I don’t know where I’m going
But I’m going to try for the kingdom if I can
‘Cause it makes me feel like I’m a man
When I put a spike into my vein
then I tell you things aren’t quite the same.
— From the song “Heroin,” by Lou Reed
“I sold my body and my soul for drugs,”
Burlington addict Nina H. bravely confessed
to a roomful of strangers — and a tape recorder
— last month in Burlington at the third and final public
hearing on methadone treatment in Vermont. The committee’s
findings will be presented to the legislature this
winter as lawmakers consider whether to make the synthetic
narcotic available to drug addicts in the state.
Nina, who has been using heroin for 20 years, is not
your stereotypical junkie, if there is such a person. The
42-year-old Vermonter spoke with a quavering voice in
vehement support of the drug she believes could allow
her a “normal” life — and earned applause from many of
the listeners. Her testimony at the hearing, along with
that of other current and recovering addicts from around
Vermont, was both emotional and logical.
“Why should I have to move out of my home state to
get the drug that was made to treat my problem?” Nina
asked. Although there were a few dissenting opinions, the
majority spoke in favor of methadone treatment, which is
controversial in Vermont in part because of Governor —
and physician — Howard Dean’s well-known opposition
to it. Only eight states in the nation, including Vermont
and neighboring New Hampshire, do not make the drug
available to recovering addicts.
The testimony underscored the insidiousness of the
drug every school kid is warned about, whose negative
side effects include slowed gait, slurred speech, constricted
pupils, droopy eyelids, impaired night vision, dry skin,
itching, skin infections, vomiting, constipation, decreased
sexual pleasure, respiratory depression, impaired immune
system, decreased appetite, irregular heart beat and blood
pressure, addiction, coma and death.
But heroin, also known as smack, horse, mud, brown
sugar, black tar, Big H, dope and junk, makes a far more
alluring first impression on those who try it. “You feel
really beautiful,” is how Nina describes a heroin high.
“Any kind of self-doubt you ever had is gone. You just
feel like you’re really pretty and really good at whatever it
is you want to be good at. Everything around you is really
beautiful, like being wrapped in really beautiful gauze
that you can see through.”
The first few years that Nina used, she says, she didn’t
feel omnipotent, just safe, happy and able to deal with
life. If it was a delusion, she didn’t care. “Nothing mattered
nothing could hurt me. I didn’t lose
my sense
of morality
or values,”
she
adds, “but my
insecurities of
what people
thought or how I
looked just didn’t
matter. I just wanted
to go out and have fun
and feel good, and for a
long time it worked.”
From the kitchen table
at her mother’s house, Nina
— her real name and other
identifying details have been
altered for this article to protect
her privacy — gazes out the window at November clouds
sulking over the Green Mountains as she talks about the
addiction she’s had most of her adult life. Nina refers to
the infamous euphoric effects of the drug in the past
tense because, for the last 10 years, it hasn’t felt that way
to her at all. Rather, Nina has taken heroin just to keep
from getting sick — withdrawal symptoms are as horrific
as the drug’s side-effects — like the time she puked up a
bucket full of bile in a jail cell. “It was so gross,” she
recalls with a grimace.
A lot of stories about addicts are written completely in
the past tense because the addict has died, usually from
an overdose. Though Nina is still alive, her story is only
slightly less harrowing. She stopped shooting heroin —
again — in August and requires daily doses of methadone
to keep her stable.
This month Nina and her fiancé, Greg M., also a
recovering addict, are moving to Greenfield,
Mass., to be closer to the services of a methadone
clinic. As the legislative testimony revealed, some
Vermonters drive long distances every day to be treated
there. After two decades of dope and desperation, Nina
seems determined to shake her demon at last. While she
once thought she would need to be on methadone the
rest of her life, she now favors gradually reducing dependence
on that drug — also highly addictive — and eventually
going off it altogether. For one thing, the drug
diminishes her enjoyment of sex, as did heroin. Still, in
the past Nina has had as many relapses as detoxes — 16,
by her count — and her “successes” have lasted only six
months at best. Some former friends, tired of her broken
promises, lost faith long ago in Nina’s ability to break the
habit. Why should this time be different?
Maybe because she now has two compelling reasons to
come “clean”: She’s HIV-positive; and she’s “finally got a
boyfriend who doesn’t want to see me with needles in my
arms.” But Nina knows, perhaps better than anyone,
there are no guarantees.
Nina grew up in a picturesque, rural pocket of
central Vermont, an only child and a straight-A
student — except for algebra, she confesses. Her
father, a restaurateur whom she remembers as very loving
and nurturing, was 20 years older than his wife and died
when Nina was 12. After that, her home life disintegrated:
Her mother began seeing a man who molested Nina.
She describes her mother, Susan, as “afraid of the guy; she
didn’t marry him, but she didn’t make him leave. Of
course, I felt guilty.” Nina didn’t tell her mother about
the abuse until many years later — the first time she went
to Maple Leaf Farm, a detox center in Underhill.
“The physical abuse stopped after about six months,”
Nina continues, “but the emotional … I was afraid all the
time. I grew up my whole teenage years terrified.” When
Susan took a nighttime job, Nina was left alone with her
abuser — a man she says got her mother’s cousin pregnant
during the time he was living with them. Nina put a
lock on her bedroom door. Whenever she went out on a
date, “he accused me of fucking everyone in town,” Nina
remembers bitterly.
There is no doubt in her mind that childhood abuse
led to low self-esteem, a feeling that she didn’t deserve
happiness or success. That same sense of worthlessness,
Nina says, is why she dropped out of college, in upstate
New York, after a year and a half — despite being bright,
creative and interested in an acting career.
Nina also blames the abuse, and subsequent self-hatred,
for her addiction. Had it “not happened to me, I
think I would
have been able to
just try heroin
and move on.
But if you have
this hole because
your caretaker
did not provide
for you … I just
think that’s a
big piece of
addiction.”
Nina’s
theory has
been corroborated
again
and again. “I’ve
been in a lot of clinics and met a lot
of addicts, and every one of them has had some abuse
in their past,” she asserts. Statistics among women
inmates at the Chittenden County Correctional Center
support her arguments. The majority of incarcerated
women have histories of substance abuse, according to
superintendent John Murphy. “Roughly 70 percent,” he
adds, “have experienced some kind of sexual abuse.”
Nina’s telling of the “junkie years” is convoluted and
out of chronological order, a jumbled recall that perhaps
reveals her state of mind for much of that time. It’s difficult
for her to sort out what happened and when — the
effect of which is to dash her life into a kaleidoscope of
blurry events. Nina’s tale also reveals her enduring inclination
toward a kind of innocence — she expresses hurt
surprise about every friend or lover who lied to her or
cheated on her — underscored by her characteristic
demeanor of downcast eyes and
soft voice. But sometimes, Nina
admits, she was not above the
same deceit; her desperate search
for love included serial affairs
with both women and men, each
of them, including a young husband,
offering only temporary
solace — and usually drugs.
She was astonished when she
was fired from a Burlington
retail shop for showing up high
on narcotics. It was a double
standard, she protests, because
her boss and other employees
routinely snorted cocaine and drank on
the premises. She
says it wasn’t fair. She
never understood, until
recently, why many of her
“straight” friends turned away.
She nearly whimpers at remembered
injustices; even now, older
and presumably wiser, Nina can’t
seem to quite relinquish the
familiar role of victim. “I believe
I suffer from post-traumatic
stress syndrome,” she offers.
Like many teenagers, Nina
had tried pot in high school,
though she later rejected it — “it
made me paranoid,” she says. “I
didn’t like it.” She found her
body had little tolerance for alcohol,
either, and she never
smoked cigarettes. She liked
cocaine, and the downers
Quaaludes and Dilaudids. For
quite a while, she “could hang
onto a quarter-gram of coke for
weeks,” Nina notes, using it only
as a “treat.” But the first time she
injected cocaine, “things really
changed — you want that rush
over and over again. The first
time, you hear bells ringing, you
feel like you’re floating, it’s better
than coming.” The rush lasted
three or four seconds; she began
to buy a lot more coke. “Drugs
started to turn into a sort of psychological need,” she recalls.
Still, Nina insists she was no
addicted to cocaine and never
abused legitimate prescription
drugs — except for the three
times she tried to commit suicide
by ingesting pills. But after
she began using heroin in 1980,
it quickly became the biggest
monkey on her back. By 1981,
she had contracted hepatitis by
sharing needles with a friend.
She began to receive disability
payments for depression and
addiction. “The federal laws
changed in 1996 and you could
no longer receive for addiction,”
Nina explains, “so I had to be
reevaluated. But by then I was
HIV-positive.” She receives disability
still — a total of $571 a
month. She hasn’t had a full-time
job for close to a decade.
Over the years, Nina has
been in and out of clinics — she
was treated at UVM s Substance
Abuse Research Center seven
times; she went to the Brattleboro
Retreat five times and
Maple Leaf once, among other
clinics in Massachusetts. Even
though she wasn’t an alcoholic,
at the urging of a friend she
tried Alcoholics Anonymous for
support. In 1985 she had sworn
off drugs and thrown her coke
stash away on New Year’s Eve —
an action she was “very proud
of.” But one day when she mentioned
to her AA sponsor that
she occasionally smoked a little
pot, the sponsor told her she
couldn’t do that. The woman
also disapproved of Nina’s job at
the time in a Burlington bar.
Nina derides the belief that if
you are addicted to one substance
you are at risk with them
all.
“In the group I said, ‘I came
here to stop shooting heroin and
cocaine. If I meet Don Juan in
the desert and he offers me peyote,
I’m going to take it,”‘ Nina
says. Though the group was supportive,
she became disenchanted
with the 12-step philosophy
and eventually left it. Off and
on through the years, though,
she has seen a private therapist.
It was not long after the AA
experience that Nina had another
relapse. Why? She had a job,
she was collaborating on an art
project and getting paid for it,
she was in a play. “Things were
going too good,” she says. “This
is typical for relapsers — things
are going too good and you
don’t believe they should,
because of the things that happened
to you as a kid. I’m obviously
not worth anything. It’s
only in hindsight,” she adds,
“that I realize that.”
Her roommate at the time, a
recovering coke-head, kicked
Nina out of the house.
When Nina moved to
Boston in 1994, her
self-destruction
reached a new low: She started
turning tricks to pay for drugs.
She says — apparently unaware
of the irony — that she was really
lucky nothing “bad” ever happened
to her. “I could possibly
have gotten killed, gotten in a
car with the wrong person,” she suggests.
But prostitution itself, of course, was bad enough. “I
hated myself, I hated men, my relationship. How could
someone who loves you let you do that?” She’s referring
to her then-boyfriend, who took her to Park Square
where she would hook until there was enough drug
money for both of them.
Her voice rising, she momentarily gets a little defensive:
“A part of me feels like, okay, isn’t working at
McDonald’s prostituting myself, because I’m really smart?
I struggle with this whole political issue. Guys would ask
me, when I was a prostitute, ‘What are you doing here?
You don’t belong here.’ I would ask them, What are you doing here?’”
No matter how she frames it, though, Nina acknowledges
those were rough times. In one of many moves, she
lost all her poetry and other writing — a casualty she feels
erased a part of her identity. Far more devastating, her
boyfriend died from complications due to AIDS, and
because of unprotected sex with him, she learned she was
HIV-positive a year later. For a while, she lived with a 60-
year-old crack addict. She wanted to go to poetry readings
but didn’t have the energy. Her days, as she attempts
to describe them, sound aimless and depressing, though
she says, “I read a lot.”
Sometime in this period, Nina was rejected from a
clinic program for missing three consecutive days — “I
was just too tired to go,” she insists — and she started
to get really, really sick. She called an ambulance,
which took her to a detox center in Jamaica Plain.
“When I threw up all over their bathroom,” Nina
remembers, “they broke protocol and got me some
methadone real quick.”
At that center Nina met Don — a “friendly guy”
who turned out to be a thief, a dealer and her next
boyfriend. Nina remembers vividly a time she and Don
were arrested for possession. She was humiliated by the
hose-down in what she calls “a really scary jail” out of
state. The couple moved to Vermont. Soon, Don was
running dope from Boston — then, as now, bags of heroin bought for $10 in the city sold for $35 in Burlington,
a profitable deal. “Don was always doing some shit, I
don’t know what,” Nina says. She didn’t want to know.
That boyfriend ended up in prison — he’s now serving
time on a federal charge of possession. Nina marvels
that she escaped being indicted and imprisoned herself.
The federal agents were “always nice to me,” she says.
Maybe that seeming “innocence” is what saved her.
Nina broke up with Don after he went to jail.
Within months, she hooked up with Greg, and by all
appearances so far, that has been a good thing. Injured
several years ago in an accident, he too is on disability
and isn’t sure of his future beyond moving to
Greenfield. But while he seems devoted to Nina and
determined to keep them both off drugs, Greg is
playing with a different kind of fire: He refuses to
use a condom. Nina is embarrassed to admit this;
they both know the risks. “But there’s nothing I can
do about it,” she laments. “It’s his choice.”
In the last year or so Nina has been a peer educator
for Vermonters with AIDS or HIV. It’s a volunteer
position — and a mission — that she
takes very seriously. “She’s really doing great,”
says her friend and fellow addict Michael M.
“She’s really become an advocate.” Nina’s
job, along with counseling any “new
HIVs” who want it, is to disseminate
information about safe sex, high-risk behaviors
and free AIDS testing, and to give out
condoms and bleach kits — bleach kills the
virus on syringes and spoons.
Even when she was using, Nina would talk to other
addicts about how to avoid HIV. “I would offer to go
with people to the anonymous testing sites,” she says. “Of
course, everyone said they were practicing safe sex. I knew
some of them were lying.” After two decades in the
duplicitous world of dope addiction, she has developed a
healthy cynicism that suggests she may not be taken in so
easily next time.
“I can only hope and pray,” says Nina’s mother
Susan, “that this time it will be different.”
She’s referring to Nina and Greg’s move to
Greenfield and the methadone treatment. “It’s really hard
to believe it’s going to be, but I have a good feeling about
this, and her relationship now. I have not heard her say
for months that she doesn’t want to live.”
Oddly, Susan does not recollect the suicide attempt
nearly 10 years ago that Nina said took place at her
mother’s house while her mother was there. Nina says she
took 30 tablets of the anti-depressant amitriptylin, wrote
suicide notes, told her mother she was killing herself, and
proceeded to sleep for three days. She believes her mother
looked in on her but did not call an ambulance “because
she was afraid they would take me to Waterbury.”
“She used to talk about committing suicide a lot,”
counters Susan, perplexed because she can’t remember
that particular incident. “She may have made the remark,
but she’d made it so many times before I probably didn’t
pay any attention to it.” Susan acknowledges that for
many years her daughter didn’t want to live but, she says,
“I guess she’s a survivor.”
Susan endured plenty of sorrow as her only
child fell victim to
drugs, but exhibits a classic Vermont
stoicism about it now. Though kindly and plainspoken,
she seems slightly numb, as if she wishes she
could look the other way but has seen far too
much to even try. Twenty years ago, though,
Susan didn’t have a clue. “Never having been
around anyone … that was using drugs,” she says,
“I guess I was pretty much in the dark about it
all.”
Susan agrees it’s been difficult to cope, but
says she can “get it off my chest” with a couple of
her sisters and her best friend. “It’s really been hard
because there isn’t anyone else in the family that
ever did any drugs … They seem to think you can
just quit if you want to.” She says the hardest thing
was watching Nina not finish school, and watching
her health go downhill. “She never used to take care
of herself, she’d go without food so she could get
drugs.”
One thing Susan credits Nina with, though, is
always staying close. “For a long time she carried a lot of anger towards me because of stuff that happened to
her in her teenage years, but she wouldn’t go all that
long without getting in touch.”
Indeed, Susan was always the one whose home — and
often money — was available, and Nina has retreated to it nearly as often as she has tried to get clean. “She
doesn’t like it,” Nina says of her lifestyle, “but if it wasn’t
for her I’d be dead. I don’t believe in the enabling concept;
I believe she saved my life.”
Asked why she put up with Nina — and a string of
often unsavory companions — Susan says simply,
“because I just love her so much. People told me to try
‘tough love,’ and I tried it for a couple months and just
couldn’t stand it. If anything had happened to her and I
had disowned her,” Susan continues, “I wouldn’t have
been able to live with myself. I’ve talked with a few different
people whose children are addicts and they don’t
know where their kids are! How can any parent stand it?
Even if they’re 45 years old, they’re still your child.”
Susan doesn’t know what she might have done differently
to help Nina, but she says she did once consider
moving to a state that had a methadone clinic. Though
she’s too reticent to advocate publicly, she feels strongly
that Vermont should make the treatment available to its
growing population of addicts. And her advice to parents
of young users is simply “try to get them some help,
whatever that help is. Of course,” she adds, “unless people
have been through it, they don’t really understand it.
More information needs to get out. I think it’s pathetic
it’s taken [the state] this long to realize there is a drug
problem in Vermont.”
Like her mother, Nina hopes that her story will be
a cautionary tale to potential users, or those who
have flirted with heroin but are not yet hooked.
She knows that she glamourized drugs herself in the
beginning, and believes that young users in, for instance,
Burlington’s City Hall Park think it’s “cool” to be a dealer.
“There’s nothing cool about it,” she declares flatly.
“There’s nothing cool about jail.”
She points to the example of her friend Lynn, who,
even exposed to the grim realities of Nina’s life, succumbed
to addiction herself. “Lynn is from
a very wealthy family in Boston. She saw
me in Burlington be a heroin addict, she
saw what it was like. She saw [my friend]
Robert and me go through hell when we
needed drugs, the people we had to hang
out with. She had a cocaine-snorting problem …
I tried everything in my power to
keep her from becoming an addict.”
But after Nina returned from a stint in
Boston, Lynn was shooting up. “I guess I
finally knew what a lot of my friends had
felt about me,” Nina says. “I couldn’t understand
how she let herself fall into that when she knew
what it was like.”
Nina understands it now: Lynn loved the “beautiful
high,” as she had at first, before the terrible fall.
As a peer educator, Nina says, “I try to share my experience
about romanticizing drugs for a long time. You
know, the suffering, tortured artist. That’s just bullshit.
When you’re in the back seat of a car with a redneck and
you’re forced to have sex with him for drugs, there’s nothing
romantic about that.”
But if she’s clearer-eyed about heroin now, Nina is also
convinced that no amount of proselytizing, lecturing or
even modeling can force a junkie to quit. “Nobody will
stop until they’re ready,” she says. “You can’t push that
decision on them until they’ve lost.”
Twenty years of Nina’s life were all but lost, and
methadone will not bring them back. But she’s ready to
stake her future on it. To the critics who believe
methadone treatment is simply trading one addiction for
another, Nina has a ready answer. “I think it’s a lot better
to go drink some juice that may be addicting than to
have to go to the most dangerous parts of the city to cop
drugs, to live a dangerous, illegal lifestyle.
“I just want to emphasize that I wouldn’t be able to
get anything done if I didn’t have methadone — I wouldn’t
be helping people, I wouldn’t have a savings account, I
wouldn’t be making car payments,” Nina adds. “I want to
go back to college; once my life is stable, I can do that. I
would like to work with other addicts and people with
HIV … If I could get methadone in Vermont I would
think about staying here.
“I’m looking for new ways to fill that empty hole,”
Nina concludes. “I’m trying to heal it.”
This article appears in Nov 10-16, 1999.
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