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FORCED TO FIGHT Addicts long for life beyond heroin BY CORY VAILLANCOURT STAFF WRITER Editor’s note: Names have been changed to protect the identity of those interviewed for this story. ive miles down an Appalachian dirt road 45 minutes from nowhere is where Daphne Laurel was raised, right in the heart of the sparsely populated mountainous region hit hardest by the ongoing opioid crisis. “I was kind of rebellious,” she said. “I wish I had known better.” Now 27, Daphne is actively attempting to combat a heroin addiction that she picked up after she began using meth and pills almost a decade ago. “To begin with, yeah, it was fun,” she said of her first forays into opiates. “But there’s a difference between having fun and having to have it to get up every day. I’m not going to say it doesn’t feel good every time you get high, because of course it does. But when it gets to being a ‘need’ from being a ‘want,’ it sucks. You would never sign up for this.” Daphne’s need now consumes her life. Paying for the Suboxone she needs to stay off heroin is a constant challenge and resisting the powerful urge to relapse is a daily struggle she doesn’t always win. But she’s trying. Sitting on the front porch of the small, nondescript bungalow she shares with her husband Paul in a rural Western North Carolina county, cigarette dangling precariously from her pursed lips, she’s trying to remember her life before heroin — because the life of an addict isn’t much of a life at all. “I miss my daughter. I miss having a job. I miss normal things, like going to the movies or just hanging out with people,” she said. “I miss my life.”
August 14-20, 2019
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o cellphone. No makeup. No dating. Daphne grew up in a strict household and once had dreams of becoming a lawyer because she wanted to send bad people to jail and help good people stay out of jail. Intelligent and relatively self-sufficient from a young age, Daphne was also the victim of childhood physical and sexual abuse, which likely contributed to her legal aspirations as much as her drug addiction that began one evening when the 17-year-old was employed at a fast food restaurant. “I worked the night shift, and there was this girl outside, cooing at the birds,” she said. “She was high. She was talking to the birds. I don’t know why, but I said, ‘I want to do whatever that is.’” “That” was meth, and it wasn’t hard to find. Last week, retired DEA Agent Joel Reece told The Smoky Mountain News that methamphetamines had just begun to make an impact east of the Mississippi River around that time, and when they hit, they hit hard. It also taught a generation of drug users 8 how to use needles; although the crystalline
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Heroin addict Daphne Laurel administers the shot of Suboxone that will prevent her from going into withdrawal, at least for the day.
Cory Vaillancourt photo
“There’s a difference between having fun and having to have it to get up every day. I’m not going to say it doesn’t feel good every time you get high, because of course it does. But when it gets to being a ‘need’ from being a ‘want,’ it sucks. You would never sign up for this.” — Daphne Laurel
white powder can be snorted, it’s much more fast-acting when administered intravenously. Daphne’s meth use led to prescription opiates like hydrocodone and oxycodone, and before she knew it, she was injecting those, too. At the time pills were cheap and easy to come by, as chronicled in a Washington Post report based on a pain pill database that tracked every single hydro and oxy pill manufactured in the United States from 2006 through 2012. During those years, the distribution of those two opioids alone grew more than 50 percent to almost 13 billion pills a year in 2012, according to The Post. All in all, more than 76 billion pills were distributed across the country, enough to supply every man, woman and child in America with 33 pills per person, per year. More than 2.5 billion of those pills ended up in North Carolina, placing this state of 10 million residents slightly above the national
average with about 35 pills per person, per year. Western counties, like the one Daphne grew up in, saw pill totals far higher than the state average. Not long after beginning her descent into full-blown dependency, Daphne became pregnant. She used drugs throughout her pregnancy, until the local social services department intervened. “At the end I had to stay clean for a month and I did,” she said. “I was ready to kill myself at the end of those 30 days, but we had some tweakers at the house and I made the mistake of getting high.” After a court battle, Daphne was able to keep her baby. Meanwhile, DEA Agent Joel Reece, who was deputy director of the Appalachian High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) at the time, was focusing substantial resources on an educational campaign targeting NAS, or neonatal abstinence syndrome.
Babies born after exposure to drugs in utero can suffer a variety of horrific and debilitating conditions including agonizing withdrawal symptoms and developmental disabilities that last a lifetime. “He’s perfect,” Daphne said of her son. “I’m really lucky that nothing happened to him. I know so many horror stories. They come out deformed or mentally incapable or whatever. We’re so lucky that there’s nothing wrong with him.” That was perhaps the last stroke of good fortune Daphne would see for quite some time; her baby’s father will remain incarcerated for several more years as a habitual drug offender, and when her own addiction worsened she gave up her son to his parents, who live in an upscale residential community in the region. “I had to take a step back. He doesn’t have either one of us right now, but he’s taken care of, and he’s loved,” Daphne said. “I try not to
