From painkillers to heroin addiction

Part three of an ongoing Herald series on heroin addiction. 

Mary dressed in a well-worn sweater and jeans for her interview in a conference room overlooking the bay at Long Beach Medical Center on a recent Friday. Her long, dark hair was unkempt and her makeup slightly askew. That bothered her. Mary, who declined to be identified by her real name, had wanted to look presentable, but her anxiety overrode her desire to groom herself. 

A chef who graduated from the French Culinary Institute in New York and SUNY Stony Brook, Mary couldn't relax until she drank her daily dose of methadone, a synthetic opioid that counteracts her desperate addiction to prescription painkillers. Without methadone, said Mary, who grew up in Suffolk County and now lives in Long Beach, she would rapidly fall apart and likely return to popping pills. 

"I couldn't be sitting here with you" without it, she told this reporter. 

Mary, 30, who had used heroin and just about every other illegal drug imaginable for half her life before she got clean last year, had not had her methadone for a little more than 23 hours at the time of her interview at 11 a.m. She was to receive it at noon at LBMC's methadone maintenance clinic across the street from the hospital, where she is in treatment. Her anxiety level appeared to rise as she spoke. She chewed on her nails furiously, and her crystalline brown eyes darted at the door. 

Methadone replaces the opiates with which she had filled her system without giving her the high, and it has none of the deleterious effects of prescription painkillers or heroin. It works by blocking drug receptor sites in the brain. 

It all began with painkillers 

Tom, 29, had never done drugs or even drunk alcohol until his early 20s, when he got hooked on prescription painkillers, he said. That led to an addiction to heroin so powerful that he had a friend inject him with it while he drove on the parkway on his way home from Brooklyn to Merrick after meeting his dealer. He said he knew he was risking his life and the lives of others as he drove high, but he couldn't help himself. He needed the heroin immediately.