Clinic Provides Hope for Addicts

Sy Mejia, director of the methadone clinic here and a former heroin addict, has been “clean” for 26 years, but he is the first one to admit that “a heroin addict is never really clean until he dies.”

Speaking with quiet eloquence and candor, Mejia, 72, said that even with “clean time” and at his age there is still a danger that one day he will fall vulnerable, perhaps while he is around addicts who are “fixing,” and “take a nod.”

“No matter how long you’re clean, you never forget the euphoria that follows a fix. When you take that flash, it’s like going down a fast elevator. It’s a beautiful high. The drug is exceptionally good, and in the Imperial Valley, where you can get it from 40% to 70% pure, it’s even better,” he said.

Mejia has been around drugs and dope addicts since he was a 9-year-old New York City street kid working as a runner for Chinese opium dealers. He got hooked on opium before he was in his teens. Later, he tried heroin, liked it, and stayed with the “devil’s food” until he was 46 and decided to clean up.

He became a drug counselor after graduating from Sonoma State University in 1967, at the age of 53. Mejia attended college while serving time at nearby Vacaville State Prison, graduating one year after serving a sentence for robbery and possession of a deadly weapon.

Dr. Amalia Katsigeanis, daughter of a Greek father and Mexican-American mother, opened the Imperial Valley methadone clinic in 1974 and persuaded Mejia to leave the Bay Area for this isolated desert community to become the clinic’s director. Katsigeanis lived a more sedate life in this border town, hardly aware of the drug problems around her until she began abusing amphetamines in the 1960s. “Speed” became a panacea for a chronic weight problem that was compounded by professional pressures.

“I shook the problem . . . and about that time young people started coming to my office,” she said, “asking for help with their heroin addiction. . . . My problems with amphetamines established a sort of empathy with them, knowing how dependent one can be on a chemical. If it happened to someone super-educated like me, who should know better, how could I fault these people for falling into this opiate trap?”

Katsigeanis, 61, is known affectionately as “Katsy” by her clinic staff and the addicts who come to her for help. She is a surgeon who has practiced here since 1956, after serving her internship at Bellevue Hospital in New York. Her clinic still offers the only hope to heroin addicts from the valley, Mexicali and as far away as Yuma, Ariz.

“Katsy may be the only friend that dope fiends have in this valley,” said a 34-year-old woman who has been a heroin addict for 19 years. “She’s mothered so many dope fiends. . . . She has that mother’s face that looks at you with understanding when you go down. She’s the only one who’s ever tried to do anything for us. Everybody else wants to put us in jail.”

When Katsigeanis opened the clinic almost 12 years ago, methadone was a relatively new drug that was still very much in the experimental stage. In addition to experimenting with methadone doses, Katsigeanis found herself providing unusual services to her patients.

“One of my first patients was a woman addict who needed several injections a day to stay well,” Katsigeanis said. “One day she showed up strung out, needing an injection real bad. Well, since we weren’t in the business of selling heroin, I drove her to Mexicali . . . to a place where she could buy the stuff and get well. . . . In those days, addicts who were strung out and needed several fixes a day would walk across the (international border) line to inject. Now, they’re able to buy all they want over here.”

Although he has worked with heroin addicts in Imperial County for 11 years, Mejia said he is still amazed at the high quality of the heroin available here and the large number of addicts.

“When I came here . . . I found a little scattered community and it didn’t look like they had a problem,” he said. “But after a while I found out how much heroin there is in this valley. I was shocked. I couldn’t understand how they could hustle for their junk, because it looked like there was nothing here to steal.”

Katsigeanis said that at least one local addict has had to go out of town to find something to steal. “She complained that there’s nothing here to steal. So, she goes to San Diego and shoplifts from the department stores down there and sells the stolen goods up here to pay for her fixes,” she said.

Both Katsigeanis and Mejia say that the biggest disappointment in running the methadone clinic is when they have to explain to people who aren’t addicts that the clinic is not in the business of curing addicts.

“They all want to know how many addicts we’ve cured,” Katsigeanis said. “Well, heroin addicts are really never cured, they switch their dependency from heroin to methadone. This makes some people skeptical of our work here.”

However, Katsigeanis and Mejia do have their supporters in county government who realize that the heroin problem in the valley would probably worsen if the clinic were to shut down.

“Heaven help us if Dr. Katsigeanis were to shut down,” said Imperial County Sheriff Oren Fox.

Rudy Lopez, newly hired head of the county Department of Mental Health, is also a supporter.

“I’ve only been here a couple of weeks, but I know there are some success stories over there,” Lopez said. “I know of one guy who’s been on the methadone program for six years and is maintaining. He’s got a job, paying taxes, a family, and is a productive member of society. He’s one less burden to society.”