I got here by first being a user, an injection drug user and finding myself in this situation where all the knowledge that I thought I had still didn’t protect me. I became aware that I was Hep C positive. After that happened, something in me just really switched on. I am a person who, I felt, I thought I was pretty well educated. And here I was and I still contracted this disease. I still think it might have been given to me through somebody using my works and not telling me. I had a couple of issues with that with a roommate. Still, I know there were times when I did things- I never shared needles. Most people know not to share needles. But what we didn’t know, there was almost no education back then, but not to share anything, not to share your works.

Like I said, I got Hep C positive and I felt like I needed to learn more about how the disease was spread and how to educate other users and people in my life. I was thinking, here I am and I thought I had the information- what about other people? They are definitely going to get infected. So what can I do about it? I met Tony Laroux with the Denver Health Project doing table top outreach and I got offered a position with a volunteer youth outreach program and I started doing bleach kits. I volunteered with him for about four years. He would ask me to tell my story to groups of people, that kind of stuff.

When the Harm Reduction Project came to Denver and got money to open a drop in, I had met Monique once before through a training she did on overdose that I went to. I did know her, but not very well. She called me and I interviewed and I got hired as an outreach worker and to help run the drop in. It will be a year in a couple of weeks.

My attitude has changed completely about what users are capable of and what their place is in society and their value. I never was one to devalue a human, but I had the same attitude a lot of people did, that those in the middle of addiction aren’t capable of much, that they’re not trustworthy. That has changed. There are still those instances and there are dysfunctional people who steal, but I have also witnessed a lot more.

I have also gotten more and more radical in my opinion in the way we treat users and the homeless and the mentally ill. It’s just borderline abuse as far as I’m concerned. It’s not okay. Like I said, I believe that- some users that I’ve met are some of the most creative, worthwhile humans that have so much to give to the planet given the right opportunities and chances. We just need to do more to understand the disease and understand that a lot of it comes from untreated mental health. I think some people know that, but we don’t realize the extent to which so many people are living with that issue.

For the next couple of years we have a grant, my job I secure. But if things keep going the way they are, I could wake up without work. Because our society does not put value on what I do. I know it’s reality, but it’s hard for me to understand how somebody could know what I know and be on the negative side of the fence, be on the “Let’s lock them up,” or “They’re all worthless, let’s lock them up…” It’s hard for me to swallow how people can come from that point of view. That’s probably my own bias…

Right now, I can count at least 10 different individuals that I know that have diagnosed mental health issues that are supposed to being medicated. They also have substance abuse issues and are homeless. They are forced to live on the street and commit crimes and panhandle and starve and suffer and freeze while they wait for the services they need. I know one person who has been waiting four years for his disability to come through.

There’s another individual, HIV+, full blown AIDS, he was living in an apartment under Section-8, was receiving benefits, but when he stopped paying his rent in protest to having open sewage and drug dealers in his building, they evicted him. Now he has been homeless for, oh God, almost a year. The stress of waiting and being jerked around so much by the system has caused him to relapse severely. He almost OD’d, his mental health is completely strained and going. You know, that’s abuse. Somebody who has already been granted the right to services by this government… You can’t live in open sewage when you have a landlord who won’t fix stuff and you have AIDS and any opportunistic infection can come in and kill you! He called and wrote letters and let people know what was going on and they kicked him out. Some people have tried to help him out and give him short little reprieves in hotels, but it wasn’t much.

Here’s somebody who was functioning and doing okay who is now, from the stress, really really broken and who relapsed and is broken. He lost a lot of ground. It’s not okay.

To not always recognize that there may be mental health issues. There are a lot of choices involved. Some people choose to be homeless or live the way that they live, but for those who don’t, who go undiagnosed, who don’t realize their drug use is a symptom of a greater problem, are never even given a chance. They don’t know there is a different way of living or that they might not have to feel this way all the time.

I had one client who told me that after he finally discovered heroin, he felt like he could breathe for the first time in his life. That somebody tells you they have been living under water for the last 30 years and that opiates were the only thing that ever gave them relief- that to me suggests some heavy duty mental illness that has obviously gone completely ignored.

Alcoholism runs in my family, although it has never been my drug of choice. I believe the substance itself doesn’t really matter. I believe I do have a genetic predisposition. I knew that. I had been told that, but it didn’t really sink in. When you are a teenager you are invincible. I never had severe problems, but I did have recreational use and long periods of chosen sobriety, too, until I had a time in my young adulthood when I was separating from an extremely abusive relationship and… It was strange. It was almost like I woke up one morning and realized everybody around me was shooting drugs, shooting heroin. I was 19 and I started realizing that it was just in my life all of a sudden. I was pretty depressed. I tried it and it… um, it was… an absolute miracle worker as far as, like the gift of serenity. Complete and total serenity and peace and mind of being. Which is really hard to find. It is something that everybody seeks. And here is this substance that will do it for you in about 30 seconds.

You know, afterwards your body changes chemically, it’s never going to go back. I went from somebody who had always had a choice about using drugs to somebody who no longer had a choice. It became totally physical. That was something I was not prepared to deal with. I did lose a lot. I sacrificed quite a bit to continue my use. That was, being homeless, living in hotels, working terrible, hard, long, thankless jobs to support… my being in pain all the time because I could never afford enough drug, was really, extremely humbling. It brought me to a real place in my spirituality that was almost… necessary. This was part of my path, I believe that. It was a necessary evil, a necessary time of suffering to help bring forth my true potential, my true purpose. But that doesn’t mean it was fun, that it wasn’t hard, that it didn’t suck. That it didn’t hurt me or my mother.

My family is mostly just my mom and now my husband. My mother thank God, being the woman who she is, not prone to being judgmental and is pretty tolerant, her reaction was extreme fear and heartbreak. She was really, really afraid. It hurt her to think that her daughter who in her eyes was so beautiful and so wonderful, like every parents’ child, would stick needles into her arm…

The day I told her, she caught me crying in the bathroom because I was sick. She thought I was pregnant or had AIDS from sex and that I was going to die. To relieve her fears, I had to tell her. We talked for about an hour. I told her there was methadone and that I had looked into that. She gave me $20 to get well and drove me to the clinic the next morning. So… I was really lucky.

She’s been incredibly supportive that whole time. She did. She gave me money that day, but it was on the stipulation that I got into that clinic. It was, “I love you and I am here for you, but this is it. This is all that I am going to do, you cannot live in my house.” She put down boundaries because she had to keep herself safe from destruction.

I was hurt by that, I was on the street. But it was the best way that she could have- maybe not your typical parent’s way of dealing with it, but…

She paid for it. She lent me $8 at the clinic. And I still had my ID which was a big deal because you have to have an ID to get methadone. I got on. I continued to use though.

I shot over my dose and I’d skip days and hold out until I was really sick so I could get high for about a year. Until I was ready. Until I was really, truly done. I think you really have to be done, you have to be finished in your own mind, in your own heart. You have to be sick of it enough. Or nothing is going to stop you.

I lived in a hotel. Before that, we lived in a car. The first six months it was really cold. We had to get up at three in the morning to do day labor- all the work nobody else wants to do- because I had lost my job because I had… robbed them. I had stolen thousands of dollars by forging time cards and bonuses. John lost his job because he was showing up late and nodding out. Just with the traveling and being sent far away, it could be 16, 18 hours before you get home and you’re maybe making fifty dollars. And you’re definitely really sick by the time you get home.

Compared to others, that is a higher level of functionality. I did manage to not have to sleep outside and I could maintain a habit. But it was really arduous. It was really hard.

Sometimes there wasn’t even emotional support. It’s hard. Sometimes she would get really angry and hurt and despondent. It’s hard for somebody on the outside to understand what could possibly make you live like that. What could make it worth it.

I’ve relapsed. I had two years clean after that year because I was really sick and tired of being sick and tired. We managed to get inside and get jobs. And then… I relapsed, really bad. I tried to get off methadone too fast. I thought I would be able to do it. I had no plan, no support, and I needed some therapy. Of course I failed. It was almost this switch that went on in my mind. I got to 28mg and I was in the clinic and she said, “You’re at 28,” and I said, “Oh, ok.” I took my dose, but then a little voice in my head said, “You know, 28grams, you could get high if you want to…” And I did. A three or four month binge.

I got this incredible fear and anxiety… of losing everything I had gotten back. I went back up on my methadone to stabilize. I talked to whoever I could about it, to stop. And I’ve been clean again for almost two and a half years since that.

But just a few months ago, I was trying to detox off of methadone, which I am trying to do now at a much, much slower pace and I wasn’t sleeping. So I started taking pills. And people noticed. I lost whole days even though I was here at work. My bosses had to speak with me and ask me what was going on.

I am just lucky that I work in an environment where relapse is understood. Even though it was pills, it was still relapse, it was still use. I wasn’t taking something that was prescribed. I wasn’t going about it in a sane manner. I think there maybe is a point where you stop being at risk, but not anytime in the first five years.

I’d also like to say that the financial issue of methadone itself is an incredible barrier to treatment. If I had not been lucky enough to be in a clinic with a counselor who fought very, very hard to keep me in treatment in the beginning when I didn’t always have enough to pay- in fact I still owe quite a bit of money, but we paid what we could. If it wasn’t for her, I definitely would have failed. Financial support early in treatment is so important.

It isn’t okay for someone to have to commit the same acts they did to get heroin in order to get their methadone. It doesn’t make sense that somebody would have to do the same things for treatment. Nobody is going to stay in treatment if they have to go out and pan handle or prostitute. That’s another thing that I have begun to see, it is so important to support people who are serious about treatment, at least for the first six months or year. You need to reduce their stress. Reduce the amount of time they have to spend hustling and struggling.

It’s $200 a month or about $50 a week. But for two people, there were times when only one of us was working. Plus survival expenses, that was really hard. I got pregnant twice and was so ill I couldn’t work, so John worked double shifts and would sleep two hours and go back to support us. That was really, really hard.

The first time I was still using and I had physical issues. I had abortions both times, so then there is this huge medical bill and how are we going to pay for that? I was so sick. It was not emotionally great fun either.

I am from New Mexico. Actually the county I was born in has more heroin addicts per capita than any other county in the country- Rio Arriba County. It is largely Hispanic. I moved to Denver when I was 16. I moved with a family friend who had an ill child, congenital heart defects, and they came to live close to the hospital. They needed somebody to take care of the baby while they worked. So I took care of him in exchange for room and board. I didn’t use at all during that time. I had been out of school for well over a year by that time. School was always an issue for me. The second I dropped out, I stopped getting in trouble with the law, I stopped getting arrested for truancy. I home schooled for about a year and a half and I just, I wasn’t doing anything and I couldn’t justify living at home anymore. We’ve always been poor, we’ve always struggled and if I wasn’t in school or working it wasn’t fair. So when the opportunity came, I went.

After I moved out, I rented a room in a house. I did pretty okay. I wasn’t pursuing education like I should have been. My mom did move up to Denver eventually. We’ve been really close since I was about 14. Before that, it was really hard from the time I was really small until my teen years. If I grow up to be anything like her, I’ll be doing really good.

I don’t know if the problem is worse where I come from in New Mexico, but there are large rural areas where it is easy to go without contact with the police. And there are generation after generation of drug dealer and user, very family oriented. It’s almost normal. The opportunities to commit the lowliest acts of crimes and the amounts and quality of the drugs are so much higher and cheaper, it is more precarious. There’s lots of open space and little law enforcement.

In the city, there’s lots of cops and people score drugs in the streets, so there’s lots of opportunities to get ripped off or a substance cut with God knows what. There is a lot less loyalty, more lying. Lots of petty theft between users, pan handling for drugs, that type of stuff. The economy, the money isn’t so interdependent, there isn’t as much of a community. The users aren’t as united. That makes it harder to intervene, I guess. But there’s also way more access to treatment. We have five or more methadone clinics in the surrounding area. There’s lots of different programs where you can seek services if you want to. It’s not like a rural community where you might have to drive as much as 100 miles to get treatment. It’s just really different. There’s more risky behavior because there’s less guidance for new users. There are lots of myths, like if someone OD’s, shoot them up with milk or if both people have Hep C it’s okay if they share needles.

But you can do street outreach and have a drop in center, try to change the practices of users. I am sure the problem is not as bad as other cities, but there are huge rural areas surrounding this place and the amount of substance abuse has got to be way larger than the numbers say. I mean, last year, 70% of the people who went into treatment went in for amphetamines. That is becoming a really big drug. It’s cheap, easy to make. Lots of people, you have MSM groups who might use it for sex, and bikers and blue collar working guys who do it and stay up and work as mechanics, electricians or whatever, construction workers who do it because their work is so hard. Not the people of who you would usually think- functioning people. And they’re not going into treatment, they’re not homeless. If somebody gives me a number and says, this number are addicts, I usually double that. You have to account for the people who aren’t being identified.

There’s not a lot of waitlists for methadone, but ID’s are an issue. But if you are looking for any other kind of treatment, or residential treatment, it’s like forget it. If you don’t have health insurance or money, there are long waitlists.

I had a patient, way out of control. Prostituting, raped a few times, shoplifting, every day being picked up by the police and the only thing they could do to keep her safe before a bed opened, was through her into detox with the drunks. She lived in there for 52 days the first time, 35 days the next, until she could get a bed in a treatment facility. Some people wait even longer. It’s a money thing. It’s always a money issue. The money is like the biggest barrier to treatment for so many people.

Even if you do have money, to get good treatment, lasting treatment- 30 day programs don’t help. They don’t work. Thinking of the same girl, she has been in and out of 30 and 60 and 90 day programs 8 or 9 or 10 times now. And every time she got turned back out into the streets. No prospect for a job or a way to make money. And the stress and despondency from that causes relapse faster than anything I know.

You can’t ask people to live like the scum of the earth and not want to stop that pain. The reality to deal with what it means to live like that, you almost have to use, just to get yourself up to go out and make money to eat and get a place to stay. It can’t be done. A human being can live being denied their basic rights of food, shelter, clothes on their back, without it having extreme, severe consequences. It causes post traumatic stress disorder. I believe that firmly. You take somebody who was okay and high functioning, they have a tragedy in their life- they lose their business, their husband dies, and all of a sudden they are losing everything they had and you watch how fast they begin abusing a substance. If they do make it back out, if they don’t die first from overdose or suicide, the permanent trauma that is caused is there forever and it’s really, really hard to address.

It took me like two years to realize that I was living in constant fear, still. After two years of a good life I still can’t even have confrontation with a roommate over dishes because I am so scared to disturb the peace. I know I am still carrying it. It is definitely PTSD. I don’t care what anybody else wants to call it. It is permanent trauma.

I definitely- everybody needs more money. Any service that there is that is accessible to users needs to be funded and they need to be funded in a way that they can do their job so that they aren’t running understaffed and underfunded. There’s got to be money to get people into treatment, long term treatment, and to help them stay in treatment. And there needs to be housing, affordable housing that won’t be taken away from them if they use. In harm reduction they say, “Every time you relapse you are closer to success.” And relapse is a part of change. You have pre-contemplation where you aren’t even thinking about the change, then you start to contemplate it, then you get pretty determined, then you change. But then you need something to maintain that change. Like people who try to lose weight- it’s the exact same process. And they relapse too and gain back the 100 pounds they lost. And the wheel keeps going around. It’s part of the process.

Re-acclimating, learning to live in the world again is a long process. Thirty days to get well, to learn how to live again, is not going to cut it. I mean, long term, these people need to be supported for the long term. They do have something to offer and if we ever want them to be productive members of society again, they are going to need substantial help and you can’t do anything period, hands down, no true change can happen if you are still going to worry about how you are going to eat and where you’re going to sleep.

This War on Drugs- it’s a war on people. And it’s not working. You cannot declare war on your own citizens and expect not to have negative consequences. It’s like, if you don’t value and lift up every person who- you know, we all live together and for every person who is being left behind and cast out and being treated like, you know, an outcast in society- we’re losing everything that person has to offer. Their whole potential is being wasted. No wonder we’re raising some of the most dysfunctional, wounded children in the whole entire planet and when they don’t grow up right and do everything they’re supposed to, we throw them away? It’s a recipe for our own destruction as far as I am concerned… I am sure you hear that a lot though… At least I would hope you would hear that from somebody else.