Pubdate: Sun, 19 Mar 2006
Source: Daily Reflector (Greenville, NC)
Copyright: 2006 Daily Reflector
Contact:  http://www.reflector.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1456
Author: Paul Dunn

SOBRIETY PROVES ELUSIVE, EVEN WHEN HELP

Lindsey Harris wears a white, loose-fitting polo shirt with an
alligator emblem over the breast. The shirt's horizontal stripes
enfold his muscular frame, which in his prime he used to punish
opposing high school football players. "You have to be able to accept
life on life's terms," he tells four men and one woman lounging on
stuffed chairs in a nondescript meeting room. "You always have to have
a plan just for today."

The listeners are drug addicts and alcoholics. They voluntarily
checked into the PORT Human Services Detoxification Center at 203
Government Circle because their lives have crashed headlong onto a
rocky bottom. Some will lose their families, jobs and friends if they
don't fly right. Others will die: Some overdose, some commit suicide,
some are murdered. Others make it. But not many.

For the past eight years Harris has been a detox center substance
abuse counselor. When he speaks, patients listen: He's been there. As
Harris tells it, he would have pursued his gridiron dreams several
more years had the chancellor at Elizabeth State University not
revoked his football scholarship. Seems a few of Harris' buddies went
on an eastern Carolina thieving spree one day 16 years ago and stashed
the goods in Harris' car.

Though the promising 18-year-old running back professed innocence
after local police discovered the theft, the chancellor wanted nothing
more to do with him, Harris recalled. So with his sports career
fumbled, Harris enrolled in Harbarger Junior College in Raleigh, a
business school with no athletic program. But he was soon distraught:
Without football he had little initiative, he discovered.

So he started drinking, then drugging, dealers scenting the vulnerable
kid like sharks do blood. Now 34, the father of three cringes at the
memories, but uses the lessons to help others harpoon their sharks, as
he once did. The final humiliation| Harris was having a bad day.

It was February 1994, 5:30 p.m., nearly dark. Thirty-eight degrees.
For a half hour, the eastern North Carolina native and three partners
had been treading the frigid asphalt on U.S. 64 near Norfolk, Va. -
stark naked. Within minutes, a Virginia state trooper pulled alongside
the men, rolled down his window and asked: "What the -- is wrong with
you!?" "We just told him what happened," Harris recalled without
chagrin. "But we didn't tell him about the drugs or the money."

Several hours earlier, a drug dealer had shoved a gun to Harris'
temple as he sat in his car with three accomplices. They were in the
woods near Norfolk, a perfect spot, they figured, for a cash-for-crack
transaction. The streetwise drug runners - all in their early 20s -
arrived in Virginia that morning looking to complete a drug deal for
their local supplier. They'd never seen this particular Virginia
dealer before. Turns out he wasn't as kind as the others had been.

The dealer wanted the $20,000 drug money hidden in Harris' white, 1990
Acura Integra, but he didn't want to fork over the crack cocaine the
money was supposed to buy. In fact, he had no drugs at all that day,
Harris said. When the North Carolina men refused to hand over the
money, the angry dealer made the quartet strip and get out of the car.
The dealer drove away. The men, meanwhile, trudged out of the woods
and finally reached the highway hoping to attract attention.

The state trooper carted them to a Norfolk police station, issued them
jumpsuits and commanded them to stay put. Three hours later, the
police found Harris' abandoned car, and the men were allowed to leave.
The money was still there, stashed inside an air vent. The drug dealer
had shredded the car's seats and carpet.

The incident forced Harris to chuck the drug-and-alcohol lifestyle
he'd embraced for four years. The day before the handgun nudged his
head, he'd chased a half gallon of gin with $300 of crack cocaine. The
day before had been similar, as had the one before that.

"I saw myself just down to nothing," Harris recalled. "I had lost
everything and didn't have a place to go. It was as low as a person
could go." Harris checked himself into the Coastal Plains Substance
Abuse Rehabilitation Center in Rocky Mount. He knew he'd made the
right decision, but the first week in rehab tested his resolve like
nothing he'd ever experienced.

"I was very volatile that first week," Harris recalls. "I was violent
and wanted to fight because I wanted to drink and get high, but I
couldn't." After about five days, his withdrawal-induced sweating and
tremors eased; a week or so later so did his depression. On the 29th
day at Coastal Plains, Harris walked out clean. He says he's been
stone sober ever since. How it happens| Shrieks of laughter peel from
the detox center's business office during a recent noon hour. Between
bites of lunch, regional manager Nicole Brown and her staff regale
each other with amusing snippets. The brief respite helps diffuse the
day's pressures.

Detox is a timeout for alcoholics and drug addicts - temporary
sanctuary from the rabid dogs nipping at their heels. It's triage for
their spirits, too, many crushed at early ages by trauma, tragedy and
simple indifference - or worse. As one detox patient said: "I got put
down a lot by my parents and teachers. They said I'd never amount to
anything."

That statement wouldn't surprise Dr. David Ames, PORT consulting
psychiatrist and chairman of the Pitt County Substance Abuse
Coalition. From his eastern North Carolina vantage point, Ames has
seen ruined lives aplenty. Much of it's drug and alcohol related.

"Substance abuse just causes a whole lot of trauma in a zillion and
one different ways," he says. "The emotional stress of seeing a loved
one falling victim to addiction and becoming dreadfully disabled is
heart wrenching."

Frequently, families fall apart when the first domino falls. Substance
abusers rely on others to take up their slack, Ames explains. It
happens at work, home, anywhere and everywhere.

"You have all those real-life problems," Ames says. "These people are
not performing on their jobs or at home. Add to that that their
families frequently have to bail them out of jail and pay lawyers' and
medical fees." In American society, risk factors for alcoholism and
drug addiction run rampant. Ames points to a couple prominent ones:
dysfunctional families and living environment.

"Parents who drink excessively or abuse other drugs can't help their
children learn coping skills or learn to deal with adverse
circumstances," Ames says. "These kids may be emotionally scarred and
more liable to get into trouble."

Compounding the problem is a society obsessed with advertising - much
of it for alcohol, Ames contends.

"If your area is saturated with advertising for alcohol, your chances
are significantly higher for having problems with alcohol," he says.
"Television is probably by far the most invasive. You get bombarded
with these messages to drink and smoke, so people think it's cool."

The craving for drugs or alcohol hijacks a fundamental biological
mechanism in the brain for survival, Ames explains. Use drugs long
enough, and the brain changes to adapt to the new situation. Stop
using and the deprived brain protests.

"Even after withdrawal, the changed brain structures are still in
place," Ames says. "They can be triggered by cues, such as taking a
drink or seeing a drug dealer."

The results are predictable. "The person experiences an overwhelming
desire to try the drug again," Ames says. "It's so overwhelming that
most people relapse, and that's why addiction is so chronic."

Pitt County Memorial Hospital treats 1,200 to 1,500 patients per year
addicted to drugs or alcohol, said Cheryl Gentile, a hospital
substance abuse counselor. Alcohol is by far the most abused drug,
Gentile said. Cocaine, prescription medication, heroin and marijuana
abuse, in order, are the next most abused.

Though the problems are daunting, Dr. Gary Leonhardt, PORT's medical
director, sites an above-average complement of local caregivers and
law enforcement personnel and increasing public awareness as causes
for optimism. "We have community leaders from all walks who are trying
to help, and they are planning a siege to jump-start the movement,"
Leonhardt said. "These people have been very pro-active."

Needs are great, Gentile says, but every victory is momentous. "There
is a tremendous need for substance abuse counselors and programs in
eastern North Carolina," Gentile says. "We treat people in great need,
who are forever impacted by the care that we give to them. A former
patient of mine approached me four years after I counseled him, and
informed me that our brief intervention gave him the chance to get his
life back on track, and in fact, saved him."

But the efforts are balanced by what Leonhardt calls "a fairly heavy
local drug trade." Patients he treats from areas such as Wilson,
Washington, Goldsboro, New Bern and elsewhere tell him they visit
Greenville to buy drugs. "So, in some ways we're better off and some
ways worse off," he says. Greenville Police Department records for
2004-2005 help illuminate Leonhardt's claim.

The department made 38 arrests in 2004 for alcohol-related
infractions, 52 in 2005. The department made 1,658 drug-related
arrests in 2004, 1,038 in 2005. Decreased arrests, though, don't
necessarily reflect decreased drug activity, said Maj. Kevin Smeltzer;
the department simply shifted its focus to larger dealers. Smeltzer
doesn't expect the drug trade to decline until dealers are put out of
business.

"You can always remain optimistic, but the situation doesn't seem to
be any better," Smeltzer explained, noting his 21 years on the job.
"As long as there's a market for it (drugs), somebody is going to
provide that service. You have to dry up the market."

Recovery's first steps The PORT Human Services Detoxification Center
does not rehabilitate drug addicts and alcoholics. That's left to
other facilities, such as The Walter B. Jones Alcohol and Drug Abuse
Treatment Center in Greenville, a 76-bed, short-term, residential
treatment center.

Detox center patients graduate to Walter B. Jones, but first they must
endure five to seven days of hideous, body-and-mind-wracking
withdrawal. For many, headaches, vomiting, stomach cramps, depression,
anxiety and stark terror scar just about every moment of their detox.
Detox center counselors, nurses and contracted doctors help ease the
process, but the onus clearly is on the patients themselves to change.
By the time they leave the center, most will have conquered the worst
of their physical trauma. "We hope to see people no longer in acute
medical distress as a result of withdrawal," said Brown the regional
manager. "Our goal is to provide a place for a safe withdrawal process."

Because patients only stay an average of five days, new and distinct
challenges greet detox staff almost every day.

"We have clients come in who are angry and depressed, with just a full
array of emotional issues," said Brown, 35. "Sometimes they come in
and cuss everybody out on the staff and on the second day they
apologize." Most patients leave the facility with a renewed outlook on
life, vowing never to return to the center or to the way of life that
propelled them there in the first place. But good intentions often
fall by the wayside once patients leave the center's encouraging embrace.

"We see people return to the detox center pretty frequently," Brown
said. "They may do well for a little while, but they relapse and are
back." Staff members give patients little time to wallow in self-pity.
Days begin at 6 a.m. when nurses check vital signs: pulse, blood
pressure, temperature. Vitals are monitored every four hours the first
24 hours of a patient's stay and thereafter every eight hours.
Patients receive multivitamins to help gain strength and medication to
help ease withdrawal symptoms. Breakfast, lunch and dinner are
provided through a contract with Cypress Glen Retirement Community.

Counselors typically fill patients' days with addiction education
lectures on goal setting, health and stress. They periodically offer
"pot luck" activities, too: nature walks, fishing, bingo and "detox
feud," among them. Patients also are encouraged to attend nightly
12-step meetings outside the detox center.

Vital signs are checked a last time at 11 p.m.; lights go out 15
minutes later. Each day, about four people inquire about the
facility's services, Leonhardt said. But not everybody gets in.

Potential patients must meet American Society of Addiction Medicine
criteria that determine the appropriateness of treatment for
individual cases. If they fall in the right range on the ASAM scale,
and there's a bed open, they're in. If not, counselors help them find
treatment alternatives. Doctors turn away patients less than 10
percent of the time, Leonhardt said. "Patients may not have problems
deemed appropriate to require the level of services at the detox
center," Leonhardt explained. "On the other hand, patients may have
such severe medical and psychiatric problems that we can't provide the
level of services they need, and they may need to go to a psychiatric
hospital."

About a third of the center's patients enter the facility
involuntarily, Leonhardt estimated. They're admitted under a legal
document called an "involuntary substance abuse petition." To be
admitted involuntarily, caregivers or doctors must determine that
people are dangers to themselves or others, and that medical treatment
is the best option. "A family member may realize that the person will
have an extremely bad outcome if they don't seek treatment," Leonhardt
said. "A magistrate swears out a petition for the person and the local
law enforcement transports the person to the center."

Patients typically suffer from depression, anxiety and some psychosis,
Leonhardt said. In many cases, alcohol has compromised liver function
and added to other health problems, such as tooth decay. Many patients
indulge in what Leonhardt calls "poly-drug use."

"Mostly we see patients who have a primary substance that they really
like, like cocaine or opiates or alcohol," he said. "Most of the
folks, though, do more than one drug, and they are very good at what
they do. They have the capacity to continue to have access to what
they like and use regularly despite losing their home, jobs and family."

Hustle and bustle Most days, the PORT center thrums with
activity.

Eight of 10 facility beds are occupied year-round, Brown said.
Admissions usually peak as the weather cools, though totals for the
last quarter of 2005 belie trends.

During that time, males outnumbered females about 3-to-1. One-hundred
thirty-five people entered the facility with alcohol problems, 36 for
opiate addiction and two for other problems. They average 56 years of
age. According to Nancy Cleghorn, care management chief for the Pitt
Mental Health Local Management Entity - formerly Pitt County Mental
Health - 28 people walked into the LME in January seeking
substance-abuse counseling. Thirteen of 28 sought admittance to the
detox center. LME administrators, who screen potential detox center
patients to determine treatment suitability, received 178 telephone
calls about substance abuse during the same time period.

Pitt County Mental Health operated the center until a 2003 state
mandate transformed the agency into an LME and divested its mental
health services to private providers. PORT Human Services also
operates two other detox centers, a nine-bed unit in Washington, N.C.
and a six-bed in Ahoskie. Brown oversees all three.

The three centers service residents in 33 counties in eastern North
Carolina from Ahoskie to Wilmington. They are funded through the state
Department of Health and Human Services Division of Mental Health,
Developmental Disabilities and Substance Abuse Services.

The three units use the bulk of their funding to pay salaries, Brown
explained. PORT also provides services for Tideland Mental Health and
Roanoke/Chowan Mental Health.

Counseling punctuates the 24-hour medical care, as did one
mid-afternoon, late February.

Three men and one woman sit around a table in the detox center
kitchen. Lindsey Harris is leading a pot luck session. He passes a
roll of white toilet paper, instructing the patients to tear off a few
sheets and stack them. He circles the table, asking them to reveal
something about themselves as they flip over the sheets. Before long,
they've stripped bare the branches of their lives.

Harris recites last. "I had just lost all hope," he recalled of his
drug days. "I was at the bottom - looking up at the bottom. Everybody
was calling me an alcoholic and crack head.

"But I made it through. If I can do it, you can, too. "Whatever y'all
are going through, you'll come out. You'll come out." Paul Dunn can be
reached at  and 329-9569. Three patients at PORT Human
Services Detoxification Center share their stories in hopes of
discouraging others from following their paths. WINE BY THE CARAFE
Woody Woodpecker had trapped chipmunks Chip and Dale in the cornice of
Doreen Gifford's bedroom.

This is just too weird - even for an alcoholic - Gifford thought,
mesmerized by the blurry images.

"It scared the hell out of me," Gifford said of the hallucination she
had six months ago. "It was animated, and that really freaked me out.
I got right up and got a 40-ounce bottle of Colt-45."

Before the incident, the 39-year-old had gone one and half days
without a drink; the drought left her shaking uncontrollably. Every
day for the past two years, the single mother had drowned the sorrow
of her marital separation six years earlier with two and half
six-packs of beer or a 1-liter drink box of zinfandel wine.

"My drinking was outrageous," Gifford said. "I had blackouts and
didn't remember things."

Administrators admitted Gifford at 11:30 p.m., Feb. 20. She'd downed
four carafes of wine the day before, but trembled too violently that
night to eat. "I was trying to bring the spoon to my mouth, but I
couldn't because I was shaking like I had palsy," she said. "I just
threw the spoon down." Enough was enough.

"I like drinking, but it's time for this stuff to stop," she said the
next day, perched in the sun on a detox center picnic table. "I'm too
smart, and I have too much to live for."

She looked off a moment in mute supplication, took a drag from a
cigarette, turned back. Stared. There's a slight yellow tinge to the
whites of Gifford's somber brown eyes. Her melancholy's reflected
there, as are her memories. Gifford's marriage 13 years ago
deteriorated as her husband's crack cocaine habit strengthened. But
she still had her job at a mental health facility in Craven County,
and in 1998 was pregnant with her first child. The premature girl was
born on Gifford's birthday, Sept. 14, 1998. The baby died in her
mother's hands 77 minutes later.

On the way home from Craven Regional Medical Center, Gifford stopped
by work to drop off her resignation. She was inconsolable.

"I sat in the house with my head stuck in the pillow, howling,"
Gifford recalled. Gifford would later conceive a son, now 6, whose
welfare, she claims, compels her to get sober.

"Amazingly, I'm still optimistic, and I want to go back to school to
become a phlebotomist," she said. "I have to get back to the point
where I'm self-sufficient. That's really important to me."

HOOKED ON PARANOIA When he's high, Dennis can hear a pin
drop.

It makes him crazy. The detox veteran, who declined to give his last
name, has tried to commit suicide five or six times, he says. He's
usually driving when the mood strikes, but so far hasn't wrecked his
cars badly enough to kill himself. The 46-year-old Farmville resident
checked into the detox center on Feb. 17. The day after, he's slouched
in a stuffed chair absorbing a lecture on goal setting. His head's
wrapped in a skintight, black bandanna, a red baseball-style cap atop
that.

The rotund man's eyes are crescent moons. He's not sleeping well, he
says - too much anxiety. The shy giant has been in and out of six or
seven detox centers, he says, but the crack cocaine he's hooked on
lures him back every time. The highly addictive drug makes him feel
"paranoid and stupid," he explains, his honesty sifting through the
gravel of his voice. "I hear things and see things that aren't there
(when he's high), and I can't be around people." Dennis has used the
rock for 15 years, but until recently never believed he was hooked -
though he regularly lighted up all night long. His struggles
intensified after a divorce and the 1998 death of a son in a car
accident. Though he's managed to keep a longtime job, he owes a drug
dealer $2,400 and wonders if he'll ever have enough money to pay him.

"Sometimes I'd rather be dead than going about doing what I'm doing,"
he says. "I work all day, and before I even get the check it's already
gone to the drug dealers. As long as I ain't got no money in my pocket
I'm all right, but if I have $20 in my pocket I have to get the
drugs." Dennis was living on easy street at one time, he says. He
owned houses in Farmville, Fountain and Texas. Then he started
drinking, and drugs soon followed. He was 31 years old.

"I was doing pretty well before I started doing this," he explains.
"Now I don't have nothin'. People don't even want to be around you
when you're doing this."

Dennis' latest crack cocaine binge was a nightmarish, surreal
straightjacket he wore for four straight days. He didn't eat. He
didn't sleep. As far as he was concerned, he didn't exist.

"The drug was constantly on my mind," he recalls. "I couldn't think of
anything else. People out there who have never done it (drugs) don't
know what it's like."

Dennis has managed to stay clean for about six months after most of
his stints in detox, he said. He's hoping the latest one lasts a
lifetime, but the soft-spoken working man knows the odds are against
him. "I hope I can get out and stop it and quit it," he says, his head
bowed, fingers picking at the nails of his left hand. "I need to find
a new place to live." EXACERBATING THE PAIN Kenneth Owens sees body
parts in his sleep.

Hands, arms, legs, feet ... faces. He stumbled on them in the rubble
of New York's Twin Towers several days after the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks. Owens and his buddies had volunteered to accompany the
Elizabeth City Fire Department on a mercy mission to New York. They
stayed a month. Owens had moved to North Carolina from Virginia at age
12, two years before he started a drug and alcohol habit that would
plague him throughout his life. The 43-year-old is an
"equal-opportunity drug fiend," as he calls himself. He used what he
could get: marijuana, crack cocaine, heroin. "I was just trying to be
in with the crowd," he said of his early years. "Now I'm 43 years old
and don't have --, no car, no nothin'. It's a dead-end street." Owens,
a tree topper until a tumble from a top limb crushed his leg in 1991,
figures he's spent $500,000 to $600,000 on drugs in his lifetime. He's
been through detox eight to 10 times, he estimated, but has yet to
stay clean for more than a year. Drug infractions have landed him in
jail 12-13 times, he estimates. "There's a lot of peer pressure to use
drugs, mainly from the dealers," he said. "They tempt you by saying,
'Come on, man, I'll give you some for free,' just so you'll get back
on it."

Owens agreed to chat in the center's kitchen several weeks ago, the
day after he'd checked in. Glazed eyes hovered over a thin, black
mustache on his unshaven, gaunt face. He wasn't in the best of form:
His stomach hurt, he couldn't eat, and he had been unable to sleep, he
said. His body craved the heroin he couldn't feed it.

"It's rough. I'm going through a lot of withdrawal now, and it's going
to get worse," he said. "There's a lot of crazy stuff going through my
head right now."

Owens' drug use intensified after he returned from New York. The
opiates helped blur the horrific images he retained, though they never
completely vanished. "It just replays in my head, seeing the body
parts," he said. The week before he entered detox, Owens spent $1,500
for 25 caps of heroin, an ounce of marijuana and a quarter ounce of
crack cocaine. He paid for the drugs with money from his savings. If
he hadn't had the money, he would have stolen to get it.

"I would have broke in somewhere to get something to sell," he said.
"I've done plenty of that in my life. I'm not proud of it."
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