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By Michael P. McConnell PUBLISHED: February 12, 2006 Sitting in the bathroom of Caribou Coffee house, she mixed the drug with water in a bottle cap, drew it up through a ball of cotton into a syringe and injected it into a vein in the crook of her right arm. She stumbled outside as the heroin kicked in. "I projectile vomited right on the sidewalk," Amanda said. "Then I walked around to the side of the building where my friends were and laid down on the sidewalk and fell asleep." She was rather conspicuous, an underage girl with a Mohawk haircut lying near the busy street. Her friends were playing chess and roused her to consciousness. "I drifted in and out," Amanda said. "They kept telling me to wake up." It was a warm July night and the drug felt good. There were many groups of kids hanging out on Main Street and getting high among the older restaurant and bar patrons who crowded the street. "I wasn't scared," she said. "I was, like, just throwing up my hands and saying, 'I don't care anymore.' I didn't fit in at school with all these kids driving Lexuses and the rest of it." The only child of a solid middle-class couple in Farmington Hills where she attended high school, Amanda had had three practice runs injecting heroin into her left foot near the ankle before she went to the veins in her arms. "It was like, 'Wow! How come nobody else is doing this?' " said Amanda, who has now been drug-free for over a year. "It made me feel like everything is fine, everything is perfect. I was pissed off at school, at my parents and thought, 'OK, I'll do this because I really don't care anymore.'" So, in the summer of 2003 Amanda took her first firm steps down the path of addiction. She thought she could handle the drug and a dual life of living with her family and going to school while she made trips to Detroit at night to buy heroin and maintain her habit. Flying high On a typical school day, Amanda would wake up in her bedroom about 5:30 a.m. and shoot heroin before getting out of bed. She carried the props of her addiction — needles, cotton and a tiny water bottle — in a little red velvet bag she sewed herself for exactly that purpose. This was her kit and she carried it everywhere. "At school I would go into the bathroom and get high between classes," she said. After school she would often hook up with an older girlfriend and they would drive to the SixMile and Woodward area of Detroit to buy more heroin. "Then I'd go back home, have dinner with the family and try to do some homework," Amanda said. "Then I'd go back out at night." She was spending about $25 a day for heroin. The money came from a part-time job at a hardware store and occasional work she did for her father, a local Realtor. Other times she would ask her mother for money for a movie and dinner and use it for drugs. "I didn't feel guilty at the time," she said. "I was getting high to take away the guilt." Amanda's friends were older teenage boys and girls with cars or vans. Her parents didn't suspect anything in the beginning, said her father, Kevin. "There had been no telltale sign," he said. "It was covert. I had no idea. It takes a real sharp or paranoid parent to figure it out right away." Addiction brings with it a second addiction to secrecy and an increasing need to lie. The values of hard work and honesty are important to Amanda's parents, but they are no match against active addiction. "That's what made me mad," Kevin said. "I taught her ethics and tried to teach her goals, but it didn't work." Amanda still remembers the exact date when reality punctured her screen of lies and her parents found out she was using heroin. "It was September 17, 2003," she said. Falling apart Administrators that day at Farmington Hills High School had gotten a tip that Amanda was using heroin and brought her to the school office. She was just a few months into her daily heroin use and believes a friend of one of her girlfriends told school officials she was using. In the office, a school official told her she didn't look right. Then they looked inside her little red velvet kit bag. "They searched me," Amanda said. "I had needles, caps and a little bottle of water." The police were called and she was taken to the police station. "My dad had to come pick me up," she said. "I had never gotten caught drinking or doing pot, so it was a real shocker. When my mom got home, there was a lot of yelling and crying. I just totally lied." Amanda came down with pneumonia and stayed away from heroin for several weeks until her parents started to trust her a little bit. Then on the day before Thanksgiving a friend from Hazel Park picked her up; they went to Detroit to buy drugs and got high. "My lies got better," she said. She continued to hang out with friends who used and sometimes visited haunts in Royal Oak. Amanda was headed for a series of overdoses, car accidents and stints in three different rehab programs before she would get clean. Her parents were headed for their own special circle of hell as they watched their daughter spiral downward. Amanda had been fired from her job at the hardware store for stealing money from the cash register, but managed to get a car with her parents' help when she turned 16 and got a driver's license. In her 1992 Oldsmobile, she could score without relying on rides from friends. "I could get high whenever I wanted," she said. Then she had three accidents in as many months and began a string of overdoses. By now she had her own drug dealers. She drove by herself to get her heroin. One June night she scored and then drove down a side street near Six Mile Road and shot up. The rush was overwhelming and she felt an intense pins-and-needles sensation throughout her upper body as she overdosed. She awoke to paramedics who were tapping on the car windows to rouse her. "I had sideswiped three cars and hit a tree," Amanda said. Her father picked her up from the hospital. When she got home she volunteered to go to outpatient treatment three times a week. "I did it to get my parents off my butt," she said. It didn't work. By now she was getting routine urine tests, which usually showed she had drugs in her system. Her family had no illusions about her drug use or the lies she told. Her father tried to keep in touch often by cell phone if only to make sure she was safe. He remembers mornings when he would get up to grab the newspaper and notice his car engine was warm. That told him Amanda had been out to buy drugs. "We tried to get her to go to school," Kevin said. "She took off; she had her (drug) kit with her." Amanda kept shooting heroin until she wound up in another rehab in October 2004 where she spent 28 days. She got out around Thanksgiving. She came home and found a cotton ball in her bedroom with heroin residue. She rinsed the cotton ball with water and shot up. Amanda went out that night, shot up more heroin and came home high. "My dad slept in my room that night to make sure I was OK," she said. Early the next morning she eluded her father long enough to shoot up again. Her mother called 9-1-1. Police and paramedics arrived and took her to the hospital where she was given Narcan, a narcotic antagonist that shuts out the effects of heroin and other opiates. She got home that night and told her parents she was going for a walk. A friend picked her up and she got more heroin. On Dec. 3, 2004, Amanda went to Pathway Family Center in Southfield which has a long-term program that treats adolescent drug abusers. She has been drug-free since then. Staying clean After nearly 14 months clean, Amanda is a recent graduate of the intensive program at Pathway, a non-profit organization with an in-patient program that includes the client's family. Amanda's blue eyes are clear and she has an infectious laugh and ready smile. "There's been a lot of rebuilding and earning trust and making amends to both of my parents," she said. "I did a lot of stupid stuff." She regularly attends 12-step meetings for both alcoholics and recovering narcotics addicts. The aches and pains, anxiety and sleeplessness of early heroin withdrawal are behind her, though she admits it took two months before she began to feel normal. Though the intense cravings for heroin have passed, she still sometimes thinks about the drug. But when she does, she counters the thought with the grim reality of what addiction brought her, she said. "I'm 17 and I have been to three treatment centers," she said with a self-mocking laugh. "It's not normal." Still, she said she is using the experiences of heroin addiction to try to grow rather than engage in chronic remorse about the past. "There are things I'm not happy about," Amanda said. "But I'm not ashamed because that would keep me stuck in the addiction. I know if I use again it will kick my ass and I'll be right back where I was." She believes she would not know herself as well as she does now if she hadn't become addicted and then fought to free herself. "And I wouldn't have the relationship I have now with my parents," she said. "It's a lot of big changes. Life is pretty sweet right now." Her parents have played a large role in her recovery. Her father visited Pathway nearly every day during her stay, getting reports on his daughter and talking with staff members and other parents. "We're greatly fatigued," Kevin said. "We need to move on." Amanda is back in high school and has a 3.5 grade average. She has friends who don't use drugs. Life is OK now. She doesn't preach about recovery, but she doesn't try to hide who she is or what she has been through. Her friends all know. "It's not like I'm the weird kid anymore," she said.
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Amanda
was only 15 years old, hanging out with a group of older teens at
Fourth and Main in Royal Oak when she first mainlined heroin.