The Opioid Epidemic

Three Stories of Addiction, Relapse, and Recovery

By Katie Kelly

Kevin Kelley was 26 years old when he overdosed on heroin in Louisiana causing his wife to give him an ultimatum: her or the drugs.

Stacie Brown struggled with a heroin addiction until her mother turned her in to the authorities to be sent to jail; that wouldn’t be the only time she would struggle to get clean.

Because of a long family history of addiction, Judy Winkowski swore off drugs until she was in a car accident and broke her neck which ended with her own opioid abuse.

These people and their families are the face of addiction in Pennsylvania, where there are so many overdose deaths that Governor Tom Wolf has declared the opioid crisis an epidemic that continues to get worse, taking more lives in this commonwealth than automobile accidents.

“I am taking this step to protect Pennsylvanians from this looming public health crisis, and I am using every tool at my disposal to get those suffering from substance use disorders into treatment, save more lives, and improve response coordination.” Wolf said in a press release.

According to the CDC, heroin and opioid overdose deaths are the leading number of accidental deaths in Pennsylvania. In 2017 alone, 5,443 people reportedly overdosed. That number is a 43 percent increase from 2016 - the largest increase of overdose deaths in all 50 states. In Allegheny county alone, 717 overdoses were reported in 2017.

The Path to Addiction

Kelley started smoking cigarettes at age 12, and it became a normal thing to do. He then gradually moved on to smoking marijuana. When most kids were joining sports teams and playing video games, he was getting high. But at that point in his life, he didn’t think it would escalate to anything more. He didn’t know about anything harder until he got into his twenties.

“[Marijuana] was the thing to do back then. I didn’t really know about pills until I was older and would get them from doctors.”

A back injury caused by a motocross accident started him on painkillers. He would get a prescription from one doctor for 120 Vicodin a month. That was the beginning of his five years of active addiction. He said he was so enamored with the Vicodin that he ate all of them in a mere five days.

Once he became dependent on them, his friends showed him how to “doctor shop,” where addicts visit several physicians known to be liberal with prescriptions of pills to get as many as possible.

In addition, he quickly found street dealers that not only had Vicodin, but stronger pills like Percocet or OxyContin, an opioid. As his addiction grew, he would take anything he could get quickly.

As he became more desperate, he approached street dealers and doctors alike to get drugs whose potency and addictive qualities grew. There were opioids like Morphine, Dilaudid, Methadone and Fentanyl patches. He’d mix them with Xanax or Valium secured from the street, but the costs were prohibitive, so he sought a cheaper way to feed his addiction -- heroin.

Kelley first started snorting heroin because it temporarily curbed his withdrawal symptoms without having to swallow a handful of expensive pills. But as his addiction grew, he decided to start injecting heroin. After the first time, he knew there no going back.  

“Ask any heroin addict and they will tell you that feeling is what you chase the rest of your days using.”

Kelley, from Turtle Creek, was in and out of rehab during a five-year active addiction. He would check into rehab a total of three times, once because he was in trouble with the law over a theft. The other two as a result of his wife’s urging.

At the start, he convinced himself that he was only addicted to drugs. However, as time passed, he realized that he was just as addicted to alcohol.

Any time he introduced a new chemical into his body, he never knew where it was going to take him - narcotic or not. And every time he relapsed, he would just feel even worse about himself, especially after spending some time clean. He had let people down and he had felt useless.

“It’s what caused my relapse,” he said. “Thinking I was cured, I didn’t need meetings, didn’t need a program.”

Kelley was a general manager at a restaurant who was put in charge of all of the deposits. The problem was, he was using the day deposits to buy drugs, then paying those off with the next day’s deposits. And on payday, he’d fix it all with his paycheck. But over the Christmas holiday, when the corporate office was closed, he stopped going to the bank. The district manager came in asking where the money was, and Kelley told him a story about the bank giving them a hard time and took off.

He ditched his car, bought a few bricks of heroin and a bus ticket. He stayed a night in Ohio, planning to travel to Mexico where almost anything could be bought over the counter, but decided he would go to Louisiana first. He heard drugs were big there and at this time, it was already devastated from Hurricane Katrina. When he arrived, he met a homeless man who would become his drug source, and would be the one to witness his first overdose.

Kevin Kelley with his wife, Kelley, in 2006, during one of his worst points in his addiction. (Photo Credit: Kelley Kelley)

He doesn’t remember much from the first time, except that it was right after Hurricane Katrina, and he was mixing cocaine and heroin. He shot up and then blacked out. At that time, the emergency response teams were so overworked, he was lucky when paramedics responded in time and had Narcan to administer.

When he woke up, he had no idea what had happened. He didn’t even realize that he had almost died. He remembers being scared when he was told what happened, but he wasn’t taken to the hospital, and he was happy to go back to his motel.

“They didn’t make me go to the hospital, no police were involved. So, I went back to my hotel…I was kind of scared but I didn’t really care.”

A few days after his first overdose, he overdosed again. This time, he was alone. The last thing he remembers was sitting down on a bench at the bus station, and the next thing he remembers is waking up to paramedics in his face telling him that he had overdosed and they had administered Narcan.

“I’m sure if I was using the drugs that are out here today, I would have been dead instantly. With real heroin, you seem to get a little more time to be saved. With fentanyl it’s over instantly.”

His second overdose, was a wake-up call for him. Two days after, he got a plane ticket home to Pittsburgh from Louisiana. When he got home, he ended up in the hospital for a week, due to his poor health as a result of his drug usage. During his hospital stay, doctors found an infection in his blood. This is when he realized, he needed to get clean not only for his family but also for his health.

Today, he’s nine years clean, no drinking or using what-so-ever, and he’s determined to help anyone and everyone he can by speaking at events and taking on sponsorship roles. He says he still knows when people are using, and that it’s hard for him to be around.

Kevin and his wife pose together at a recent event. (Photo Credit: Kelley Kelley)

“Today, I want to be clean and sober more than I want to be drunk and high.”

Kelley is currently a sponsor and continues to go to meetings three times a week and a peer recovery group. He takes any chance he gets to let everyone know that you don’t have to struggle every day because he knows how horrible it is, but he also knows that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. He’s had a few people that he’s sponsored in the past that are still in the program today, but right now he currently has no one.

“You don’t want to let those people down.”

Wreck Wreaks Havoc

Brown had a normal life for a 28-year-old, she worked a full-time job, lived in the neighborhood where she grew up and she had a daughter to take care of and struggled with self-acceptance. A normal, everyday life - or it was until she got into a car accident and she was prescribed a low dose of pain medication and didn’t stop taking them.

At the time of taking pain medication non-stop, she was also dating a heroin addict, who slowly introduced her to the drug.

The first time, she thought nothing of it. She didn’t think that she could actually get addicted to it. But within several days of snorting it, she became addicted.

It was cheaper and easier to come by than the pain pills she was previously using. Within weeks, her addiction was in full swing, and her life started to slowly spiral out of control. She didn’t have enough money to feed her addiction, so she started stealing money from her family. Drugs became her singular focus. She lied to her family, who took over custody of her daughter.

Brown took off for West Virginia, where she took jobs dancing at strip clubs to finance her addiction. She would drive back and forth from West Virginia and Pennsylvania, trying to find a fix, not eating or sleeping, her weight dropping to eighty pounds.

When she came back to Pennsylvania, she’d find out that she couldn’t hide from the over two hundred charges being held against her. Ninety of those charges were felonies.

When her mother had seen enough of her addiction, she stepped in and turned her daughter to the police.

Stacie Brown, during the worst of her addiction. (Photo Credit: Stacie Brown)

The first time Brown experienced detox in the Allegheny County Jail. She would come out clean and stay that way for 18 months, until she got back with her boyfriend and got her hands on some drugs. Then, it was right back to the way she was before.

One night, Brown was with her boyfriend and two others, at her apartment. They were planning on getting high, when she remembered a guy had given her some free heroin. She injected the heroin and that was the last thing she remembered. When she came to, there were four EMT’s standing over her. They explained that when she overdosed, her boyfriend was mad that she used all of the free drugs, so he dragged her to the hallway and left her unconscious. And when her neighbor found her, they had called 911.

It took paramedics three doses of Narcan to bring her back to consciousness. Brown said that one of the paramedics explained she was a recovered addict and that after the second dose of Narcan, they were going to stop, because usually if you don’t respond after two, there’s nothing to be done. But the paramedic said to try one more time, and Brown regained consciousness. Brown had never been so thankful in her life.

“If she hadn’t been there, hadn’t said one more time, I wouldn’t be here.”

To detox after her overdose, she decided a trip to Florida to her friend’s house would be good. Her friend had a few years clean, and she was determined to make up for lost time with her now 13-year-old daughter. She would take her daughter to Disney World for her thirteenth birthday, deciding that they could celebrate and she could detox. Thinking she’d be away from the drugs. Brown thought of this as a second chance for her daughter to never see her dope sick.

But what she didn’t realize was that you can get anything in Florida, and she bought some drugs. She started using instead of detoxing and needed to make sure she had enough so she wouldn’t get dope sick if she took her daughter anywhere. Her daughter continued to question if they could go places, but Brown needed to get her fix.

“And I remember her asking me every day can we go to the playground? And I would say you have to wait for mommy to have her medicine. And by the time I had enough to get through the whole day, it was the nighttime.”

Brown spent her time in Florida using, her daughter’s birthday long forgotten. But the guilt of letting her daughter see her like this again was eating her alive. And when the trip from Florida was over, Brown decided that she would go into rehab.

She succeeded, going to meetings and actually detoxing, and before she knew it she was suddenly almost five years clean and getting married to a recovering addict.

“I thought a new husband, we’re having a baby together. A new start.”

Once she was married with a baby on the way, she looked at this as turning over a new leaf. Then her husband relapsed, and five months later, she was following right behind him.

She used on and off again for two years, struggling to stay clean completely until one day when she was sober, her daughter asked her to go to the playground. When they were there, her daughter had told her that she was happy she didn’t have to take her medicine anymore and Brown swore to her husband that if she ever said she was going to use again, to have her daughter say those words.

“If I could take one part of my addiction back, it would be that moment.”

That sentence would push Brown into going into her second round of rehab. This time, as an outpatient detox with a doctor and experienced Suboxone, which is used to treat addiction. (It also has a high risk for addiction.)

She also went to support group meetings and sponsor meetings and found a home in the recovery program at Onala -- where she now works.

Those words of her daughter would also come back to haunt Brown, as even at six years clean, she recalls a time two years ago when she had a hard time with a coworker. She had set up a meeting with someone to buy drugs and was on her way there when she got a phone call from her daughter telling her that she didn’t want her to take her medicine anymore.

“I drove straight home,” Brown recounted.

Brown still struggles every day, but has her daughter to get her through. With six years of sobriety under her belt, she’s working at Onala Recovery Center and giving Narcan trainings when she can.

“Do I want to die? No. Do I plan to use again? No. But I want everyone to know how to administer Narcan.”

A Family Struggles

Addiction runs through Winkowski’s family. Her mother was an addict and lost custody of her and her siblings multiple times throughout their lives.

Growing up, she claimed, she not only struggled with sexual abuse but also being bounced around between her mother’s and her grandmother’s home. They would go to live with their grandmother who would teach Winkowski, as she claims, “how to live straight.” When with her grandmother, she was the straight-A student of her family, when everyone else was out partying and doing drugs, she was the one swearing that she would never do that.

When her mother won custody of her and her siblings again, Winkowski wouldn’t go to school and spent her summers trying to make up for it in summer school so she could graduate on time.

She decided to take the path her grandmother tried to pave for her, enrolling in paralegal school. And while her siblings and mother continued to use, she was working and going to school. She wanted to try and get away from the life of addiction, thinking that she could get a good job and leave. She felt like nothing was going the way she wanted as she watched her entire family, and felt drained as she tried to hold a nine-to-five job and take care of everyone. So she turned to the one thing she said she never would: popping pain pills to feel a little energy.

 She met a man who, at the time, she didn’t know was a drug addict. They eventually got married and had a baby. And that’s when she realized he was a drug addict.

Judy Winkowski at Onala Recovery Center, April 13, 2018. Photo by Katie Kelly.

While she was going to work as a paralegal and taking care of a baby, her husband was hanging out with her brother and sister and getting high. She couldn’t believe she had married into addiction. Shortly after having the baby, she was in a car accident where she broke her neck, hip and pelvic bone and was prescribed a heavier dose of pain medication: Vicodin. It grew from Vicodin to Heroin, from Heroin to Cocaine.

She was constantly worried about where and from whom she was going to buy drugs. She wondered when she was going to use and how she was going to do it. She had become just like her mother.

Suddenly work and family were an afterthought, and she was more worried about her next fix. It was a constant battle within herself because she didn’t want to fall into her mother’s footsteps. To her it was just fitting in and doing what felt good at the time.

She was trying to maintain a life by using constantly, not worrying about her job as a paralegal anymore, just worrying about the high.

She felt as though she could only pretend to be a normal mother for so long. Her struggles of pretending and scrambling for money to buy drugs, lasted until she watched her family slowly wither away. She lost her mother to an overdose in her own living room. She decided that she would change her ways, she couldn’t take this helpless feeling anymore. She checked herself into rehab.

In rehab, her heart stopped beating from Benzodiazepine (Valium) withdrawal, the point when a person’s body can no longer function without drugs while in rehab. She started to seize, and they couldn’t stop it. She was rushed by ambulance to Cleveland Clinic, where she woke up on a ventilator.

After waking up in the hospital, she was distraught and angry. When she checked out, she wanted to go back to in-patient rehab. But she was told she had overstayed her welcome and had not only been taken to the hospital but had also been to the same rehab facility before and checked herself out.

That’s when she was put into the Onala program at the Onala Recovery Center in Pittsburgh.

Onala Recovery Center, located on West Carson Street in Pittsburgh. Photo by Katie Kelly.

The Onala program is a program designed for people struggling with addiction to find recovery with the companionship in a social environment created by people that have the same or mutual problems. She’s working with other people to help get through her own struggles and also help them get through theirs.

Winkowski is now two years clean.

“The last time something changed in me, I just knew that I didn’t want to live like this anymore,” she explained.

These are just the stories of three people who were affected first hand by the opioid epidemic. They are lucky enough to share their stories of addiction and recovery, as difficult as it is for them to talk about. But 5,443 people won’t get the chance to share their stories.  

Katie Kelly is a senior journalism major at Point Park. She hopes to work as an investigative journalist. For more information, you can contact her at katiekelly1515@gmail.com