Valley Heroin Addiction Spans 2 or 3 Generations

Her eyes dart nervously from side to side and her hands alternate, rubbing over both knees one moment and her face the next. The slightly built woman curses her “bittersweet” addiction to heroin, but she does not expect a better life for her 10-year-old son.

“My son will be using by the time he’s 15, if not sooner, because of where I live,” she said. “I hate the valley. There’s so much of the stuff around, it’s everywhere. . . . You go to Safeway, and someone’s dealing there. You go to the post office, and someone’s dealing there. . . . If you’re not using, sooner or later you get pressured into fixing. I even got him going to a Christian school, but it won’t do no good.”

The woman, 34 and an addict for 19 years, is an example of what Imperial County Sheriff Oren Fox calls “the permeation of heroin addiction into all segments of our community.”

Law enforcement officials say that many addicts here steal to finance their addiction. But this woman’s parents had a business from which she says she embezzled $105,000 over two years so she could “take that rush,” the woman said. However, she explained that on another occasion she “spiked” almost that much in less than a year.

“My husband died of an (heroin) overdose in 1976. I got $80,000 in insurance money, and I shot that in my veins in seven months, heroin, cocaine and speedballs. . . . Fixed right after the funeral. Had to. I guess I’m gonna grow up to be an old dope fiend,” she said.

If the addiction is such a curse, why does she still use heroin?

“I began using when I was 15. I tried it, and I liked it. I got strung out fast. . . . I liked the rush. It’s probably the most wonderful feeling on earth. . . . It’s a beautiful feeling. But it owns you. I can’t get off of it,” she said.

The woman lives with her parents, along with her son and a young daughter who was fathered by another addict. Although she is on parole and is not supposed to associate with addicts or use the drug, her parents know that she is still “fixing.”

“Don’t know about the girl,” her father tells a reporter. “Sometimes she gets so damn high that we don’t see her for two weeks.”

Aside from the addiction, addicts have one thing in common: a desire to break their dependency on the drug.

“I’m a dope fiend. That’s what hurts my parents. It hurts my parents a lot, and it’s sad that I still do it. . . . Dope fiends lead a rough life. Look at me. I’m 34, but I look like death warmed over,” said another woman addict who has served two sentences at the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco, where the state sends most drug addicts for rehabilitation.

There are families with two generations of addicts in Imperial Valley--and some with three.

Fox and other law enforcement officials say that Brawley has the largest concentration of “old” addicts--those born before World War II--in the valley.

A haggard-looking man walks out of a wood frame house on the town’s east side and tells a visitor that his mother is “too embarrassed to talk about it.” The old woman is 62 and matriarch of a family of addicts. The man said he has used heroin for 23 years. He pulled up his shirt sleeves to display two needle-tracked arms. He said his mother has used heroin for “as long as I can remember,” and as a child he would watch her “fix” in her bedroom.

“Two of my nephews are hypes. That’s a bitch. But what do you expect when kids grow up around the stuff? . . . That’s what happened to my brothers and me. . . . What’s gonna happen to their (the nephews’) kids? Hell, look at what happened to them and us,” he said.

In downtown Brawley a woman addict who looks a decade older than her 33 years is standing on a street corner, glancing at the passing truckers. She has been an addict for 18 years. Her common-law husband, a dealer, was sent to prison eight months ago, forcing her to turn to prostitution so she can buy the heroin that she needs to “stay well.”

The woman’s seven children, ages 18 to 2 and fathered by four different men, are living in foster homes. Her oldest child, a boy, was born while she was incarcerated at Norco.

“I last saw my oldest boy when he was only seven months old, but I keep tabs on him. He lives with a foster family in Calexico, and I heard he’s gotten into drugs. He’s been in and out of Juvenile Hall. . . . Yeah, they tell me that he’s using,” she said.

Her turf is a sidewalk in front of a row of bars that line the 900 block of East Main Street in Brawley.

“I charge $20 or $25 . . . no lower than $20 because each fix costs $25. If I turn six tricks a day, I fix six times,” she said. “I use all the money I earn to fix. . . . Right now I’m living with a guy because I have no place to stay. We live at a wino’s house that has no lights or gas. . . . He’s not really my old man. He’s just someone I go home to at night.”

Some of the addicts interviewed for this article are on parole. Two common conditions of their paroles are mandatory urine tests and a requirement that they stay away from heroin. All of those currently on parole are still fixing, but some, particularly the women, have developed elaborate schemes to get around the urine tests.

“My parole officer is a man, so he can’t frisk me when I go in. He has me stand in front of him and makes me pat my jeans pockets, legs and shirt,” said a woman addict. “All I do is take in someone else’s urine . . . someone who’s clean. Just hide the bottle (of the other person’s urine) in my sock and switch it when I go inside the bathroom.”

Officials of the Methadone Clinic of Imperial Valley say that “old” addicts are rare. Overdoses and secondary infections brought on by heroin addiction often kill.

Manuel, 71 and an addict for about 40 years, has beaten the odds. The World War II veteran and U.S. citizen lives across the border in Mexicali, where his Social Security payments and a small service disability pension help him live comfortably.

Manuel walks five miles each morning from his Mexicali home to the methadone clinic and back. Immediately after crossing to the U.S. side, the diminutive, gray-haired man lights up a marijuana cigarette, which he finishes before reaching the clinic.

And in what has become a daily ritual, he takes out a second cigarette, which is wrapped in foil, and hides it on one of the railroad cars usually parked across the street from the clinic. He smokes the second cigarette after drinking his daily dose of methadone and while walking back to Mexicali.

“Marijuana is the only vice I have left . . . and I’m too old to break this habit. What harm does a little marijuana do now and then?” he said. “Let an old man keep his one last source of pleasure. . . . Heroin controls you. You have no control over it. Marijuana, I smoke it when I want to. And if I don’t smoke it, well, I don’t get sick.”