For Holly Wright, heroin was bliss.
It was cheap, and it was everywhere. She craved the rush of energy that came with the high, but soon she needed the drug just to get out of bed and feed her children without feeling dopesick.
But last year, she was confronted with a choice. She could keep her addiction and lose Dani, then 2, and her older brother Brayden, then 6. Or she could get treatment and start clean with her family.
By then, heroin had already taken her job and her money. And she didn’t realize the damage it had done to her children.
“When you’re getting high, it don’t matter,” said Holly, 34, now living in Pittsburgh in housing provided by Sojourner House MOMS. “I thought as long as they had a clean diaper on and food in their belly, they were fine.”
Holly is one face in a state and national crisis.
Heroin is cheap, plentiful and extremely addictive, and it does not discriminate based on race, place or social standing. It’s in urban Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. It’s in the suburbs. And it’s in places like Kittanning, a small river town in Western Pennsylvania where drugs used to be sold behind closed doors, and now they’re on the street corner.
Kittanning, a town struggling with few jobs, little to do and easy drugs, is where Holly became an addict.
In Armstrong County, where Kittanning is the county seat, paramedics seem to respond to calls of overdoses nearly every day, the county coroner said, though only 13 heroin users have died this year.
In nearby Allegheny County, heroin has been detected in 239 overdose deaths since 2013, according to the latest available figures.
Meanwhile, treatment facilities struggle for funding, and insurance companies routinely refuse to pay for long-term care until an addict has numerous relapses. Those costs are instead transferred to hospitals and prisons, common refuges for addicts who can’t get clean.
‘Took every dime’
If she didn’t come out and tell you, Holly might not seem like a recovering heroin addict.
She’s like any other young mom, tired and a little frantic from trying to juggle life with a son with disabilities and an active 3-year-old daughter.
With little makeup, her usual attire is jeans and a sweatshirt. You can tell she loves her kids. She smiles and the corners of her blue eyes — like Dani’s — crinkle as she talks about how they made cupcakes together the other weekend.
She would never have paid much attention to such an experience last year, when her top priority was getting her next fix.
Now she’s serious and listens carefully, and she talks freely about her addiction, as if recounting how much she’s changed helps her get through each day. She’s going to meetings, seeing her son in therapy, playing with her daughter, cooking supper for the family.
Holly’s journey with drugs started at age 12 with marijuana. She’d steal it from her mother, she said, and she smoked and drank through high school.
At that age, she was shy and had difficulty fitting in, and drinking was an easy way to loosen up and make friends. Holly said her mom used drugs and was an alcoholic, but her home life was happy. Even if they had arguments, Holly still had everything she asked for.
In her early 20s, Holly turned to harder drugs like cocaine, both powder and crack.
These were party drugs — for the weekends — and she was still paying her bills and getting up for her job in the kitchen of a nursing home.
“It wasn’t a big thing there,” she said. “I could still function.”
Holly prided herself on being reliable. She’d worked since she was 16, and she always saw herself as self-sufficient. Drugs were just for her free time in Kittanning, she said, where there’s little but bars, laundromats and a Wal-Mart.
When she moved to opiates, it was pills at first: Vicodin, Percocet and OxyContin.
Those names are familiar to the more than two million Americans who have found themselves hooked on opioid painkillers, often prescribed for pain. But many found them too expensive and turned to heroin, which is cheaper.
Holly snorted crushed pills socially with friends, she said. She still felt in control, and she still showed up for work, doing laundry at another nursing home.
In her 30s, she moved to the world of syringes, burnt spoons and glassine bags. At first, heroin was recreational. Something to do on payday.
But then she fell hard. And it was every day, and it was crippling.
She’d wake up sick, anxious about the vomiting and diarrhea that would come if she didn’t inject. And she’d lie on the couch, scheming about how she’d get money for a fix.
A stamp bag cost just $10 to $15, a pittance compared to what she might spend on painkillers, yet, over time, the heroin “took every dime.”
“After a while it was like, OK, don’t pay the bills,” she said. “A little bit after that, you’re selling your food stamps. Everything.”
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