much seemed like she was dead. She was just eroded from the inside out,” he says. Raoul broke up with her. Diamond was distraught, but she was not about to change her behavior. She was spending most of her time hanging out with a “career heroin addict,” as she describes him, whom she’d met when she bought heroin off him outside a methadone clinic. To support their habit, they’d hustle. It was a full-time job calling people up in the morning for orders and gas money, picking up that money, driving an hour down to Paterson to buy a brick of heroin for maybe $250, driving an hour back to Sussex County to deliver bundles for $70 apiece to dope-sick suburbanites. The profit went to dope. Diamond and her new friend weren’t the only ones who’d done it that way. Local highways It is a well-traveled route. “Sussex County has a problem,” said Philip Horowitz, CEO of Sunrise House in Lafayette, which runs an in-patient rehabilitation program. “Route 15 is a conduit for drugs. Gangs move drugs through Pennsylvania, Upstate New York, Rochester, and they come through Route 15.” A few years ago, Sparta police were arresting a lot of people for heroin. Many of those people lived north of Sparta in places like Port Jervis, N.Y., and Shohola, Pa., according to Neil Spidaletto, the Sparta Police Department’s spokesman. These drug users were headed back from Paterson or Newark after buying drugs, he said. Because heroin addicts generally won’t “waste” money on fixing their cars, they often have a light out or something wrong with their exhaust, giving police a reason to pull them over. As Sussex County Prosecutor Thomas Reed put it, “When you become profoundly addicted, your life goes to heck. You don’t have a working car, or a car that’s not a moving violation when it rolls out of the driveway.” In 2008, Sparta police made only 18 arrests involving heroin. That was significantly down from the 33 arrests they had made that involved heroin in 2005. He doesn’t think that’s because heroin was less popular. Spidaletto thinks that Sparta’s highways had gained a reputation. He said that the Sparta police’s “past pro-active approach has caused motorists who possess heroin to avoid driving through this township.” It’s true: Driving on Route 15 with Diamond, she can predict where the “pigs” are going to be. Like Diamond, veteran users know to take an alternate route home from copping dope. Not always easy Diamond and her new friend polished their dope purchasing technique to near-perfection. “We got off the highway, drove two minutes, rolled up on the street, the guy’s waiting out there, we didn’t even stop, he threw the dope in the window, we threw the money,” said Diamond. It didn’t always work out quite that smoothly, though. Once, after stopping at a store to shoot up in the bathroom, the pair were pulled over in Paterson by undercover cops on the highway. The police said they had been watching them for 40 minutes and had seen them buy the dope. Since she was no longer a minor at this time, not only did Diamond manage to keep the incident from her parents, but she didn’t even give the police all the dope she had on her. “Even at that point I was pretty slick,” she says. “I only gave ‘em a couple bags. I saved me and that kid [her friend] some dope, so when we got home we got high.” For that first offense, Diamond received a conditional discharge — a six-month probation bookended by urine tests. If both tests prove clean, the offense is expunged from the record. To stay out of trouble, for a while she avoided Paterson, buying her drugs in Passaic instead. The gloss of memory A sheen brightens Diamond’s memories of those times and it can make her forget the pain that came between highs. “You feel like you’re on the front lines of a battlefield sometimes,” she said nostalgically. “Part of you is like, how did I get here? The other part of you feels so [f-ing] alive. You think, I’d rather be lying in the gutter half the time if the other half I’m shining in the sun.” As time passes it’s those memories of the good times that remain, said a 27-year-old graphic designer from Sparta who is now clean after years of using heroin and crack. At the height of his addiction, he began pasting empty heroin baggies into a journal, so he could retain a physical reminder of those “good” times. Had he kept this journal from the beginning of his heroin use, he estimates there would have been 6,500 bags. But, now reformed, he can also recall the low points and says that looking at the journal “brings things into focus and removes the romance from all of the amazing highs I experienced. It’s just one more reason why I will not ever allow myself to fall down that hole again.” Nostalgia fades for Diamond, too, as she talks about that young friend she got busted with. He died of a heroin overdose. He was just a year older than she. Hard to help Raoul let Diamond know he disapproved of what she was doing. When that didn’t have any effect, he told Diamond’s parents she was using. Confronted by her parents, Diamond admitted she had a problem, agreed to go to counseling (where she’d often show up high), and entered a methadone clinic. For the 10 days she was going to the methadone clinic, where they administer urine tests and lower your dose if you miss a day, she stayed clean. But at heart, she was still an addict just waiting for the next opportunity to use. Diamond announced she wanted to switch from methadone to Suboxone, an alternative that in some cases requires only a monthly visit to a doctor and a monthly urine test. With no one checking up on her regularly, Diamond had her opportunity. She started using heroin again, always careful to switch to Suboxone pills five days before a urine test. Now all her money went to dope. Diamond kept her relapse a secret especially from her mother, who was paying for beauty school and for the Suboxone pills. When her mother left for work in the morning, instead of going to school Diamond would often drive to Middletown, N.Y., and buy dope from someone she knew there, then return home at 3 p.m. as if she’d been at school. “I didn’t care. If I was dope sick, I had to get unsick. That was the first thing to do.” Eventually, Raoul cut off contact with her — or tried. But whenever Diamond got herself into a situation, she knew she could count on Raoul to bail her out. Try as he might to start a new life in which yoga, meditation and hiking took the place of substances, Raoul couldn’t stomach the thought of leaving Diamond to suffer on her own. Like when she was stuck on a highway shoulder in the rain with no gas and no money because she’d spent it all on dope. It was just $5, he told himself. Meanwhile, Raoul’s resolve was slipping. He had just lost his father, his grandmother and his brother, and he was fast losing his ex-girlfriend. “I felt destroyed inside,” he says. He was working nights at ShopRite and as a carpenter during the day. After a car accident left Raoul with lingering back pain, he found himself tempted once again by drugs. A friend could make OxyContin available to him. It was an all-too familiar situation.

OxyContin facts
In 2008, 13.8 million Americans had used oxycodone (4.8 million used OxyContin) for nonmedical use at least once during their lifetime, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Seizures of oxycodone submitted to state and local laboratories increased 124 percent from 14,990 items in 2004 to 33,612 items in 2008, according to the National Forensic Laboratory Information System.

Resources Self-help Narcotics Anonymous 818-773-9999 www.na.org Inpatient Detoxification Sunrise House 973-383-6300 or 1-800-LET-LIVE 37 Sunset Inn Road Lafayette, NJ 07848 www.sunrisehouse.com Saint Clare’s Hospital 973-702-2600 or 1-866-STCLARE 130 Powerville Road Boonton Township, NJ 07005 www.saintclares.org Outpatient Detoxification To locate a certified private physician certified in opiate detoxification Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration 1-877-SAMHSA-7 www.buprenorphine.samhsa.gov Outpatient Counseling Sunrise House 973-383-6300 or 1-800-LET-LIVE 37 Sunset Inn Road Lafayette, NJ 07848 www.sunrisehouse.com Center for Prevention and Counseling 973-383-4787 61 Spring St. Newton, NJ 07860 www.centerforprevention.org Treatment Dynamics North 973-940-7306 83 Spring St. #101 Newton, NJ 07860 www.treatmentdynamics.com Newton Memorial Hospital 973-383-2121 175 High St. Newton, NJ 07860 www.nmhnj.org Resource Directories New Jersey Addiction Services 609-292-5760 www.state.nj.us/humanservices/das/home/index.html Methadone Clinic Directory 866-575-8186 www.methadonetreatment.net North American Syringe Exchange Network 253-272-4857 www.nasen.org/programs