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IMPACT PROFILE
The face of ADDICTION
South Shore man wages lifelong battle against
the power drugs have over him
After days of lying in a filthy Roxbury apartment surrounded by strangers, used needles and cockroaches, TJ stumbled outside toward a bank machine. He punched in his password and waited for the money to spit out so he could buy more crack.
His stock market job at a Boston financial company seemed worlds away.
So did his wife, his $300,000 Plymouth home and his two young children.
Then he was snapped back to reality.
The bank machine, in tiny shuddering electronic letters, was telling TJ something was wrong ... access denied.
Anger charged through him as TJ realized what was happening. His wife had cut him off, trying to rescue him, to lure him home.
It wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last.
In fact, that wasn’t even rock bottom for TJ, a Boston University graduate from Quincy who, during better days, had been a semipro hockey player.
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AMELIA KUNHARDT/The Patriot Ledger TJ would often use crack to get high and heroin to come down, draining up to $500 a day from his bank accounts during a binge. |
Rock bottom, depending on how you measured it, was either the time between 1998 and 1999 when he spent almost six months living in a car in Florida, hustling money for another fix, hanging on by a thread and knowing all the while the price he was paying: his marriage and his recovery were slipping away again.
Or it could have been years earlier, when the dream TJ worked to achieve since a teenager - becoming a pro hockey player - was lost because of drugs.
The words of the phone call still linger in his mind. On the other end of the line was the coach of a semipro team TJ had just begun playing for. He wanted to know if TJ was using cocaine.
TJ couldn’t lie, and the coach said he had no choice. He kicked TJ off the team.
“I knew that was the beginning of the end,” TJ recalled during an interview at Gosnold on Cape Cod, a drug treatment facility in Falmouth. “They drug-test at (hockey) camp, and I did coke the day before I left to go there. I threw it away. I often think about how good I could have been if I didn’t do this.”
TJ’s is a story about alcohol and drug use begun casually, during a suburban adolescence, among friends, that spiraled desperately out of control and drastically altered his life.
On the surface, TJ was for years a hard-working, athletic, talented individual with a comfortable life, but behind that image was an individual losing control, descending through darkening shades of a powerful dependency until bottoming out in addiction and hopelessness.
“It destroyed me,” TJ said, continuing his narrative in a subdued voice.
Sitting in a tiny office at Gosnold, TJ leans back in his chair and looks upward, sorting through memories.
TJ was 39 at the time of the interview. In T-shirt and sneakers, he looks like an aging athlete. His body is stocky, but is also sagging, tired and worn. Short, sandy brown hair frames a weathered, slightly ruddy face that hints at years of excess.
Decades of drugs and hard living have wracked TJ’s once physically fit body. TJ’s in rehab again, struggling with a dependency whose power still frightens and mystifies him.
TJ said he used drugs and alcohol since he was a teenager to fill some internal void, to ease emotional pain and to boost his confidence.
He began drinking alcohol at a party with fellow students at Broad Meadows Middle School in Quincy. In college, members of his Boston University hockey team introduced TJ to cocaine. Later, as a white-collar employee, TJ regularly enjoyed an evening drink with co-workers in Boston. When happy hour broke up, TJ waved goodbye, pretended to go home and slipped off to the city’s seedier neighborhoods for a fix.
He would often use crack to get high and heroin to come down, draining up to $500 a day from his bank accounts during a binge.
“I’ve had drug dealers (in crack houses) saying to me, ‘You’ve got to go. You’ve got to go. You’re crazy. You’re going to die, and we don’t want to have to put your body in a dumpster.’”
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AMELIA KUNHARDT/The Patriot Ledger |
People may choose to start using drugs, but no one really chooses to be an addict, according to medical professionals.
Children of alcoholics, for instance, are four times more likely than other children to become alcoholics, according to the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.
Parents with substance abuse problems pass down to their children a level of vulnerability to substance abuse, said Dr. Roger Weiss, director of the alcohol and drug abuse program at McLean Hospital in Belmont.
“Some people are at greater risk,” Weiss said. “If you have a parent with substance abuse problems, you have a greater risk.”
According to Weiss, there also have been a number of studies completed and several ongoing studies about the brain changes that occur with long-term drug and alcohol use. Such changes make quitting difficult, Weiss says.
“Certain parts of the brain are activated during the process of craving and (researchers) are now looking at the process of recovery, to see the extent to which that can be reversed,” Weiss said.
“But trying to use a single word like ‘loser’ to describe these people doesn’t make sense,” he continued. “People who are drug- or alcohol-dependent have a tremendous struggle to stop. It can be done, sure. If you say it can’t be done, that’s simply untrue, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.”
TJ is the son of a roofer and a housewife. There wasn’t a lot of love growing up, he said, but there was an extended family with alcohol problems.
TJ didn’t view his alcohol and cocaine use during college as a serious issue because other parts of his life remained intact.
“I couldn’t see it because things were still there. I still had things,” TJ said.
Looking back now, he realizes he gave up something at every step of the way in favor of drugs.
He chose an easier major in college, one that would let him glide through school with less work. When he played hockey, instead of focusing on the game, all TJ could think about was snorting cocaine afterward.
| “Some people are at greater risk.
If you have a parent with substance abuse problems, you have a greater risk.” – Dr. Roger Weiss |
He was high on coke when he got married. Three days after the birth of his son, TJ went out on an all-night coke binge. Instead of taking his kids trick-or-treating in 1999, he made up an excuse and walked out the door, leaving them sitting on the couch in their costumes. That time, TJ was gone for three days, doing crack and trying to dim the memory of his children’s disappointed faces.
The strength of his disease confounds TJ. The last two decades have been a roller coaster ride of visits to rehab and relapses.
Relapses were caused by anything from having a tooth removed and the accompanying Percoset prescription to a missed visit from his children after he and his wife separated.
Finally, the former financial professional who once made a six-figure income was indigent.
A Florida treatment program provided TJ with what so far has been the longest period of recovery in his life. He spent about a year there, learning about intimacy and honesty. He wrote an 80-page autobiography about his life and his feelings. He shed many tears.
“It all has to do with feelings. The first time I took a drink, I felt relief,” TJ said.
Despite how far he traveled in the Florida program, TJ relapsed again and checked in to Gosnold.
Asked whether he’s clean for good this time, TJ grimaces. There’s a long silence.
And then TJ explains, first with his distant eyes and slouching body, and then with words that this thing, this dependency, in many ways, feels like a force greater than him.
“I can’t say it’s forever. I wish I understood it. The power it has over me is incredible. ... A lot of the kids I grew up with, a lot of them are sober now. A lot of them hung on, and a lot are dead.”
NUMBERS
6
Apparent drug overdose deaths in Cohasset in five years
150
Braintree residents treated in one year for abusing heroin
208
Children younger than 15 in Massachusetts who entered substance abuse programs in 2000