Emerging from the darkness Heroin addict tells chilling story of pain, loneliness and the struggle for redemption

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Editor’s Note: Heroin was once a big-city drug known to most Mainers only from movies or books. Today, however, the powerful illegal narcotic is readily available in many parts of the state, even in small, rural communities such as Bar Harbor and Machias.

Last year, 136 Maine people died of heroin and prescription drug overdoses, a record fourfold increase since 1997.

A young mother from Mount Desert Island, addicted to heroin for years, nearly became one of those drug statistics, but saved herself just in time with help from a doctor at Eastern Maine Medical Center, the Bangor methadone clinic run by Acadia Hospital, and her own sheer determination.

She agreed to tell her story if the Bangor Daily News did not identify her, and so Sharon Smith is not her real name.

Part two of a two-part series

In her darkest moments, Sharon Smith thought God had forsaken her. Or worse, cursed her. Somewhere between the crippling leg cramps and throwing up the lining of her stomach, she prayed for both death and redemption.

Whichever one came first was fine with her.

“Everyone I know who gets into [heroin] deep wants so bad to get off it, but what it does to your brain is unfriggin’ real,” Smith said during a series of recent interviews.

“When family members decide you have driven a knife into their heart and twisted it, we feel like God has cut us off at the knees, and the arms, and we have no choices and our lives should be over.

“We’re not out to hurt anyone,” she said, her brown eyes clear and bright and pained. “It’s the drug that has taken over our mind.”

Today, four years after first using heroin, Smith begins her fourth month without it. She has tried repeatedly to quit, she said, but detox led to rehab, and rehab led to relapse.

There are only two reasons why Smith thinks she might make it this time: a deep desire to find her way out of the dark, and the methadone she gets at a Bangor clinic every day that depresses her body’s craving for heroin and makes it nearly impossible to get high even if she tries.

“Methadone has saved my life,” she said. “I would have committed suicide by now, there’s no doubt in my mind.”

A long road

It’s five days before Christmas, and Smith is driving to the clinic in the pounding rain. She draws on a Camel, flicks the ashes through a slit in the window, and remembers how it all started with Valium.

Just a little Valium to help her through the stress of an untidy separation and divorce, then painkillers awhile later after injuring her back in a car wreck.

The combination was seductive and addicting, she says, and she loved how the pills cushioned her against stress, pain and worry.

At times soft-spoken and sorrowful, at others animated and intense, the 28-year-old mother of two confesses she has made some terrible decisions in her life, but never intended heroin to be among them.

Once a successful businesswoman with a busy day care center and plans to take courses at the University of Maine in Orono, Smith says she knew heroin was around Mount Desert Island, but told her friends she “would never use it.”

“It had been around for years [on the island], but only a few people used it, and it was very hush-hush,” she says. “My girlfriends and me thought it was some drug that was on the streets of New York City. We didn’t think it was going to hit [MDI] so hard.”

She drags on a cigarette and sips hazelnut vanilla coffee, her favorite. She drives a little over the speed limit, despite the storm.

“We thought it was gross,” she says. “We thought heroin was the scum on the bottom of our shoes and that anyone who did it was scum on the bottom of our shoes.”

But Smith’s disdain for heroin disappeared with her pills. Six months after getting her first prescription for Valium, a tranquilizer, and three months after a doctor doubled the dose and added Lorcetfor pain after the accident, a pharmacist became suspicious and concerned about the early refills Smith was getting and started asking questions.

Smith says the doctor responded by taking away both prescriptions without notice. Without the pills, she felt exhausted, depressed and sick.

Her boyfriend told her she was withdrawing from the prescriptions and that heroin would not hurt her – in small amounts – and would make her feel better than she could even imagine.

He was right on one count. “I loved it immediately. It took away all of the pain I was going through,” she says. “It made everything OK. It made my whole life seem better. It made me feel whole. It made me feel invincible.”

Smith snorted heroin for the first three years, building up from one bag a day to 15. She was afraid of the needle and refused to shoot up until she could no longer get high from snorting.

“I came to like the needle. Then I came to love it,” she says.

“It was really quite nice,” she adds with a long sigh, reaching for another Camel.

The rain has slowed. The clinic is in sight.

Destruction and doom

Smith’s boyfriend shot her up for the first time – he learned how while doing time in the state prison in Windham, she claimed. After she got used to it, she and her girlfriends would shoot each other up while their boyfriends were out fishing.

When the men got home, they would all shoot up together.

The heroin was expensive, about $30 a bag, but someone always had some, Smith said, and she seldom went without. A lot of the people who use heroin end up dealing in it, one way or another, to support their habit, though Smith didn’t.

Injecting the heroin, rather than snorting it, gave Smith an intense but brief high, compared to the steady but more low-key high she initially got from snorting.

In order to maintain the intense high she craved, Smith began shooting more and more. Eventually, she was doing it all day, every day.

In the end, she didn’t know how many bags a day she used, and her arms were so “stoved up” she couldn’t find a new place to poke.

“There was no more smelling the flowers on a beautiful spring morning” after you’re hooked, she said. “Life was just [unbearable] until you got high. Then you smelt those flowers and that was your life.”

Smith’s downward spiral of destruction and doom has cost her everything but her willpower and spirit. And some days, almost that, too.

She lost her day care center while on the prescription drugs and then lost her nighttime waitress job once she started heroin. She also contracted hepatitis C from a needle and lost 100 pounds of flesh and muscle in the first year of her addiction.

Today her family takes care of her two daughters, Smith has no car or money, and she’s getting state assistance during her methadone treatment – which could last up to two years.

She has lost her friends, and people say mean things and make fun of her behind her back. Or so she believes.

“I lost my family, too,” she said. “I lost their love, their support, their anything. They take care of my children, and that’s a lot, but that’s it. The less they see of me, the happier they are.”

Her boyfriend, whom she had liked as a girl and loved as a woman, died from an overdose last December in Ellsworth on his way home from Christmas shopping. He died in the back seat of a van, she said.

“He just passed out and never woke up.”

He was 27.

Too sick to quit

But even her lover’s death from heroin and other drugs could not stop her own love affair with the narcotic. If she tried to stop – and she often did – she would get so physically sick that she returned to the heroin as her only relief.

“The stomach cramps, then the leg cramps,” she said. “Then the vomiting up bile, throwing up the inside of your stomach. It was such a deep-down, powerful vomiting that you just vomit up yellow and green. That’s the heroin,” she said.

“It’s unreal the lengths you will go to, to get heroin when you’re sick,” she said. “I would run across a field naked in a blizzard to get a bag if I was sick. I would do just about anything.”

Last September, when she tried to stop again, she felt so sick and wanted so badly to feel better without taking more heroin that she took an anti-psychotic drug that caused a form of lockjaw and sent her to the emergency room at Eastern Maine Medical Center.

She was suicidal. The worst ever, maybe: “I felt like I was in a deep, dark hole and there was just no way out and nowhere to go and I just wanted to make it as quick and as easy as possible to get it over with.”

Anything but the violent sickness of trying to stop, she said.

Smith had signed up on the waiting list at the methadone clinic, but the doctor who saw her at EMMC made sure she got in two days later. Except for one futile attempt to get high several weeks into the program, she has remained clean.

In addition to the methadone and counseling she gets at the Bangor clinic, Smith sees a doctor in Bar Harbor who has cared for her family for three generations.

“I needed someone who would know when I was telling the truth,” she said, “and when I was lying. And he does.”

Smith no longer thinks that God abandoned or cursed her. She begins her day with coffee and readings from her inspirational books. She has a box of “angel cards,” and she draws one out each morning and memorizes the encouraging words for the day.

Her small apartment is sparsely furnished, but comfortable and clean. She said she’s never had an apartment without someone else.

A decorated wicker basket sits near a closet. It’s filled with small winter hats, strings dangling over one side, waiting for snow and her girls to come home someday.

“I feel 100 percent better than I have felt in four years,” she said. “I feel grateful to be alive. I have 100 percent more to go for myself, but I’ve been sober and I’m finally getting it in my head that I can do it.”

Daily battle

But trouble seems to follow Smith, even when she already has so much.

On Christmas Eve day, she was stopped by Bar Harbor police for criminal speeding and taken to the station because the officer figured she was on heroin – or something else. She wasn’t, but she was delayed long enough that she could not make it to the clinic in time for her daily dose of methadone.She got back on her routine the next day.Then the morning after Christmas, she destroyed her mother’s car while driving to the clinic, admitting she had been paying closer attention to her new eyeglasses in the rearview mirror than the road. She wasn’t seriously hurt, but her mother is even more disgusted and angry with her now, she said.

Smith had hoped to volunteer at the homeless shelter in Ellsworth over the Christmas holiday, to help take her mind off her own troubles and the anniversary of her boyfriend’s death, but the speeding and the car crash derailed her plans.

Instead, she spent the holidays pretty much alone, as she spends most of her days now. Just her and a vicious addiction that takes all of her strength and determination to fight.

“I really believed that like everything else I had tried, I would use heroin until I felt like stopping it,” she said. “I thought it would be a little phase – nothing that would last. You know, like drinking, it wouldn’t last.

“I never thought that it was something that was going to ruin my entire life.”