Small Steps Led Up to Big-Time Addiction

Nancy Flores’ tumble into crack was so simple and seamless. She dabbled in glue sniffing at age 12, grass and angel dust as a teen-ager. Curiosity drew her to the odd concoction some friends cooked up in the kitchen and began smoking in a glass pipe. Taking hold of the tiny tube broke her grip on life. “I hit that stuff and I took off,” she says. “I fell in love.”

It was a long, ugly affair for her children. They bounced among friends, relatives and foster care, frequently supported by taxpayers. Once she persuaded a social worker to let her keep her newborn at home. But while smoking crack days later, she mistakenly poured rubbing alcohol into the infant’s mouth, thinking it was a milk bottle. “I was trying to give her something to shut her up so I can hit the pipe,” Flores said. Another child was born with two small knife wounds in her back, inflicted when the pregnant Flores was attacked by a knife-swinging drug dealer.

In the final throes of her addiction, violence took her down, landing her repeatedly in the hospital at public expense. First, a man cut her head open with a machete. Then an angry friend threw a tire iron at her, puncturing her lung. Later, high on crack, she was hit by a car. “Death kept knockin’ me in the face,” she says.

She turned to treatment last year and says she is clean. Two of her children are back and she is getting counseling and job training help through SHIELDS for Families.

She and her husband recently delivered a son. It was her sixth pregnancy--but the first she experienced drug-free.