Pubdate: Sun, 30 Dec 2012
Source: Dallas Morning News (TX)
Copyright: 2012 The Dallas Morning News, Inc.
Contact: http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/send-a-letter/
Website: http://www.dallasnews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/117
Author: Andrew Pantazi

A YOUNG LIFE NEARLY LOST

Student's Addiction Came Early; Escape Almost Elusive

In a cramped bathroom stall at Edward Cary Middle School, Mariela and 
her crew passed around a binder and a school badge to divide the 
lines of powder.
Jeff Lautenberger/staff Photographer Mariela, who has shared her 
experiences on television, has replaced drugs with education. She is 
pursuing an associate of applied science degree at Eastfield College 
in Mesquite in hopes of becoming a substance abuse counselor. She 
expects to graduate in May.

Come and check it. See if the lines are even, a girl in the stall 
said. Here's four for you. Four for you. Four for you.

I'm fixin' to hit a line, right now, boasted Mariela, a skinny 
13-year-old girl with blond streaks through her brown hair, directing 
the crew while standing back by the sinks.

The bathroom door creaked. Most of the girls, high at 8 in the 
morning, spun around and began fussing over themselves in the mirror.

Who is that? one girl, still snorting in the stall, asked in Spanish.

Maestra, one of them whispered. The teacher.

The teacher walked into a stall near them, taking no notice of the 
girls or the drugs.

When Mariela Torres started eighth grade months earlier, she'd never 
smoked, drunk or tried drugs. But in classrooms, hallways and 
bathroom stalls, "cheese" heroin was inescapable. In many ways, 
Mariela was like other teenagers getting hooked: a 13-year-old girl 
living in a poor area of Dallas where prostitutes, drug dealers and 
gangbangers were common. She can't move out. She can't ignore it. 
Does she forsake her only friends in favor of a drug-free life? What 
13-year-old would?

Newspapers and TV would highlight the crisis the following year: 
Children as young as 11 snorting the black tar heroin mixed with 
pills. But over the years, the media spotlight would fade, even as 
kids continue to die.

And cheese heroin would always surround Mariela.

It started in September 2005, a few weeks into the new school year.

She was sitting in the back during eighth-grade home economics. Kids 
were talking and strutting around, flinging paper airplanes, 
balled-up notes - even books. A boy named Adrian sidled up to Mariela 
and hunched behind a textbook with something in his hand.

Inside a folded piece of notebook paper were little yellow balls of dust.

There's this new drug, cheese, he said. It's easy to forget your 
problems, y'know? Everything's bliss, y'know? I've just been getting 
high. It's great.

What are you talking about? Mariela asked.

This is cheese, he said, forming a bit of the powder into a line. 
This is what I've been using. If you try it, it's going to make you feel good.

He offered Mariela a rolled dollar bill to use as a straw.

Heroin chunks banged through her nostrils, like hot coals.

She rubbed her nose, willing the pain away, waiting for the effects 
to kick in. Nothing happened.

The next day in the hallway after class, she tried again. Almost 
immediately, she struggled to keep her eyes open. Everything faded. 
She felt like she was floating.

When she was 5, Mariela, her mother and younger twin sisters returned 
from a trip to Mexico to their Oak Cliff apartment. A stranger met 
them at the door. Mariela's father had abandoned them, and another 
man was living there.

Mariela's mother, 45-yearold Margarita Delara, moved the family to a 
cramped apartment in the Webb Chapel area, where Mariela's aunt, 
uncle and cousins lived nearby. Low-rent apartments dominate, filled 
with poor immigrant families chasing the American dream. But Webb 
Chapel also struggles against crime.

Margarita didn't speak English. She and her three daughters lived 
sparingly off the money Margarita made selling dishes she'd learned 
to prepare in Mexico to neighbors.

Mariela used that money to support her new routine. She gave Adrian 
$2 of her lunch money and would snort lines with her hollowed-out pen 
or a dollar bill.

Mariela heard rival middle school drug dealers arguing over whose 
cheese looked the best. That looks like straight-up chalk, one boy 
said about another's product.

The boys argued over how many pills and which ones to cut the heroin 
with. (Tylenol PM? Oxycontin? Xanax?) One boy might mix 20 pills with 
$40 worth of black-tar heroin, while another would use only five 
pills. Every batch of cheese was a gamble. One could kill you. One 
might barely give you a buzz.

Adrian made Mariela a deal. If she sold heroin, she could keep some. 
Drop it off at "A" lunch, Adrian would tell her.

She worried that drugs would ruin her friends, but selling the drug 
was the only way she could afford it.

The school didn't have cameras. Adrian and Mariela met by the 
portable classrooms to exchange products and profits. He'd hand her a 
paper pouch with a number written on it: 5, 10, 20, 30 or 40, 
indicating how much money the heroin inside was worth.

Five dollars of heroin might be two lines of cheese. Ten dollars 
would be six lines. Twenty dollars could mean anywhere from 12 to 30 
lines of cheese. At $20, users were getting high for less than $1per hit.

By December, she was snorting four lines in the morning, four lines 
at lunch and four lines after school every day.

Teachers became suspicious. The next month when selling, she and 
Adrian were caught skipping class. They were sent to in-school 
suspension, called Appropriate Alternative Placement. Mariela found 
herself doing homework in an isolated classroom with other users and dealers.

One day, a Dallas ISD police officer escorted Adrian and Mariela to 
the principal's office. Teachers suspected they were using drugs even 
during suspension. Leaving the portable classroom, Mariela pulled a 
folded paper marked "$10" out of her bra and threw the heroin behind 
a mound of dirt, glass and rocks.

I just dropped it, she whispered to Adrian in Spanish.

Before the teens met with the principal, an officer searched Mariela. 
She didn't find anything. I'm on to you, the officer said.

Most girls wanted to be Mariela's friend, but she was picky. Girls 
would compliment her, and she would cut them down. Popular but 
confrontational, she led her own clique, vying for the attention of boys.

As she tired of getting high with Adrian and other boys, she drew her 
girlfriends in.

Abby had been her best friend and neighbor since they were 7 and 6. 
Now, after school, they would snort cheese in Abby's bathroom. They 
told Abby's parents they were styling each other's hair.

Jessica Esparza was Mariela's cousin. Together, they spent their 
childhoods playing with Barbies, running through fields and dancing 
to the radio. They'd been distant in recent months; Jessica 
disapproved of the drugs. But the two grew closer than ever after 
Jessica, who earlier mocked Mariela as a cheesehead, admitted that 
she, too, had tried cheese. Mariela shared her supply.

That spring, Mariela once went two days without heroin. Her whole 
body ached. She started using again, at least 16 lines a day, just to 
feel normal. She'd stopped feeling the drug's calming sense of 
slipping away. She'd lost the high. She blamed Adrian's drugs. It's 
sheisty, she told him. He was cutting it with too many tablets.

She and her crew of friends wanted their own hookup. She asked Adrian 
how he got his drugs.

Call this number, state your name, say you got the number from me and 
say how much heroin you want.

At her apartment complex, surrounded by friends, she borrowed her 
cousin's cellphone and made the call from a dirty patch of grass 
littered with cigarette butts and brown marijuana blunts.

Who the hell is this? a deep voice asked.

I'm Mariela. I got your number from Adrian. He said he gets heroin from you.

They were at a nearby McDonald's a half-hour later to meet a dark 
truck with tinted windows as it drove up. The windows rolled down.

Are you Mariela? the dealer called out.

They greeted with a handshake, black-tar heroin wrapped in plastic in 
his hand, a $20 bill cupped in hers. The same way she'd sold at school.

One day in the spring of 2006, Mariela was called to the principal's 
office. She was so high she was sent to the infirmary. Her mother was called.

Not my Mariela, Margarita Delara thought.

Margarita came from a poor Mexican pueblo, working in tomato fields, 
away from paved roads and city lights. She'd never used drugs. She 
moved to Dallas to build a life and family.

She didn't want to copy her parents' harsh discipline. She smothered 
her Mariela in love. But something changed in eighth grade. Mariela 
began talking back.

I want to go out, she said. When her mother refused, peace broke, 
doors slammed, voices screeched. Mariela went out anyway. Margarita 
heard rumors: Mariela was getting high.

She'd asked her daughter before. Are you using drugs?

Mariela looked her in the eyes.

No! Te lo juro. I swear. Why would you say that?!

Margarita marched into the school, worried that her daughter's 
addiction could kill her.

School officials told Margarita they wanted to place Mariela in an 
alternative school, but her mother objected. Alternative schools are 
filled with addicts. Why would you put my daughter with other addicts?

Though she didn't speak English, Margarita sat next to Mariela in 
class every day she could.

But Mariela took bathroom breaks, sneaking into stalls to snort lines.

During the summer of 2006, Mariela and her friends each pitched in a 
few dollars so they could get their daily fix from their dealer. As 
loyal customers, he rewarded them with a special: Thirty dollars of 
heroin for only $20.

The girls divided the heroin into a breakfast dose, a lunch dose, a 
dinner dose and a sleeping dose.

One evening, she heard a dance song called "La Nina." It sounded 
upbeat, supported by lines such as "Alex, your daddy loves you," 
before continuing in Spanish with the story of a 9year-old girl being raped.

The next morning, as Mariela was in her heroin-induced sleep and 
while Margarita was out selling homemade menudo, one of her sisters 
heard a knock at the door. It was a man who said he was hungry.

Mariela awoke to screams. Almost blind without her glasses, she could 
at first barely distinguish the shapes: A man was attacking her 
sister. Her sister's pants had been torn off.

Mariela tried to pull the man off. He grabbed her hair. Mariela 
stomped on the ground and the walls to make as much noise as 
possible. She heard banging outside the front door, but both bolts 
were locked.

Then her uncle leapt onto the balcony and sprang in through the 
unlocked patio door. He wrestled with the intruder while Mariela 
grabbed a phone and cursed at the 911 call taker to get here, now. 
Shaken but unharmed, Mariela and her sisters spent the rest of the 
day reliving the story at a police station. Back home, Mariela stood 
in the parking lot with friends, snorting as much cheese as she 
could, hoping to forget. Then a car pulled up. Mariela! a voice 
beckoned. It was the father she hadn't seen in years.

Get the [expletive] out of here! she yelled at him. I don't want you 
around! Why are you here?!

High and paranoid, Mariela heard the song she'd heard the night 
before ringing through her head. Why hadn't he been there when he was needed?

She kept snorting.

In the fall of 2006, Margarita refused to send Mariela to the nearby 
school kids were calling the "Cheesehead Factory" - Thomas Jefferson 
High. Instead, Mariela started high school at W.T. White, away from 
her friends.

There was no Adrian or Abby or Jessica to tempt her at the school of 
more than 2,000 students, but as soon as the day ended, Mariela 
bolted home to call her dealer.

Students started bumping into her. I hear you're selling, they'd say.

I'm not selling, but I'll sell you some.

A few weeks later, Jessica's mother sent her to Phoenix House, a 
rehab center for children. Within days, Margarita told Mariela she 
was going, too.

Packing, Mariela took one last snort before tucking away her favorite 
toy - a stuffed elephant.

Oh my God, Mariela thought as they drove on Harry Hines Boulevard 
toward the center, I'm about to go into treatment, and I don't know 
when I'm going to get out.

She slept that first night, Sept. 22, thanks to the waning effects of 
her last high. But 5:30 a.m. came too soon.

Where the hell am I? she demanded. Call my mom, tell her to come pick 
me up. Tell her I don't want to be here. If you don't call my mom, 
I'm going to leave.

During group meetings, others talked about goals and temptations, and 
she sat in a corner. She stayed silent.

Counselors asked her to list the people she had gotten high with; she 
wrote out 114 names, enough that she distinguished users by adding 
initials, nicknames or different spellings. To stay clean, counselors 
told Mariela, she needed to abandon all of them.

Withdrawal meant cold sweats and fever. At night, she lay awake, 
frightened. She didn't trust the staff. She didn't trust her 
roommates. She worried about her sisters. She began having 
nightmares. In them, she'd use. And the attacker was there.

A month after arriving at Phoenix House, she met Ricardo, a 
15-year-old boy from Fort Worth. He was crying. He missed his family. 
He missed celebrating Halloween with costumes.

The next day, they talked again. Then they started passing notes.

Counselor Louis Toms took her aside and explained she needed to focus 
on herself, not on Ricardo. "Mr. Louis" first got hooked on meth when 
he was13 in California. He went through prison and a treatment 
facility before he made his way to Phoenix House. He knew Mariela's pain.

She played sweet and nice in front of the counselors. But when they 
were out of sight, she tried huffing, inhaling aerosol sprays from a 
bag. She tried snorting Benadryl. She tried a game where others choke 
you until you pass out. Each time, she got caught. Counselors told 
her she was only using to avoid her emotions. She bottled her 
feelings until exploding at whoever was closest - her mom, her 
sisters, her friends. To escape drugs, she needed to learn to cope.

One day, a girl came back from a doctor's appointment outside the 
facility. She brought a bag of heroin into Phoenix House.

Don't, Mariela told one of the girls about to snort a line. The girl 
would graduate in a few days. Why ruin that? The girl snorted. And 
then Mariela did. Once again, she got caught. At Encounter Group, 
kids confronted each other with the problems they caused. Mariela was 
confronted a lot.

December 2006. Three months into the program. During Encounter Group, 
a staff member asked Ricardo to step out of the room.

Later, Mariela went to look for him. She couldn't find him in any of 
the rooms and started shouting.

Where's Ricardo? Where's Ricardo?

Staff members tried to calm her. They explained that Ricardo broke 
the rules and they'd had to discharge him.

Mariela didn't eat for two days. She stopped talking again.

Mr. Louis finally had enough. He'd seen potential in Mariela: The way 
she led others when they had a chore or an assignment. She was polite 
to the staff. He also knew she didn't value herself.

You need to get yourself together, he told her. He's moved on to 
somewhere where he can get help. Now it's your turn to get help. It 
was either going to be you discharged or him discharged, and we saw 
you had more potential.

Mr. Louis told her to be afraid of using again. He explained she 
needed to be wary of her friends. Drugs came from friends. Ricardo 
was exactly the kind of person she needed to abandon.

Mariela remained quiet, looking down.

But a week later, she was placed in charge of assigning chores to 
other kids: vacuuming, serving food, scrubbing toilets. She harnessed 
the same skills she'd used as the leader of her crew of drug-using friends.

It's your turn to get help, Mr. Louis had said. She started paying 
attention in meetings.

A few days before Christmas, she wrote a mock conversation with 
Adrian on a worksheet.

"Say, I got some, do you want some?" she imagined him asking her.

"Well, I'm sober now, Adrian."

She imagined him pushing her harder. "Adrian, I'm sorry, but I 
already stopped doing drugs! I don't want to do it no more! So just 
leave me alone!" she wrote.

She was determined to turn away from her old ways. But she would soon 
be back in the same apartment, near her old friends who were still using.

February 2007. On her second day back at W.T. White, as Mariela 
picked up papers in her health class, the teacher asked her to tell 
everyone where she'd been.

Oh, I just got out of rehab, she began. I was there for about five months.

She spent half the class telling her story. She was a drug addict. 
She'd used heroin. But she was clean, and proud. She wanted people to know.

Victor, a friend from rehab, got out and promised Mariela he'd never 
use again if only she would go out with him.

She felt guilty. She believed it was her fault that so many friends 
were hooked on cheese.

They dated one week. Then Victor either had too much or got his hands 
on a bad batch. He walked to her apartment saying he didn't feel 
right. She called 911, and he ended up back in rehab and permanently 
out of her life.

After that, she separated herself from her old friends. To start a 
new life, Mariela put her old life to death. She replaced drugs with 
school, and then work. She spoke about her experiences on local TV. A 
year later, Univision brought her to Miami for a national story on drug use.

She met a new boy, Herbert, who taught her to drive. She volunteered 
at Phoenix House, helping families that spoke Spanish. Then came a 
paying job at the center.

She started taking classes at Eastfield College in Mesquite to learn 
to be a substance abuse counselor. She expects to graduate in May.

Today, she's 21, and six years sober.

Another cheese addict finished the in-house Phoenix program in 
October, moving to outpatient counseling. His mother brought him to 
the center one day and thrust out her hand to Mariela. Cupped inside 
was a folded piece of paper.

Mariela's hands were shaking as she handed the cheese over to a counselor.

The lure of floating away was still there.

Editor's note: Staff writer Andrew Pantazi reconstructed the story of 
Mariela Torres from about 30 interviews across the last six months. 
In addition to more than 10 lengthy interviews with Mariela, he 
corroborated key details with her mother, sister, friends and 
counselors. Drug activity in Dallas Independent School District 
schools has been reported in the past, and where possible was 
corroborated with police sources and Mariela's own investigative 
file. The italicized quotes are presented as they were remembered by 
those present at the time.
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