Heroin tightens its grip on younger users
August 19, 2008 at 8:00 pm by Mara Shalhoup in News
Editor’s note: Some of the last names of the subjects in this story have been withheld.
There’s nothing about Sarah that would lead you to believe heroin nearly sucked the life out of her — on so many occasions, during so many ambulance rides to the hospital, she can’t put a number on them.
Sitting across from her ex-boyfriend Brian at the Majestic diner on Ponce, Sarah glows with good health and positive energy. Her long, flaxen blond hair frames a golden complexion, and the green stones in her silver rings heighten the color of her pale, sage eyes.
One night 10 years ago, when she was 17, she and some friends were driving home from a pool hall when a car pulled out in front of them. The impact tore the muscles from the bones in Sarah’s back. The guy sitting behind her in the back seat was in a coma for weeks.
While recovering from her injuries, Sarah relied on a cocktail of prescribed drugs, including the pain killer Percocet and muscle relaxer Soma. Then she ran out of insurance money. She no longer had access to the narcotics to which she’d grown attached. So she started buying prescription pills from a drug dealer. That went on for a few months, until the time when she gave her dealer $100 for some Soma, and he gave her a half-gram of heroin instead.
She snorted a little, just to ease the pain. The next time, she snorted a little more. It was bliss. “My world was kind of crooked my whole life,” she says. “And I started doing heroin, and everything kind of evened out.”
Read the rest of this article here.
(Photo by Joeff Davis)
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