Let Us Live is a new project that centers on storytelling and uplifting the voices of people directly impacted by the overdose epidemic and incarceration, with the goal of reducing stigma and discrimination against incarcerated people with opioid use disorder (OUD) and increasing access to MOUD for people who are incarcerated and detained in Pennsylvania.
The voices of those directly impacted are often lost in the discussion of treatment for OUD in jails and prisons. Let Us Live seeks to change that by sharing stories of currently and formerly incarcerated people with OUD in their own voice.
James, Barry, George, Chase, Monique, and Jerome have made the brave choice to speak out about their experiences with the hope that it will help people understand the critical need to provide better treatment for all people with OUD.
Monique T. is an outreach worker in Kensington – a neighborhood in Philadelphia that is home to one of the biggest open-air drug markets in the U.S.
She spends her days connecting drug users and unhoused people to resources. But just nine years ago, she struggled with addiction herself.
She cycled in and out of jail and lived on the same streets where she now works.
Monique tried to “get clean” for years, but was only successful when she used methadone, a treatment that she refers to as “the bridge.”
This is her story in her own words:
I grew up on a working farm in Rhode Island. My dad grew vegetables and fruit and we had animals. He’s Native American: part Mashantucket Pequot, and part Narragansett. My mom’s family is from the Cape Verde Islands.
As I got older, my mom and dad got divorced and we moved into the city. I think that's when my depression set in.
I was only 14 at the time, and I didn't know how to describe it.
At first I thought drugs would take away everything that I was feeling. But by the time I realized that the only thing it did was suppress my emotions, I was already physically addicted to opiates.
A vicious cycle
Addiction was a vicious cycle.
Every day was the same thing because I didn’t know anything different: Feeling sick, stealing, selling what I stole to get more drugs, and getting locked up.
Did I want to go home? Every day. Did I want to see my kids? Every day. But the drug was so powerful there was no way I could win alone. And asking for help was something that I wasn't used to doing.
At one point, my aunt tried to put me in treatment in a facility in Delaware. They didn’t use methadone, they used psych meds and that didn’t work. After being there for 8 months I went home to my aunt's house, picked up drugs again, and went on to use for another 10 years.
Jumping through a hoop of fire
Trying to get access to methadone was like jumping through hoops of fire with gasoline drawers on.
At that time, there were only 3 facilities in Philadelphia that used methadone. Many of them required IDs, which were hard to get if you were homeless, or had intake processes that were so complicated that I could never stay long enough to finish all of the paperwork.
But when I finally got into an inpatient program, methadone saved my life. For the first time, I could sleep at night and not have a drug dream.
When you're in that stage of addiction, the only thing lower than where you are is the grave. You can't get no lower than that.
Methadone raised me out of that. Even though I didn't know which way I was going, even though I didn't know how, I saw that there was an opportunity to change.
I could not have done it without my methadone support group. They held on to me when I didn't want to be held. They loved on me when I didn't want to be loved, and probably didn't deserve to be.
Without that support, I wouldn’t be here today.
Addiction is not a crime
Recovery is something you work at every single day. Every day I fight for my life, but I know no greater fight.
It’s not a crime to be an addict. The American Medical Association has classified it as a disease.
So why are we treating it like it's a crime?
People are dying out here. They're getting limbs amputated. Legs, arms, fingers, and toes. This is a fight for your life. I'm ready to fight for anybody that wants to do this and save their life. I will go to the moon for people. Because people have done it for me.
If we're saying we want to help people as a society, we need to make methadone more accessible. It needs to be in prisons, jails, mental health institutions, behavioral health institutions, all of them.
Methadone gives people the opportunity to lift the fog from over their eyes and brains so that new ways of life can get in.
If we're a country that says that we care about our citizens, ac like it. Don’t ignore it. Don’t act like you don't see the elephant in the room that is the opioid epidemic. Don't act like you don't see the drugs getting more deadly, the kids getting addicted at earlier ages.
By denying people the resources that they need to recover, you're killing them. You're killing their hopes. You're killing their dreams. And it's just not them, this is generational. Their grandkids and kids are affected.
Breaking the cycle
We have to break this cycle somewhere. And since most of us are incarcerated at some point, why not start there? Going through withdrawal in jail is the worst. You could kill yourself from that level of pain and agony.
Let methadone be accessible so that people can believe in something, until they can believe in themselves.
We have to be responsible for one another. I care about you so that you can care about somebody else.
In Kensington, we want people to come and talk to us like human beings, because that's what we are. How can you help us if you don't ask us what we need? People make all of these assumptions about people who use drugs.
It’s like Marie Antoinette: “Oh they look hungry, let them eat cake.”
When we're hungry, we're not just hungry for food. We're hungry for life, for substance, for something to be a part of.
So let us live. Let us have methadone. It isn’t the whole answer, but it's the bridge to get us to the other side.
And on the other side, there is the answer.
James D. was recently released from state prison. Like many people, he has cycled in and out of the criminal legal system for years as a result of having opioid use disorder.
At the time of his arrest, he was prescribed Sublocade, an injectable form of buprenorphine. The prison told him many times that he was approved to receive it in prison, but they didn’t give it to him. Then later, the prison told him that they would not prescribe it for him because he had been off of the medication for so long that he was no longer qualified to receive it – due to the prison’s own delay in providing it to him.
This is James D.’s story in his own words:
People use drugs for a lot of different reasons. They use it to numb themselves. To cope with the things they may have going on in their lives.
I got into drugs because I grew up with it. It was what was normal to me, a part of everyday life. People sat around snorting pills, drinking, or snorting coke. I didn’t know nuthin’ else. The majority of my family either sold drugs or used them.
I was doing and selling hard drugs by the time I was 13. I got high with my parents. I did pills with my dad, and sold drugs with him. My mother was incarcerated, my father was incarcerated, I was incarcerated. At one point, I even had my dad as a celly in prison. Some people might say, “Me and my dad went to the ball game.”
Well, me and my dad shared a cell in prison.
I try my hardest to explain it to people, but there’s only so much you can say.
I wish people knew how hard it is to stop using. If you’ve never been in my shoes or another addict’s shoes you don't know what it’s like.
When I’m using, I’m not happy. I’m miserable. Like, it literally makes me want to die. That's how bad it is. But I still can't stop using. It sounds crazy, but this is an illness.
Drugs are killing us. It's not something I want. I know that I could possibly die, and I still do it. So what's that tell you right there? Something is wrong.
The Miracle Drug
When I got on Sublocade, I called it the miracle drug.
I started taking it right before I got out of rehab.
I realized that for the first time in as long as I can remember, I wasn’t thinking about getting high.
Before, I would get stressed out about the little things: where am I going to get my next paycheck, how am I going to do this? I'm used to drowning in all of my thoughts. But it helped me relax. It helped me breathe.
It makes you feel normal, whatever that is.
I’m an artist, and when I was drawing tattoos for people I even noticed that my creativity was better.
And I've seen it work for a lot of people. I've met some dudes that’ve been on it for five years now. And they're doing great. Maybe not everything is perfect, but they're working. They have families.
It made me feel like I actually had a shot at doing something with my life. But that got shot down real quick.
Withdrawal
When I got locked up, they asked me as soon as I walked in the door if I was on Sublocade and marked it down. I got a paper saying I met all the criteria to receive it while I was in prison and that I would be put on the list.
But when I got transferred, they said that I needed to start the whole process over, that they didn’t have my medical records. They denied me for so long that eventually they claimed that I was no longer eligible to receive the shot because I had been off of it for too long.
I eventually started going through withdrawal in jail.
When you go through withdrawal, you can't sleep. You're up all night, awake for days. Your anxieties are through the roof. You don't want to eat. You don't want to do nothing. I would try to go outside and work out, but I had no motivation. It just takes your life out of you.
Even though you’re surrounded by thousands of people, you feel alone.
You feel like death.
A Lifetime Battle
Addiction is a lifetime battle.
I once had 8 years clean, and even after all of that time, I still relapsed.
It’s always right there, and if you stop going to meetings, or doing what you need to do to stay away from drugs, you pick up right where you left off.
While I was incarcerated, I lost my brother to drugs. He was 47, and had been battling addiction for his entire life, too.
Before he died, he broke down crying with me. I was hugging him and he was like, “Bro, I don’t want to do this no more, but I can’t quit.”
He had kids and grandkids. He had many years of his life where he had managed to stay clean, and would even take me to narcotics anonymous meetings. But then he got hurt at work and started taking Oxy’s and got back into it. That’s what happens when you are an addict.
I tried to tell him to get on Sublocade. He was like, “Bro, does it really work?” And I was like, “Yeah it really works– please take it.”
He kept saying, “Yeah, I will.”
But he never did. And that was it.
Life on the outside
My brother lost the battle, but I'm still fighting it.
I've been doing this since I was 13, and I just don't want to do it anymore.
I'm 37 and I finally feel like I’ve got a little shot at life here. So I'm going to try to make the best of it and get out of it what I can instead of ending up in a casket. I'm gonna do it for me and I'm gonna do it for my brother.
We're all gonna be in the grave one day. But I'm not trying to have someone find me ODed laying on the side of the road.
Sublocade is my last hope. I don’t want to go back to that life no matter what. I want to thrive, I want to do better. I’ve worked hard at it.
Not everybody’s gonna do the right thing. We get stereotyped because maybe someone else slipped up and relapsed. But it’s the drugs, not the person.
I wish people like us were given more of a chance.
George B. is currently incarcerated in Pennsylvania. Like many people in prison, he suffers from Opioid Use Disorder.
Despite having a disease that requires medication as treatment, George does not have access to Suboxone because he did not have a prescription before he entered prison. According to state prison policy, he can only get Suboxone if he’d been prescribed it at the time at the time of his arrest, and only if that was after 2019.
Instead, the prison will only offer him naltrexone. George has tried taking this medication and it did not work for him. Studies show that naltrexone is less effective at reducing overdoses and has worse treatment retention rates. Doctors in the community usually do not prescribe it.
Because so many people with opioid use disorder are denied the necessary medication they need in prison, Suboxone is widely available on the prison illicit market. Because the prison refused to prescribe it for him, George felt that he had to risk the consequences of purchasing Suboxone illicitly rather than face a possible overdose. When George purchased it from other incarcerated people and was caught, he was punished severely, despite using the same medication that the prison prescribes to others who have the same disease he does.
George has been sent to solitary confinement for months and denied visitation. Most importantly, he was denied parole, which extended his sentence.
People with OUD have a disease, and they deserve to receive medical treatment for it when they are in prison.
Here is his story in his own words:
The accident
I'm originally from Brooklyn, New York. I came to Pennsylvania in the mid-90s, and I brought my children and my wife at the time. But I ended up getting arrested in Pennsylvania, and I spent the next decade in prison.
I was in a revolving door of prison for a couple of years but I came home and I finally ended up getting myself together. I was in recovery for 13 years in Narcotics Anonymous until I had a car accident.
I was working two jobs: as a barber in the daytime, and third shift in a steel plant as an operator.
I had to work both jobs because I had mouths to feed.
One night, I was coming home from work, when I hit a spot of black ice and my car spun out and hit a tree. I was trying to pump the brakes while I spun, and as a result when I hit the tree, it ripped my foot off completely on one side. It was hanging by a thread.
The doctors had to reattach my ankle, and they started giving me Percocets and then Oxycontin for the pain.
After the accident, I had to have two more surgeries. I had to have screws put in my leg. I was laid up and couldn’t do anything. I ended up losing the job at the steel plant because I wasn't there long enough to get workman's comp.
But I started cutting hair again like a week after my surgery because the pain pills allowed me to work through the pain.
At the time, my youngest daughter had a brand new baby, and we were trying to help them out. My son was going through a situation, so we were paying his rent. My mother was sick in New York, and I was going back and forth to help her out. All of that was financially straining.
Working cutting hair gave me a good feeling inside. I enjoy cutting hair. I’m a good barber. And I liked that I was able to be dependable if my family needed something.
I wanted to keep that good feeling at all costs. And that caused me to lie to people. I knew the pain pills were a problem, subconsciously. I would share at Narcotics Anonymous meetings about my prescription, but I would never say exactly what I was on or what I was taking.
It's like trying to juggle fire. Eventually, I knew I was going to get burned.
Back to prison
In 2017, my mother passed away. I didn't know how to feel. Because I went to jail at a young age, I never grew up emotionally. Drugs make you feel better in the beginning. But at some point, you feel nothing. And that's where I was at.
I was taking one pill, twice a day. I would feel no physical pain. I would get the feeling of euphoria. But after the physical pain, my mind manifested a phantom pain. After a while, I had to go ahead and find other means. I started buying pills on the street. And that led me from taking pills to me starting doing heroin because it was cheaper.
That went on until March of 2018, when I was arrested. I came to jail with a heroin habit.
I didn't want to go through withdrawal because the withdrawal is painful. Withdrawal feels like you constantly have the flu. The nose starts running. I couldn’t sleep. My body felt weak. I felt like somebody's taking an ice pick and chipping out the marrow of my bones inside of my body.
Denied treatment
I realized I could not stop on my own.
When I don't have Suboxone, everything is doom and gloom. The glass is always half empty. When I have Suboxone, the glass is always half full. It gives me a better perspective. It helps me figure out life. It helps me cope with things better.
When I was self-medicating for a year and a half, I enrolled in a school in prison and I was able to complete the course. It shows that I work better on medication than I do off medication. Off, it is just a bleary existence. Dreadful.
So I started asking for help. I asked them, could I be on the MAT program? So they put me in a referral to a doctor. And when I saw him, he told me that it was impossible for me to get addicted to drugs in jail, so he wasn’t going to refer me to the MAT program.
When I came to this jail, I tried again. I wrote to them and asked them about the MAT program. They said they were going to look into it. But then they eventually denied me.
After that, I filed a grievance. I filed grievances to the superintendent. I filed a grievance to medical. And at every level I was denied.
Illicit Suboxone
In prison, if you get a dirty urine, they take away your visits and they put you in the hole for anywhere from 30 to 90 days. They put you on this tracking program where every month they test you to see if you're using drugs. So every month, I'm going to the hole. I come back out, I go to the hole, come back out. And every time I go to the hole, if I don't get drugs, I gotta go through withdrawal all over again. But the jail gives me no alternative for me to stop the physical pain. The whole cycle just keeps repeating itself.
Suboxone is a medication. It's like if I got cancer and I'm being given medication for cancer, it's helping me. And people don't look at it like that. They're like, “Oh that's a drug that you want to use to get high.”
No, it's a real mental problem that I have.
Medication helps you get back on the right path. This drug allows you to be able to function properly, work, go to school, be a part of your family. You don't have to sneak off and try to get high. You're able to function. So for me, it's a necessity to be on Suboxone. It puts me in a place where I'm able to be a better version of myself.
I have a real addiction. I have a real problem and there's a real solution. And you're telling me, no, I don't fit the criteria for it. So I'm going to continue to fight.
Chase R. is currently incarcerated in Pennsylvania. When he was transferred from prison to a county jail to attend a court proceeding, the county jail prescribed Suboxone to treat his Opioid Use Disorder, a disease that he has suffered from for over fifteen years.
He was later transferred back to state prison 50 days later, where he was told that prison policy requires incarcerated people to have been on Suboxone for 60 days in order to continue to receive treatment. Therefore, they denied him Suboxone.
These kinds of arbitrary policies, which have no basis in medicine, have caused pain, relapse, and even death for incarcerated people suffering from OUD.
Despite his previous prescription for medication, Chase R. has yet to receive medical treatment.
This is his story in his own words:
I'm from a place called Barnesville, Pennsylvania. A lot of people don't really know because it's such a small town.
I grew up in a little valley. I rode dirt bikes for fun and skateboarded. My passion is music and welding– those are the two things that I do best.
I ended up getting addicted to opiates after I hit a deer on a motorcycle when I was 21. I had to get surgery after the accident and got prescribed Percocets. The first couple times I took them, I didn't like them. But then all of a sudden I started liking them, and couldn’t stop.
After my prescription to Percocets ended, I turned to the street and started using heroin and fentanyl.
Now I am 37, and it's been nothing but a battle ever since.
Nothing but a battle
I went from having close relationships with my family to stealing money from them to get drugs, and lying. Types of things that I would never do if I was sober.
If I did not have heroin or fentanyl, I was sick in bed and I didn't want to do anything. I would feel depressed, and all I would think about was getting high. It's the only thing that made me feel normal.
It feels like you have no motivation to do anything at all. You're not happy, but you know if you do that little bit of heroin or fentanyl or Percocet, or any type of opiate, you'll have the motivation to do things for that day.
Opiates had a really strong hold on me, to the point where I became suicidal. I didn't want to live anymore because I didn't want to keep hurting the people that I love. It made me feel ashamed of myself.
10 days
Taking Suboxone made me feel like I didn't have to go use heroin anymore. It made me feel normal. It gave me my motivation back. I wasn't sick every day in bed. I wasn't out stealing stuff to get money for drugs.
I actually started feeling like my self-worth was coming back. I started feeling like I could be successful and go to work every day and just do normal things. I really couldn't believe it in the beginning, but that medication worked wonders for me.
But I'm about to go home in 11 months and they don't want to prescribe it to me.
They said that since I was only on Suboxone for 50 days instead of 60 days like the policy requires, I cannot get the medication.
That difference of 10 days was the reason why they refused me.
Withdrawal
Going through withdrawal in prison is the worst feeling.
Just imagine laying in your bed for seven days and not being able to sleep at all, no matter how hard you try. You can’t stop moving your legs. You get bad headaches, stomach aches, bad diarrhea. You sweat and no matter how many times you shower, you still feel dirty.
All I could think about was how one piece of Suboxone could make me better.
True Help
It makes me feel angry. The people that need help here can't get the true help that they need.
The medical staff at the prison say things like, “Oh, he just wants to get high.”
But they don't have any understanding of what our experience is because many of them have never been on heroin.
It feels like no matter what conclusion you come to, no matter how hard you fight, you'll never win against the prison.
Things need to make a change in a lot of ways in Pennsylvania.
People need love and support. We need people that care, people that listen, people that don’t just come to work for the paycheck.
I just feel like none of us are perfect. Everybody needs help in their own way.
For me, Suboxone will allow me to never use heroin again, go home with a fresh start, be successful and reach my goals.
People should be able to get the treatment that they truly need in here.
How could we ever go to the street and even try to be successful when they're not getting us involved in treatment before we come home? They're just sending us out to the street to die.
Jerome M. is an outreach worker in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where he devotes his life to helping others who have Opioid Use Disorder like him.
Jerome only found relief from OUD when he was on methadone.
Several years ago, after successfully being in treatment with methadone for years, he was arrested and went to jail. Because the jail wouldn’t prescribe him methadone, Jerome was forced to go through an excruciating withdrawal.
This is his story in his own words:
I was born and raised in Detroit. Coming up in that city is nothing like other places, Detroit is fast.
What I'm talking about when I say fast is the drugs and the lifestyle.
I came up under the era that they called the “super fly era.” It was when pimps, hustlers and big drug dealers ran the city.
That meant that I got introduced to drugs at an early age. At about 15 years old I tried heroin. And that's where all my trouble started.
My oldest brother was a drug dealer. He was my role model growing up– he was who I wanted to be like. He didn't want me in the lifestyle that he was living and he always told me, “This ain't for you.”
But I was an inquisitive kid. I’m 74 now and I’m still inquisitive.
I used to hide and watch my brothers and his friends do drugs. So the first time I tried them, I knew how to do it.
I shot heroin, nodded out for a while, and when I woke back up, I fell in love with the high. That's where everything started for me.
When my brother found out that I was using drugs, he beat me up real bad. He said, “before I let you go down this dark alleyway, I'll kill you, cause this ain't for you.”
But it was too late, I was already addicted.
Cycles of Incarceration
The first time I went to prison I got locked up for 13 years. I was denied parole twice, but by the third time they agreed to let me out as long as I left Detroit.
That’s when I came to Pittsburgh to live with my father.
At the time, he was running two Jitney stations on the North Side and was almost never home, which meant I had no supervision. I loved my dad and respected him, but it didn’t take long until I wound up back in the game.
For the next decades I would be in and out of prison and jail.
When I was out, I would use everyday. I didn't think I had a problem, but the truth was, I was playing Russian Roulette with my life.
Denial plays a big part in addiction. I was not only addicted to the drugs, I was addicted to the lifestyle. To everything that comes along with the disease of addiction. Those two counterparts kept me sick for years.
Recovery
Change is hard for a lot of people. But I had to change. The tool that gave me the chance to do it was methadone.
Using methadone meant that I could deal with life on life's terms. It allowed me to look at my life, and for the first time decide that I didn’t want to live like this anymore.
Receiving methadone treatment has meant that I can go out and work in the trenches every day as an outreach worker. I have saved lives, reversed overdoses. I have seen so many friends die as a direct result of this disease, and methadone means that I am still here. It has given me hope.
But back in 2020 I almost lost that hope. I was working and living at my nephew’s house on supervision. My probation officer came and accused me of using marijuana, which was not true.
The next thing I knew–with no warning or piss test–they sent six county sheriffs to my nephew's house to cart me off to county jail for three months. They sat me down in a lawn chair and put me in shackles. All of my neighbors were saying, “What the hell is this?”
When I got to jail, I was checked out by a nurse. I told her I needed methadone for my recovery and she said, “I can’t help you.”
I was 71 years old at the time. That's when I started wondering: Would I survive?
Jail
Detoxing from methadone is so painful that I know people who have died from it.
The first day you just feel sickness. But by the third day I was balled up in my cell, experiencing cold flashes, hot flashes and sweats. I completely lost the ability to eat.
I went 29 days without eating or sleeping. And on top of that, I caught COVID-19.
I thought I was going to die. At that point, my resistance was so low that the only thing that got me through was God.
Purpose on earth
Eventually, I was able to tell a judge my story.
The first thing he said was, “I am sorry. You are not even supposed to be here.”
I've been in jail when guys just took their own life because they just felt nobody cared about them. But I ain't never felt that, because I know I got a purpose on this earth.
People that have known me through all of these years see me out working in the community and tell me, “I’m proud of you, man.”
For them, I'm a hope shot. They see that if I can do it, they can do it.
A day in my life is another day clean and sober. Another day for me to be out in the streets helping those who need it.
I just became a great grandfather this year. And after so many years in and out of jail, I finally get to be a part of my grandkids’ lives.
Life sober ain't always a bowl of cherries, but every day that I wake up, I ask God to keep his hands on me.
Like many people in prison who have Opioid Use Disorder, Barry S. has cycled in and out of the criminal legal system in a familiar pattern: arrest, imprisonment, release -- followed by an immediate return to the streets of Kensington in Philadelphia, one of the biggest open-air drug markets in the U.S.
The only thing that managed to stop that cycle was Suboxone, a form of buprenorphine. Barry was previously prescribed it on the outside and also while he was in state prison.
When Barry was released from prison in August 2020 at the height of the pandemic, he tried to get treated with Suboxone again. But he faced delays and obstacles with his insurance and struggled to navigate the health care and welfare systems, which remained strained from COVID-19.
Without treatment, Barry relapsed and was arrested and went back to prison. When he tried to get Suboxone from the same doctor who had prescribed it to him before, he was denied. At the time, the prison required that people be on buprenorphine for at least 60 days at the time of their arrest in order to keep receiving it while in prison.
Barry remains incarcerated. The prison still refuses to prescribe him Suboxone.
This is his story in his own words:
I grew up in South Philly until I was 14, when my mom moved away to Havertown to get away from my dad. I’m the son of two alcoholics, and both of them were abusive.
My dad was addicted to alcohol and rage; he would fight anybody that was around. My mom would drink and take pills. We had the cops called to our house all the time. We had food and shelter, the bills and stuff paid, but it was totally dysfunctional.
When I was about 17, my friend started taking me to Philly to hang out around in Center City. We were meeting people, partying, drinking, smoking weed.
At first, I just wanted to be a part of something. My addiction was to the lifestyle. I didn't feel like I fit in anywhere else before, so that was fun to me.
But I started progressing rather quickly into harder and harder drugs. I went from marijuana to Ecstasy to cocaine. I was 17 years old, addicted to crack cocaine and heroin.
When you start using drugs like that, it totally takes over your mind. It tells you over and over: that's all you need. It lowers your inhibition, it lowers your self-esteem. You just want to keep escaping because you feel like there's nothing left other than using that drug. You're going to any lengths to get it, even criminal activity.
I was pretty much alone trying to figure out how to support my addiction. Drugs cost me about a couple hundred dollars a day. So I resorted to theft, property crimes.
I found myself going into the criminal legal system before I was 19. I was given a 2 ½ to 10 year sentence.
From there, every time I got out, I went running back into Kensington because I felt like I fit in there. I’d do a year in prison and then the same day I’m released, I’m on the Market Frankford El on the way to the Somerset station stop, already willing to trade my freedom.
Once you’re wrapped up in it, it’s a prison in itself.
Stopping the cycle
The only reprieve I had in all that time is medicated assistance. It’s not perfect. I’ve messed up on it, but it worked better than anything else I was on.
The doctor who was running the program in prison told me it was like a diabetic using insulin, and I’d probably overdose without it.
With Suboxone, I would get 30, 60 days clean, when I couldn't even get a day before.
I could be around my family more. I could go to work. I'm definitely not committing crimes. You're not facing an overdose. It comes from a pharmacy, so you know there's no fentanyl in there. It replaces the illicit drugs and allows you to once again live.
Denied Treatment
I was released from prison during COVID in August 2020. They sent me out there with no plan. I tried to go to the insurance provider for Suboxone. They said I didn’t have the proper insurance, and I’d have to figure out how to get welfare to fix it. I was calling every day.
Before I could get treatment, I’d already relapsed. And then I got locked up on an old charge.
I got sent to county, and they didn’t have a MAT program at the time. Then I came upstate and I asked them is there any way to get back on MAT? It was the same doctor, so I thought: there’s no way he’s going to tell me no.
But I received a letter. They said, you're ineligible because you were not on MAT for 60 days before being locked up. You’re on and off. So you’re ineligible. We're not going to give it to you.
That crushed me. After that I went through a lot of depression. I thought to myself: What am I going to do? The day I get out, am I going to shoot fentanyl and die?
I really don't want to go back to that life. And I thought MAT would help me. But they don't care about that.
Offered treatment that doesn’t work
I’ve been on a Therapeutic Community program five times. You sit around in a room with a minimum of 60 different people and they just give out handouts, handouts, handouts. You just read things and write things down. It's a bunch of information.
There's no other way to help. There's no hope for you. It's just telling you what drug addiction is. That's not helping me stay clean. I can literally recite it word for word. How is that going to help me out there?
Seeking hope for the future
The withdrawal is awful. But the worst part is the doubt in yourself.
Being on Suboxone is like a security blanket. It means that maybe I can get out and at least get 30 days clean and see that I have a different way to live.
I have no family left. My mom passed away while I was in jail. So did my dad. My niece died while I was in jail from running around in Kensington. My sister now has her child to take care of while she’s getting divorced and losing her house.
These are things I should be home helping her with, and I really want to do that. Maybe I could do that without Suboxone. But I know that the success that I did have staying clean was with Suboxone.
I know that it worked. So why? Why should I go out there with no armor?
I'm going to be 47 in July. I could have been anything almost. But instead I got wrapped up in drugs.
Maybe had I had Suboxone available to me, I could have stopped years ago.
I don't know why they don't want to offer it to people. I don't understand what the politics are to it, but I know they're releasing people and they’re dying.
If you can save one person's life by giving them the meds that they feel like they need, why wouldn’t you?