Jack O’Neill always wanted to ‘be a part of something’

I knew I was an addict immediately and it scared me, but I was so happy.”

Jack O’Neill, addict, East Norwich

Jack O’Neill began his days by snorting cocaine. Sometimes the St. John’s University freshman would wake up as early as 3 a.m. to do so. Other times at noon. Regardless, his routine was always the same.

“My entire day was focused on using again,” recalled O’Neill, now 25. “In the beginning, I was doing a small gram bag of cocaine, and it made me so happy. It made me think about not being judged. If I didn’t have the drug, I couldn’t function.”

Something was missing

O’Neill loved sports. He played baseball all four years at Oyster Bay High School, and football, too, until he had two concussions in his sophomore year. The lifelong East Norwich resident never did drugs or drank alcohol, he said, although they were available at parties. And he had many friends.

Jack’s parents, Ellen and Jim O’Neill, encouraged their children to bring their friends home on weekends, offering their large front porch and backyard for them to gather.

“Ellen always had kids at the house when there was nothing to do in town,” said Vicki Walsh, a friend of Ellen’s who is an Oyster Bay town councilwoman. “Ellen’s house was the one the kids always went to. They’re a hands-on family.”

But as much as Jack liked sports and socializing, he didn’t like school. Suffering from anxiety, he found academics difficult. He was granted accommodations, taking his tests in a separate room, where he was given extra time. And he was sometimes pulled out of class to go to resource room, where he would receive additional help, although O’Neill said he never belonged there.

His first day at OBHS wasn’t a good one. He hid in the back of his mother’s SUV, experiencing what he said was a “full-blown anxiety breakdown.”

“At Oyster Bay High School you go in as a seventh-grader, but you see the 12th-graders all the time,” O’Neill said. “I was afraid. There was bullying there. Even though I was never hit, it was very intimidating.”

At first, he had plans to become a special-education teacher, then a gym teacher. But by the time he was a senior, he no longer wanted to go to college. “I worried I’d have to take standardized tests,” he said. “And I felt like I’d have to hide something about myself.”

Nonetheless, O’Neill decided to give college a try, and was accepted by St. John’s University in Queens. Initially he made many friends there and did well academically. But in the spring of his freshman year, two students in his dorm persuaded him to join a fraternity.

“Two things went through my mind: This seems like a bad idea. But I could be part of something,” O’Neill recalled. “I felt like I could be cool and get attention from women.”

After being accepted, he moved into a fraternity house off campus. It was September 2018, and O’Neill was beginning his sophomore year.

Finding euphoria in cocaine

At a fraternity party, he was asked if he wanted to do some cocaine. His heart was pounding, O’Neill remembers, but he tried it.

“Immediately I was like, oh, crap, this feels really good,” he recalled. “It was immediate happiness, euphoria. All the anxiety went away. I could care less how thin my arms were, how tall I was. I had done like four or five lines. I went to bed and didn’t think anything of it.”

The next morning, he went to another party and did more cocaine. The following day, a Monday, he went to another party and did even more.

“I knew I was an addict immediately and it scared me,” O’Neill said, “but I was so happy.”

On Tuesday he had classes, but when he woke up, he felt horrible. He didn’t want to snort any more cocaine, but he realized he needed it. He did a few lines before school, brought more with him to his classes and did it throughout the day.

Everything seemed perfect. Cocaine relaxed him and helped him study and he was doing well in school. But he felt that he needed the drug to succeed.

Then he met someone at a party who was offering free cocaine. He became O’Neill’s dealer. His next hurdle was finding the money to feed his habit.

Spiraling downward

In his years at Oyster Bay High, O’Neill always worked, either delivering pizza or as a waiter. He saved practically all of his earnings, roughly $5,000, to take to college.

“I used up the five grand pretty quickly. In six months it was all gone,” he said. “That’s when I started asking my mom for money for my frat dues, which I used for coke.”
But that wasn’t enough money to pay for his habit. O’Neill sold everything he owned on eBay.

“I was a Nike basketball shoe collector all my life,” he said. He sold them all. “That still hurts me to this day. But that wasn’t enough money, so I started to steal from my parents. I constantly tried to figure out when my parents would be home. I’d look for money stashed, or anything expensive. I figured I’d pay them back later.”

He became a recluse, worried that his fraternity brothers would tell his parents how much he was using.

By the spring of 2019, O’Neill no longer attended classes. He didn’t leave his bedroom.

“I’d lie to my mom about going to class and playing flag football,” he said. “It was one of my favorites things to do, but I could feel my body not wanting to run. I didn’t have a roommate, so I wasn’t even hiding my cocaine anymore. I had a padlock on my door.”

A former altar boy, he became a compulsive liar, with his top priority being to cover his addiction. That hurt, he said, until he did cocaine. Then it didn’t.

In the fall of 2020 he was using more than he ever had. “I didn’t care if I lived or died,” O’Neill said. “It made me happy.”

His fraternity brothers knew he had a drug problem, and threw him out. But they left some of his things in his room, so he climbed the fence around the building, put up a ladder, climbed onto the balcony and opened the sliding door of his room. Then he sat on the floor, snorting lines of cocaine.

O’Neill was shaking and sweating 24 hours a day, he said, but he couldn’t stop using. When he had nothing left to sell, he stole a credit card from his parents, and charged $999 to buy cocaine. His parents, who were on vacation, received a fraud alert and called Jack, who told them he had a gambling problem.

“I didn’t want them to know I had a cocaine problem,” he said. “They changed their credit cards and cut me off. I told my brother I was very sick and just needed a little coke to make me feel better.”

Kevin O’Neill, Jack’s younger brother by a year, was also attending St. John’s. He went with Jack to meet his drug dealer, and Kevin told him not to sell to his brother anymore, which made Jack angry.

The dealer ignored the angry exchange between the two brothers. He crushed a pill and told Jack to snort it, because it was cheaper.

“Kevin said, ‘Don’t do it,’ but I did,” Jack recounted. “I didn’t like it more than cocaine, but it got rid of the withdrawal and was only $30 a pill. I used it for a month, having no idea what was in this pill. I could care less.”

A month later, now taking five pills a day, he realized it was fentanyl.

Next week: Part 2.