Pubdate: Sun, 15 Jun 2014
Source: News Journal, The (Wilmington, DE)
Copyright: 2014 The News Journal
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/1c6Xgdq3
Website: http://www.delawareonline.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/822
Author: Adam Taylor

DELAWARE'S NEW FACES OF ADDICTION

RECOVERY FOR THESE YOUNG HEROIN ADDICTS REQUIRES A UNIQUELY DIFFICULT PATH.

Like many young addicts, Nola Parcells is part conformist, part
eccentric.

On Wednesday nights, she plays second base and catcher on her softball
team. After the game, though, she lets Cash, her albino checkered
garter snake, crawl through her platinum blonde hair with lavender
highlights to help her relax.

Nola is the new face of heroin addiction in Delaware. A student at the
University of Delaware, where her dad is a professor, she's white,
charming and solidly upper-middle class.

She's 21 years old, part of a growing number of heroin addicts getting
clean before they're legally allowed to have their first drink. The
young addicts say this brings additional challenges to getting clean,
and drug counselors say new strategies are required to help them
navigate the minefield that awaits them in their first year of abstinence.

A study last month published in the JAMA Psychiatry found heroin is
appealing to a more diverse group, with a spike over the past decade
among white, suburban users. The average age of today's heroin user is
22.9 years old. In Delaware last year, 2,750 adults who identified
heroin as their drug of choice sought state-funded treatment, the
highest number since at least 1987. State Health and Human Services
Secretary Rita Landgraf said kids have gotten into the juvenile
treatment system for heroin as young as 12.

Recovery for these young addicts requires a uniquely difficult path.
Heroin is a powerful drug, with a particularly hard bottom that comes
quickly for the addict. While some alcoholics can function for decades
before they finally seek help in their 50s or 60s, defeated heroin
addicts are walking into rehabilitation centers in droves in their
teens or early 20s.

The dynamic of a young addict and such a serious drug creates tricky
obstacles to getting clean. For a heroin addict, there's no going back
to alcohol or marijuana. Eventually, they'll go back to their deadly
drug of choice, experts say.

Nola began using heroin when she was 18. She has been heroin-free
since August and a patient for several months at ARGO Institute, an
intensive-outpatient treatment facility for young adults in Price's
Corner that she credits with saving her life.

"I never, never, never thought I would live until I was 21," she said.
"This place saved me."

Technically, Nola has been clean for only 52 days. She had one drink
at a wedding reception last September, then another at a cabin during
a getaway in the woods on April 25, just four days after her 21st
birthday, a trigger-event for many young addicts.

"There was a sign there that says, 'What happens at the cabin, stays
at the cabin,' " she said.

At the time, Nola was guilty of the flawed thinking of some who,
fragile in early recovery, believe that not getting caught sneaking a
drink is all that matters. Eventually, she knows she has to get to the
point where the person staring back in the mirror knows what she did.

She's working on that.

To her credit, she returned to ARGO and confessed.

Mandell Much, ARGO's clinical director, said the drinking setback is
obviously not optimal, but the fact she immediately returned to
treatment is a good sign.

"Is that ideal? No," Much said. "But we see that as progression toward
a life of abstinence."

In her addiction, Nola used her charm to manipulate police and avoid
arrests in North Philadelphia with heroin in her car.

"It was easy," she said. "I just started crying and told them I had an
eating disorder. I was such a scumbag."

Now she uses her charm in a positive way, expressing gratitude toward
her softball coach, Alfred E. Jay III, himself a recovering alcoholic
with 25 years sobriety. He offers Nola guidance on and off the diamond.

"She's a good kid, a very caring and loving person," Jay said. "She's
like that with everybody but herself."

Nola's working on that, too.

A hard sell

It's hard for a 20-year-old leaving rehab to think of living the rest
of their life in complete abstinence. Tim Miller knows that more than
anyone.

His opiate use, like many heroin addicts, started when he took
prescription painkillers from a relative's medicine cabinet when he
was a teenager growing up in Fairfax. Counselors tried to help him
when he was a Brandywine High School student. Miller didn't want to
hear it.

"I guess I needed more pain," he said.

And more pain he got.

Years after high school, then with a full-blown heroin habit, he
caught a burglary charge in the middle of a scorching hot summer and
landed in Wilmington's Howard Young prison. That meant he was going to
be dopesick in jail.

For several days, he suffered through it: profuse sweating, diarrhea,
fatigue, throwing up. His muscles ached, his body twitched. The only
silver lining was that the physical pain distracted him from the
reality that heroin had broken his spirit as well.

"Really bad, awful," he said. "I never wanted anything more than how
bad I wanted to be clean and sober in that moment."

He's been clean ever since. Now, he's 30, working as a counselor at
Gaudenzia House, a rehab facility in Delaware City, helping young men
avoid the same fate. It's not easy making the young addicts see what
living drug-free looks like.

"I used to think that recovery meant going to an AA meeting in a
church basement with a bunch of old people who talked about how great
things were back in the day, and how miserable things are now," he
said.

Not a great sell to a young kid who still harbors dreams that he might
be able to go to Las Vegas with his friends at 21 and live the
"Hangover" movie, as long as he avoids opiates, and limits his
indulgence to alcohol or pot.

More people get high after leaving rehabs than those who get clean.
Yet hope abounds in recovery.

Much of it can be found in sober living houses, where
relapse-prevention experts such as Jessica Cirillo of Mirmont
Treatment Center in Media, Pennsylvania, send young men and women
after they leave in-patient treatment.

"A sober-living environment is particularly beneficial for a young
adult," Cirillo said. "It helps them get established right out of the
gate. They're welcomed with unconditional regard and with open arms.
It does for them what they can't do for themselves."

They're not anonymous

They are young, stubbon addicts, these men in their late teens and
early 20s at Independence Lodge, a series of three recovery houses in
Bucks County, Pa., that serve men fresh out of rehab from
Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. They don't like taking
directions from counselors like Miller.

They are the young turks of the recovery movement, part of a new breed
who feel no negative stigma about having been a heroin addict. While
respectful of the traditions of the 12-step support groups they attend
daily, they're proud of having put their addictions in a state of
arrest, with an eye toward long-term remission.

They're happy to talk about their past. Mostly, though, they're
thrilled to have their names in the paper for something other than the
police blotter.

While the men all came from different walks of life, their paths in
addiction and recovery are remarkably similar. They began with
prescription opiates, then graduated to heroin because it was
stronger, cheaper and easier to get. Their lives spun out of control.

Chad Golt, 19, from Mullica Hill, New Jersey, had to drop out of high
school last year because he was shivering from heroin withdrawal 90
minutes into class every day. He first did heroin at 15, hated it,
then swore it off for a year. He got a job at a restaurant, began
popping Percocet and eventually was buying heroin in the Badlands
section of Philadelphia.

George Brooke, 23, was an elementary school aide in Delaware County,
Pennsylvania, who got quietly fired for stealing an employee's credit
card to support his heroin habit. Soon after, he stood and watched his
grandfather crying, pleading with him to stop doing drugs. He was
living in his van and didn't understand what all the fuss was about.

Jack Grauer, 22, of Horsham, Pennsylvania, began a three-year descent
into heroin the day before his senior prom and ended it the day he
called his mother from his apartment that no longer had electricity.
He had relapsed - again. He needed rehab - again.

Ethan Cirko, 20, of Hatboro, Pennsylvania, started doing Percocet in
10th grade. He tried being like his friends, who just drank and smoked
pot, but always returned to the isolation of opiate use. Eventually,
he got arrested for stealing money from work and kicked out of a
recovery house in Florida for getting high.

Illusions of social use

After their stints in rehab, each harbored illusions they could be
like their social-using, weekend-warrior buddies.

In all cases, it didn't work out. Their buddies had fun, made it to
work Monday morning and didn't drink or smoke pot again until the next
weekend. The guys in recovery at the lodge, meanwhile, all wound up
shooting heroin in a room by themselves, and eventually back in rehab.

Golt, for example, thought he could have a "straight party rage,"
meaning he would drink, smoke pot and try to meet women.

"It just doesn't work that way for me," he said.

He wound up back in Kensington, the notorious heroin market in
Philadelphia.

"Now I know I'm not normal," he said. "I'm 19, but I can't ever drink
again. Because if I do, I might end up in an alley with a needle in my
arm. That's the truth and I understand that today."

Golt knows that because one of his friends from his first stint in
rehab asked him to go to South Street in Philadelphia. Golt had to
work, so he declined. His friend relapsed and died in an alley off
South Street that night.

"Honestly, if I would have gone with him, I probably would have OD'd
that night too," Golt said.

There's nothing like the pain of a relapse to educate an addict and
hasten moments of clarity. The men were humbled, and began to listen
to the intensive relapse-prevention training offered in rehabs such as
Mirmont, where Golt has been twice.

Today, the young men are doing well.

Golt just attended the prom with a girl who is a senior at the high
school he left as a dropout.

Brooke has a job building cabinets, happier than he ever was working
with kids at an elementary school.

Grauer is the manager of one of the Independence Lodge houses and the
mother whose heart he broke not long ago comes to visit to see how
well he's doing.

Cirko just celebrated one year clean and plans to attend school for
radiology or something in the medical field, something he didn't dare
dream of a year ago. He said he no longer wishes he could be a social
drinker. He'll be 21 soon and happy to hang out with his roommates at
the lodge.

"I've been relieved from the obsession of using," Cirko said. "Why
would I ever want to test the waters again?"

Band of brothers

More than four years clean, Bryan Kennedy started his recovery at
Mirmont after winding up living in his parents' unfinished basement in
his 30s, throwing back massive amounts of vodka and opiates every day,
and neglecting his beloved American Bulldog, Stella.

Kennedy's addiction was much like those of the men in the house. It
just happened a decade earlier. He was raised in Chester County, a
popular high school athlete, active in the student council. But he was
socially awkward. Alcohol helped with that. Then marijuana. Then
Valium and Xanax. When he went to college, he found his "dream job" at
a bar, where they tipped him with cocaine.

All of it worked. Until it didn't. While his primary drug of choice
was vodka, at the end, he was in Florida, with a needle full of heroin
in his arm. The social butterfly was finally alone.

Kennedy's transformation has been remarkable. Any young heroin addict
who might share the fear Miller once had - that getting clean young
means a life doomed to diners with crusty AARP members after AA
meetings - would do well to follow Bryan Kennedy on Facebook.

Simply scrolling through his posts of a single three-day weekend can
be exhausting. He hops from visits to rehabs, motorcycle rides that
benefit treatment centers, sober dances at private recovery clubs,
midnight 12-step meetings, quick jaunts to Sea Isle City. And, yes,
there are stops at diners, but not with older, retired people.

He's a seasoned 36 years old in comparison to the men who live in his
houses, but he doesn't show it. He's lives in one of the houses and
routinely takes some of the lodge residents on his adventures. Those
who don't travel with him can share his life in his social media
posts, offering the life in recovery that drugs promised, but never
delivered. Stella comes, too.

Today, Kennedy inspires hope. His name, picture and bio appears on a
website titled, "I Am Not Anonymous," designed to remove the stigma of
addiction and help people get the help they need. A born networker,
his Facebook page includes pictures of him with Phillies first baseman
Ryan Howard and New Jersey Gov. Cris Christie.

His biggest problem used to be that he couldn't get out of his
parents' basement. His biggest problem today?

"Not enough hours in the day," he said. "At the end of my addiction, I
burned every bridge I had and no one would talk to me. Today, I look
at my phone before I go to bed and realize I haven't gotten back to 10
people because there wasn't enough time."

Resources: Where to get help

Rebuilding relationships

Kennedy prides himself in having multiple common areas in the houses.
He knows he could renovate them for more bedrooms and make more money,
but he won't do it. More common areas mean the residents are less
likely to isolate themselves in their bedrooms. Isolation can doom an
addict in early recovery, he said.

Kennedy says the first 24 to 48 hours makes or breaks the experience
at one of his houses. The men are just as nervous coming into the
houses as they were a month earlier entering rehab, he said.

"You can see their anxiety and fear," he said. "But within a few
hours, they're hanging out, playing cards or X-box, and laughing with
the guys. The older guys are helping the next guy, giving what was
freely given to them."

Then, weeks later, things get even better. They get jobs, and, for
once, keep them. They have money and, for once, keep it in their
pocket to spend on everyday things, not a bag of dope.

"They've done a lot of damage to the relationships with their mothers
and fathers," he said. "Their parents visit and relationships get
rebuilt. Their moms and dads see that they're doing OK. Their parents
go home and can sleep again. That's what gives me goosebumps."

Grauer, who is very close with his family, said he doesn't know if
he'd be clean without his housemates.

"We share a bond I can't share with my mom or my sister," he said.
"The bond is that I'm able to help them as much as they are helping me
to get another day clean and sober."

Grauer now manages one of the Independence Lodge Houses. He's not only
having fun these days, he's had an epiphany as a young addict that he
hopes will guide him for the rest of his life.

"I don't have a heroin problem. I have a 'me problem,' " he said. "I
have an illness of the mind that tells me when I have one, I need
another one immediately, whether it's a drink, a joint, heroin or
cocaine. I cannot control it once it's in my body."
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