On Pills and Needles

by Rick Van Warner

  We recognized early on that one of Tommy’s key issues seemed to be a lack of faith in a higher power. Despite having been raised in a Christian household, he did not believe in God, Jesus, or any organized religion. We discussed this numerous times and I personally found it distressing. But there was much more to his struggles than lack of faith or the chemical dependencies he established while numbing his personal pain. The drug use was a result, not the root cause, of whatever thoughts decimated his self-esteem. Opiate use was a symptom, not the disease itself—a self-medicating way to escape his inner torment.

  As the cycle of despair continued, with no positive results, my view shifted from viewing addiction as something that might be cured through committed abstinence to something that was far more rooted in a person’s psychological and psychiatric well being. Individual brain chemistry, which clearly can be rewired through substance abuse, seems to have as much, if not more, to do with the inability of an addict to break free as other causes. How could there be just one solution to such a complex problem? Why are some people able to shake off opiates forever but continue to drink or smoke in moderation? How did my late father, who never attended a single AA meeting or read a single word from AA’s The Big Book, simply decide to stop drinking one day at fifty-something years old and live another two decades without taking another sip of alcohol? Or how do you explain my son, who was exposed to so much recovery doctrine over a five-year period that he could teach it, yet continued to relapse time after time? Life is gray, not black and white. There is no silver bullet.

  There are also no perfect answers when it comes to matters of the brain; after all, it’s the final frontier in medical science. What I’ve grown to believe is that substance abuse stems from a complex combination of brain chemistry, genetic predisposition, socialization, and life experiences. Often it is inextricably linked with mental imbalances such as bipolar disorder, social anxiety, or depression.

  In the throes of crisis, you sometimes hear only what you want to hear, and Mary and I harbored secret envy of parents who reported that their kids were doing better while Tommy continued to flail. Bumping into some of these same parents months or years later, we realized they were mostly in the same boat. As Tommy’s vicious cycle of relapse and recovery continued, we clung to the only bright spot we could find—the time between relapses and Tommy’s desire to get clean kept getting shorter. Instead of descending into prolonged periods of oblivion, when we might not hear from him for weeks, he seemed to nearly immediately call for help just a day or two after falling off the wagon.

  When we received our son’s collect call, we were not that surprised. Less than a week after we had visited him in his latest halfway house and listened to him ramble on about aliens, conspiracy theories, and other subjects, our son was arrested, this time for possession of a controlled substance. He swore he had been only seeking to make a few bucks by agreeing to buy dope for a roommate. He was booked into the Palm Beach County Jail for violating probation. While the possession charges were dropped within two days, the inefficiencies inherent in our overcrowded jail and prison bureaucracy left him behind bars for the next two months, which was fine with us. Basically the two Florida counties couldn’t get their act together on a transfer back to our home county, where he had been under probation.

  A sad and well-documented travesty tracing back to America’s war on drugs has been the harsh sentences handed out for relatively nonviolent drug offenses, a major contributor to the overcrowding that plagues our nation’s penal system today. It’s a war that, despite popular belief largely due to Nancy Reagan’s highly visible “Just Say No” campaign, was not started by Ronald Reagan but was launched by Richard Nixon as a way to get back at the antiwar protestors chanting outside his White House doors. Every year between 1993 and 2009, more people were sentenced to state and federal prison due to drug crimes than violent crimes. Since 2000, one-third of all convictions have been related to drug crimes, more during this period than for property crimes. Of the thirty million drug arrests and subsequent incarcerations that occurred between 1993 and 2011, twenty-four million of them were for possessing drugs, not selling them.1 Prison overcrowding, including the disproportionate number of minorities behind bars, remains a very complex issue, and there are far more societal issues at play than the war on drugs. Yet the ease with which a nonviolent drug user can be locked up, often for long periods of time, is alarming.

  With Tommy behind bars, I stayed a day longer on a business trip in the area to see him on a Saturday morning, one of only two mornings per week when visitors were allowed. The process felt odd, beginning with the parking lot signs to leave all cell phones, weapons, and contraband in your vehicle before entering the wire-mesh walkway toward the jail’s rear entrance door. After the expected metal detector screening and a series of electronic double-security doors, deputies ushered the visitors into a waiting room. I was sad to see how many young children were there, waiting to see their incarcerated fathers.

  When we finally were ushered through the last step of security by a no-nonsense deputy, we were directed into a stark, fluorescent-lit visiting area featuring the two-way Plexiglas windows and phones common in movies and TV shows. As I chose my tiny, attached metal stool next to a phone, one of about fifteen to twenty available, I saw the woman next to me pull a wet wipe from her purse and wipe down the phone. Now disgusted with the idea of putting the receiver against my ear and the bottom part near my mouth, I improvised using my T-shirt.

  We were all positioned around the perimeter of the inner bullpen as guards ushered a big group of inmates inside, each locating his visitor and moving to the stool across from him or her. Face to face but separated by Plexiglas, it was a sad scene. Young kids cried, asking when Daddy would be coming home. Older kids shuffled awkwardly behind their mothers and younger siblings, looking as if this was the last place they wanted to be. Mothers discussed money and other problems. It struck me how privileged my children had been compared to most of these kids. But addiction is an equal-opportunity problem that couldn’t care less about economic or family circumstances.

  Tommy was one of the last to enter, and he had a large brown Afro that made him look somewhat crazed. He looked more like Cheech Marin of Cheech and Chong fame than the son I had visualized in my mind that morning.

  “Hi, Dad,” he said after picking up the black phone. “Why are you here?”

  “Not to bail you out,” I answered. “What happened?”

  “I needed money and agreed to score this guy in the house some dope,” he said, continuing to insist he wasn’t using at the time.

  “Where’s all your stuff?” I asked.

  “It’s probably gone. The woman running the halfway house is not a good person, and she probably has sold it by now. The cops wouldn’t let me go back and get anything.”

  His look was sullen and distant. Despite my best efforts, he barely managed a slight smile. After about fifteen minutes, an announcement was made to wrap up conversations, and the visit ended as abruptly as it began. As I watched him walk out of the room alongside much larger, scarier-looking inmates, it felt unreal that this was once my sweet little boy.

  In one of many futile attempts at recovering Tommy’s possessions from pawnshops, drug dealer residences, or halfway houses, I soon was pounding on the door of the house. The slovenly lady who answered allowed me to step inside briefly but said there was nothing of his there.

  “I have no idea what is even his,” she said. “Kids are in and out of here all the time, and we get new kids every week.”

  Halfway houses are simply another cog in the recovery industry, an alternative to sleeping on the streets but barely. Like in NA meetings and rehab centers, there are many addicts in halfway houses to gravitate toward if a person is not interested in trying to get clean. Most houses do not allow locks on bedroom doors, leading to constant theft and strife among the residents. During periods when Tommy found jobs and tried to get on track, he’d sometimes co
me home to a halfway house after work to find his money or belongings gone from under his mattress or dresser drawer. This usually led to angry accusations, getting kicked out, or simply giving up. Relapse was nearly certain to follow.

  After a few more weeks, which were likely agonizing for him but a welcome stretch of calm for us, Tommy was transferred to the jail in our home county. My wife visited once, but I refused. During this period we took solace in the fact that he was at least clean and alive. Or so we thought. Tommy later told me that it was quite easy to get drugs in jail if you had something to trade, such as cigarettes or money. He said they passed the time with dice and card games, gambling for cigarettes.

  A few weeks after being returned to the county jail in our area, Tommy’s day in court finally arrived, and we drove downtown to attend. His was the very last case called by the judge, meaning we were treated to a full three hours of watching other inmates and their lawyers, one by one, shuffle slowly through the obviously broken system. Many cases were dismissed due to errors in processing or because the clogged penal bureaucracy had already resulted in jail terms longer than the judge would have ordered. Other more violent offenders only said, “Yes, ma’am,” and their public defendants did all the talking.

  One by one the judge cycled through the morning caseload, taking a twenty-minute break at one point. The family holding room on the other side of glass from the court chambers had a small area about the size of a phone booth in which a family member was allowed to step up to and ask questions through an intercom. The room was packed when we arrived at 8:00 a.m., but now approaching the lunch hour, it was completely empty except for Mary, an armed deputy, and me. Finally our son was brought in front of the judge. Peering out from under a huge, bushy fro, his brown hair matted and filthy looking, Tommy spotted us on the other side of the glass and gave us a nod. He looked ashamed and embarrassed, which was better than the dispassionate, glazed look I’d seen far too many times before.

  With his parents unwilling to pump any more money into his bottomless pit to hire a lawyer, he appeared on his own accord. When the judge realized how much time he’d already spent in jail due to the inept coordination between two different counties, she dismissed the violation and released him. For the first time in two months, Tommy was no longer behind bars.

  17

  Back to the Brink

  After giving his girlfriend, Missy, and me the slip using the running-shower trick and then pawning his new laptop to afford a lethal amount of synthetic heroin, Tommy had returned to the house of his bloated drug dealer to try to permanently end his pain. Just two days after the sobbing episode in our living room that had terrified his girlfriend and parents, he shot up an enormous amount of drugs in an effort to pass out and never wake up again. He succeeded, briefly.

  When he stopped breathing, the enormous man who had sold him the stuff and who owned the house performed CPR on Tommy and brought him back.

  “You’re not going to die in my house, mofo!” he told Tommy once he had been revived. “Go somewhere else to die,” he ordered, showing the level of concern drug dealers truly have for their customers.

  Tommy called Missy, who mobilized Mary, and within hours they’d managed to pick him up from a neighborhood she later described as “very scary.” Missy convinced him to enter the hospital to detox. Sadly, there was to be a third time we would process through this hospital’s emergency room, only to learn that the facility no longer accepted detox patients due to a change in medical laws.

  A few days later Missy drove him from the hospital to a treatment facility an hour north of Orlando, a place that was relatively new and had earned a good reputation. This time we did not participate beyond continuing to keep Tommy on our family’s insurance plan. It was entirely through Missy’s efforts that he was given another chance at recovery. Any costs that our insurance didn’t cover were his problem, not ours, we decided. Mary kept tabs on the situation through Missy, and we also spoke to our son a few times on the phone and tried to be encouraging.

  Once the amount of time that insurance would cover ran out, the center of course determined that either we would have to pay privately or he would have to leave. Coincidentally, it was the day before Thanksgiving. We reluctantly decided to bring him back home to see his family for the holiday.

  After his second death-by-overdose attempt, my attitude toward him began to shift. Again Mary and I reversed roles. This time she had simply had enough and felt completely betrayed by him after trying so hard to get him on track. She was finished, except for the deep love and hope she still harbored and the intense worry only a mother can truly understand. I felt the tremendous sadness and hopelessness, wondering if there was anything we would ever be able to do to help our son.

  Tommy looked and sounded great during the holiday; extended sobriety apparently had cleared some of the cobwebs from his damaged brain. We decided to let him stay home through Christmas to give us time, for a change, to consider future options without the pressure of a twenty-four-hour deadline.

  In a somewhat surreal experience a couple weeks later, Mary and Jessie were driving back into our neighborhood when Mary spotted Tommy’s stolen car in our neighborhood, the second automobile appropriated by drug dealers over money Tommy owed them. Mary again decided to throw caution to the wind and now was tailing his car just a few blocks from our home. An aggressive woman who rarely lets go of anything without a fight, she was determined to recover this car as well. It was a wild coincidence that she had spotted it at all, since the drug dealer lived twenty miles away in a different city.

  The driver didn’t notice that a diminutive suburban mom with a Christmas tree on her roof rack was tailing him, a feisty lady who wasn’t thinking about the potential danger of confronting the driver.

  When he parked at a house and went inside, she drove around the corner where she could keep a sight line and called the local police chief. By the time the driver came back outside, two uniformed officers greeted him. Since we had yet to file a stolen vehicle report, the driver was released. Our son’s car was retrieved and eventually sold for much less than he’d paid for it just months before.

  Tommy again decided that he needed to leave Orlando before slipping back into his old ways. He seemed to hate the merry-go-round he’d been riding and was sincere in his desire to start fresh somewhere else.

  Our son Paul, back from working in Seattle and now living in Tampa, began talking with Tommy about moving there. Paul made it clear that living with him was not an option, so the two of them began seeking halfway houses that weren’t far from where Paul lived. Despite separate conversations with both his parents about what a foolish idea we thought it would be to disrupt his life by bringing his addicted brother into it, just like his grandmother Dona did before him, Paul ignored our warnings. Soon we found ourselves setting Tommy up in his fifth halfway house, this one owned by a married couple, themselves recovering addicts. At first the woman seemed to truly care about the lost souls paying a significant sum each week, most courtesy of their parents, to rent a room. The renters were encouraged to attend meetings. In time we would find out that her concern was an act, just another elaborate lie in the deceptive culture of drugs and the recovery business.

  For several weeks, Tommy seemed to finally be moving in the right direction, landing a job as a lead cook at a new restaurant that opened just blocks from his house. The general manager loved him and the gregarious regional manager, whom I’d known for a few years, took him under his wing. For the next several weeks he worked overtime at the job, which experienced a strong opening and much higher than expected sales. Our family visited him on friends-and-family night, and he beamed with pride when introducing us to colleagues.

  Unfortunately the other cook that Tommy was splitting most of the duties of running the kitchen with was injured in a motorcycle accident and had to take a leave of absence. Tommy suddenly found himself working sixty hours a week, sometimes twelve hours straight, something he was ne
ither physically nor mentally ready to do. Never saying no to taking on double shifts or coming in on his day off, he drove himself to exhaustion. Faced with this new type of adversity and because of his longing to be normal, which included smoking weed behind the restaurant or at parties with his coworkers, he soon slipped back into opiate use.

  Paul noticed it too and came to the realization that having his brother living nearby had become burdensome. Tommy began showing up to work late and, on at least one occasion, high. Within a matter of days Tommy went from being the star kitchen employee of this busy new restaurant to being fired. The slide down was always fast.

  By now the halfway house ruse being carried out by the woman who ran the house became evident to us all. A couple weeks earlier on a Friday evening, we pulled into the parking lot adjacent to the halfway house to pick Tommy up to take him to dinner. The woman sprang off the front porch when she saw my car and rushed to the driver’s window, moving much more quickly than I’d thought possible. She was anxious to collect that week’s rent. I immediately recognized the familiar look of desperate angst in her eyes, an anxious stare we knew from experience was that of an addict craving a fix. Tommy had told us she was using, but we no longer believed anything he said so had dismissed his claim as paranoia. Adding to his anger and growing spiral downward was the fact that other halfway house residents were routinely stealing from him. Despite his constant protests, the sloppy, deceptive house manager refused to let him put a lock on his door. We agreed that he needed to move on and that the relatively expensive house in the decrepit neighborhood was doing more harm than good.