Tracking the heroin epidemic in Woodstock

“I lost 28 friends last year from heroin overdoses”, says Y., a resident of Woodstock who has lived in this area since he was five years old. “These friends all lived in and around the Woodstock area.” According to the CDC, Center for Disease Control and Prevention, heroin related deaths have quadrupled between 2002 and 2013 and are still growing. In towns like Burlington, Vermont, Manchester, New Hampshire and Boston, the rate of overdoses has reached epic proportions. Woodstock is no exception. A lot of people don’t like to talk about it since heroin has always been a taboo subject, but all you have to do is drive around Woodstock on a spring or summer day and you can see the difference in town says Y., a thirty-one-year-old who has been clean and sober now for 38 days. “The problem has grown tremendously worse. For the past six years I’ve seen it get out of hand, since 2010 it’s just been crazy. Last summer I noticed a big difference. Three or four years ago you could drive through Woodstock on a nice summer afternoon and there would be kids on the green, kids by the pizza place, kids on the wall in front of Harmony, kids over by Taco Juan’s, kids down at the Millstream, kids playing basketball at the rec field, kids at the youth center, now you drive through town on like a summer day when it’s 80 degrees and all you see is tourists. You see no kids anywhere. You go try to find a group of people to go swimming with, they are not there, play basketball with, they’re not there, everybody is in the designated shooting galleries in Woodstock which are various houses that people are welcome to come and get high at,” says Y.

It’s been documented that heroin is so out of control because of laws passed several years ago restricting prescriptions for drugs like, Percodan, OxyContin, and Vicodin, which contain the opioid hydrocodone. The new rules made it much more difficult for narcotic addicts to get the medicine that they were using, so most people turned to the street and heroin is the obvious choice. With OxyContin pills going for as much as one hundred dollars per pill and heroin being as cheap is four dollars a bag, it’s a no brainer.

Y. knows the heroin trade better than most since he dealt the drug. “Nothing comes from Woodstock. I was a dealer for many years. I used to go to Brooklyn to get my stuff. I tripled my money pretty much. I was able to use and make tons of money, it was nice while it lasted. I realized that I spent a lot of time thinking everything was cool and I was trying to control the world. Addiction was my disease and those were my coping skills, so I used my coping skills to control my world and make my life easier.”

Most addicts find narcotics a way to deal with the world. I used narcotics myself to cope with everything that I didn’t want to deal with and in 2005 it led me to a liver transplant from the Hepatitis C that I had acquired shooting drugs. The disease did long term damage. These kids don’t live long enough to need a liver transplant.

They are dying by the thousands. More people are dying these days from drug overdoses, 46,471 in 2013, than car accidents that year, 35,369, and by firearms 33,636, according to the Federal Drug Enforcement Agency. That was three years ago and the number is climbing and most of them are kids under 20 years old. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch “heroin’s youngest addicts are dying in high schools.” This brought me to asking Y. about Harold Reilly, one of the deaths that Woodstock felt the hardest. On the morning of Harold’s death after using the bathroom at Cumberland Farms, where he probably fixed, his lifeless body was later found behind the Bank of America by Jogger John. He had just been released from Samaritan Village in Ellenville, a drug treatment center, according to Woodstock Times. “Yeah, I knew Harold very well. The person whose dope he got and died off of got locked up last Friday, so it’s okay.” I asked Y. if he thought Harold got a “hot bag” or intentionally overdosed. “Oh no, not at all. I was doing the same stuff that he did. It was really good. Harold had just gotten out of a long term treatment. He had absolutely no tolerance. I know the person that gave him the bags and they said they only gave him two. He had absolutely no tolerance. I could do a bundle of Poughkeepsie dope in a shot and these bags I would do three of them and get a nice rush.” Meaning that the heroin Harold got was probably 90% pure or better.

I wanted to get to the heart of why the problem had grown so out of hand in the last few years. Was it the price? The abundance of it? Y., having had years of experience being around people using, agreed that the change in the law that made prescription pills more expensive and difficult to obtain was a big reason.

“Now at the same point in time they changed the formulation on a lot of easily abusable pills. Like Oxycontin for instance used to be a pill where you could just pop in your mouth suck off the coating and wipe it off on your shirt. You could tell who was an Oxy head when they went swimming, they would have all of these blue stains on the inside or the bottom of their shirt. That was quite a few years ago. A lot of the kids these days don’t even know about that.” Y. himself had started on prescription narcotics before graduating to heroin. “Yeah, I myself included. I started using Oxycontin when I was 18.”

With the problem ever growing, I asked Y. what he thought was a good way to approach the kids, since he has been working his program in AA “like my life depends on it, which it does.”

“What seems to impact the kids right now is like death, unfortunately. I’ve talked to some principals of schools and that’s pretty much what they want. They had Ryan Kelder’s sister speak and she…knew her brother’s addiction. She knew how he passed away. I knew Ryan, we used to use together and I could have told the story to a much heavier extent than she could, being his friend and a co-addict. You know I had 28 friends die last year, if they want the message of death passed, I can pass the message very darkly.”

Pat Horner is a long time resident of Woodstock and is very involved in the community. Pat lost her son Scott, 50, to drugs. She was one of the people who cared enough to attend the meeting on November 16 at Town Hall in Woodstock where the community came together to try and find solutions for the heroin epidemic. You can hear the sadness in her voice when she talks about the drug problem in town and losing her son. “That talk a couple of months ago was a start but I don’t know if it’s done any good. What we need is a place where the kids can go, like a health clinic where they can be not treated but at least put through a screening process of where they should end up. Clearly what came out of that meeting was that they just don’t know.” Pat expresses her frustration. “The meeting at Town Hall showed just how bad our system is. The system is bad and if anything worse today than it was 20 years ago…Due to the politics of medical insurance and a system that would rather look the other way, the epidemic is getting worse…They send them to the emergency room at the hospital and then they let them go after a few hours or in a day and then they’re dead the next day.”

“I like helping people and saving lives,” says Y. But there is no easy answer for the problems of narcotic addiction. It begins with a desire on the part of those suffering the disease. They have to want to beat it. Doing it alone is rough. A community helping those who are looking for a way out is essential. And, as the NA/AA program says, ‘One day at a time…’