The Fight Against Crime: Notes From the Front : For the Addict There’s No End to Humiliation

Kathy J. thought she had hit bottom when she pawned her daughter’s Nintendo set.

She wasn’t even close.

“When heroin is your drug of choice,” said Kathy, 37, sitting on a bed at the Tarzana Treatment Center, where she was in a detox program, “you can’t imagine how bad it can get.”

This is Kathy’s fourth detox. But she does not fit the stereotype of a street addict. She is articulate, gregarious and stylish, even in a casual pair of shorts and a simple top. She has long black hair and a smile that lights up the stark examination room.

“I guess I don’t look like a hype,” she said, using the street slang for an addict. “Maybe that’s part of why it took me so long to get here.”

She and her husband have a townhouse in North Hills, where they live with their twins, age 9, and their 13-year-old son. Her husband, who is not involved with drugs, gets steady work in the film industry. Kathy had a job as a legal secretary.

“People didn’t expect,” she said, “that someone like me would have this problem.”

A recent, long-term study out of UCLA said that heroin addicts who do not quit by their late 30s are not likely to ever quit. But it’s not a problem they will have to worry about for long, according to the study.

Average age of death for users is 40.

“One of my kids is a teen-ager now,” she said. “I want to see him grow up. I want him to know he has a mom.”

Robert Villa, also a recovering addict and one of her counselors at the center, believes that this time she has a chance to stay off heroin. But there are no guarantees.

“The disease is very patient,” Villa said. “Sometimes you can go years, and then you are back there again. You can’t take anything for granted.”

Kathy’s own mom was a cocaine addict and Kathy first tried heroin when she was 10. “It was during the Vietnam War and the drug was cheap,” she said. “For $2 we would get enough to get five people high.”

Kathy said she was not a full-blown heroin addict until she was 30. By then, she was in Los Angeles and married. She was so good at hiding her addiction, that at first neither her husband nor any of her employers knew she was sneaking out to score heroin.

She also began to steal. “I would go to Vons and take $8 or $9 packs of film,” she said. “Also some toiletries. Then I would take them down to mom-and-pop stores on Western or Normandie and sell them.

“It was a hard hustle.”

She eventually got caught at a Vons in Burbank. She got probation and entered a detox. “All the time I was there,” Kathy said, “I was planning on how I was going to get loaded when I got out.”

Her erratic behavior cost her all of her jobs. The next time she got caught shoplifting was at Sears in Northridge, where she had tried to steal two leather jackets worth $600. That time she went to jail and eventually entered a methadone program. But she still needed the heroin.

Afraid to steal, she would pawn or sell family items, including toys, for money. “I had to say to the kids that I had to borrow the Nintendo,” she said. “You can imagine the humiliation.” Her husband began leaving her $60 every day so that she wouldn’t sell anything from the house.

The last straw came in January when she ran off with a wealthy man to his home in Malibu. But once there, she said, he abused her. “He called me names no one had ever called me, ever,” Kathy said. She escaped, taking his television, VCR and other appliances, and she drove to Norwalk. There, her car broke down.

“I was so out of it, I did not know what was going on,” she said. “I was walking down the street, looking for someone to sell this stuff to.” A man soon stole the appliances from her.

Kathy took a cab home but her husband refused to pay the $90 tab. The police intervened and finally, she agreed to sign a contract to go back into detox.

“I’ve never kicked so hard,” she said, talking about the pain of detoxing from both the heroin and methadone.

“I’m so scared of going through this again. This time I think I’m going to make it.”