High School Heroes: Slaying the Dragon—Joe Miller, Recovering Heroin Addict

This second piece in her High School Heroes interview series, The Ann Arbor Independent’s high school intern Stavi Tennenbaum talks to Pathways to Success Junior Joe Miller about how heroin addiction and recovery have impacted his family, his education and his future.

Correction: Joe Miller attends the AAPS Pathways to Success high school program.

by Stavi Tennenbaum

DRAGON. SMACK. H. Junk. Dope. Tar. Heroin goes by many street names. High School Junior Joe Miller is a seventeen-year-old recovering addict living in Ann Arbor, where he was born and raised. Beginning regular usage of opiates in his sophomore year, Joe was one of the 156,000 teens who used heroin for the first time in high school that year. Heroin, a drug that was once mainly an inner-city problem, has now made its way into the suburban middle-class.

In October 2014, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a study showing that from 2010 to 2012, the death rate from heroin overdoses in more than 28 states had doubled, adding to the nearly 10,000 deaths linked to prescription painkillers and other opioids. The most dramatic increase in new heroin users was seen in demographics ages 18-25, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, with the number approaching 700,000 users in 2012.

In direct response to this, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration has reported an 80 percent increase in teens seeking treatment for heroin abuse in the past decade.  In 2014, new data from the Washtenaw County Public Health Department reported that drug-related deaths in Washtenaw County alone increased over 80 percent over the last three years, and that the number of heroin overdose deaths for country residents doubled between 2012 and 2013.

The prevalence of drug use and addiction in the greater Ann Arbor community has led to the formation of the Washtenaw Health Initiative Opioid Project in July 2013, a body funded by the Washtenaw Health Initiative and dedicated to the prevention of addiction and overdose deaths throughout the county. Agency officials have concluded that opiate abuse in the Ann Arbor area is beyond an issue of supply and demand, and that the cultural and economic factors contributing to a substantial increase in teenage heroin usage throughout the last few years cannot be inhibited by arrests.

Joe Miller talked at length about how heroin addiction and recovery have impacted his family, his education and his life.

Stavi Tennenbaum: Why did you choose to attend Catholic Central? What were your freshman and sophomore years of high school like?

Joe Miller: My parents are atheists, so originally they didn’t want me to go to CC. But they’re pretty opened-minded, and since it’s a good school and I really wanted to go there, they bought into it after a while. So I ended up going. I started off my freshman year with good intentions; I liked the school and wanted to succeed and do well.

That year went pretty smooth, even though I didn’t really fit in. All I was known as was the lacrosse player, since that’s what I was good at. But the stoners and some other drug kids related better to me, so I started hanging out with them.

By sophomore year, I was pretty much doing everything. I was nodding off in class a lot of the time and I don’t remember too much of what happened, but eventually the school just asked me to leave. I never even got detention and I was pretty well-behaved in school, but the administration knew I was getting into a lot of trouble outside of school, with kids from AAPS and other private schools, so about halfway through the year, they told me that I either had to leave or they would expel me. Some of the advisors there were actually nice and were okay to me, and I think they sort of knew what was going on, but in the end they just had to drawn the line.

Stavi Tennenbaum: When did you first start experimenting with drugs? Was marijuana a gateway drug for you? When did you realize you were addicted?

Joe Miller: I started smoking weed sophomore year, and it escalated pretty quickly from there on out. Weed might have been a gateway drug for me in the sense that it was the drug that was accessible and the most acceptable, so that’s what I started off getting high on. But some people just have addictive personalities, so when they end up using, they end up using habitually. I think that if I never would have smoked, I still would have gotten into harder drugs. I was so prone to using and addiction that it was just something that was always going to happen to me.

That moment happened for me after I had a really bad acid trip. I was just somewhere else completely, so I called my Mom and she came home, and when she came up to my room she didn’t know what was wrong—I think she might have thought I was having an anxiety attack because I have anxiety too—but I just said to her, “I took like six hits of acid and I am not okay right now.”

So she stayed up the whole night with me making sure I didn’t do anything stupid. I just kept talking to her and the day after that I remember thinking “I’m never doing drugs again.” Then the next day I got high on coke and stayed high that whole week.

A couple weeks later I did the exact same thing on shrooms, and the same thing happened: My mom stayed up all night with me again while I was panicking and just having a really bad trip. At that point she basically told me that we had to do something, and I said that I knew, because I was losing my mind. So the next day I didn’t go to school, and instead I went to an out-patient hearing at Dawn Farms, where I talked to them about all the drugs I’d done in the past year so they could assess if I was right for the program. I wasn’t even honest with them about all the drugs that I did; I told them the truth about the different kinds, but I completely downgraded on the quantities. And they still told me that I had to go to in-patient rehab right away.

Stavi Tennenbaum: What was your view on drugs before you started using? How did you start Dawn Farms and what was it like for you?

Joe Miller: I always thought about myself as someone who really liked drugs and really liked this lifestyle, but not as someone who had to do it. At the same time, though, even when I was a child I was told that I had an addictive personality and that alcoholism ran in my family. So I always knew I was prone to addiction.

I couldn’t go into in-patient treatment at Dawn Farms because I was too young, so they sent me to Saginaw for Kairos Healthcare, and that was pretty awful. It was a twenty-eight day program, and I lived there, and because it was a poor facility, they didn’t really feed you a whole bunch. It was like Juvi: sketchy and there were a lot of fights and kids were trying to run away, but there was a barbed-wire fence.

After I left, I was absolutely furious at my parents for sending me there….I told my parents about how bad it was and they were upset about it, but at the same time they were just happy that I wasn’t using. I think my dad said something along the lines of “we would rather have had you in jail than at home,” because they were so worried about me overdosing. They thought anything had to be better than me sitting at home getting high all day off different kinds of drugs.

Stavi Tennenbaum: Did you go back to using after your first experience in rehab?

Joe Miller: After Kairos I went back to using really quick, within about four or five days. I went to see the second “Hobbit” movie and decided to smoke a bunch beforehand with some friends from CC. I remember them asking me if I’d gotten high since I got back, and when I said no, they said “We shouldn’t do this.” I said I was going to do it anyway, that it was eventually going to happen. So I convinced them into doing it, and I paid for the weed, since at that point I had a good amount of money. So I took the weed home and smoked some more that night in my room, which was the first time I had used in front of my parents since I got back. And they came in and were pissed.

They started taking all my things, like my computer and my TV, and I honestly didn’t know what to think. I was really confused overall at the time, just in everything in life, and I didn’t have a very good understanding of what was going on. I wasn’t even mad, I was just confused. Other than that, my parents didn’t really do a whole lot after I started using again.

I was in Dawn Farms out-patient at that point, and they just called it a relapse; they said I could go right back into the program and stay sober again. But I wasn’t interested in getting clean at all. It wasn’t until I was kicked out of school that I had any interest in it. It was only at that point that I realized that something had to change. So I went back to a different rehab and I took it really seriously.

Stavi Tennenbaum: How did you get into using heroin? What was it like?

Joe Miller: Heroin is an opiate, so all your physical pain goes away. I had a lot of emotional issues at that point and a lot of it resonated for me physically, in my neck and in my stomach, so I would always feel sick and stressed out and in pain. Heroin would just get rid of everything. I actually got into using it from the first rehab—the guys there told me about it and where to get it.

Before I went there I did a lot of opiates, but I don’t think I ever did heroin until then. A lot of times my rationale for doing harder drugs like that was that I just had to try it, that it was this mind-opening experience that I had to have, to see what it was like for some reason. But looking back, as the narcotics got stronger and stronger, I stopped experiencing things and started doing my best to experience nothing. I was trying not to feel anything. I was trying not to exist.

Stavi Tennenbaum: When you left school, how did that experience affect you?

Joe Miller: When I was asked to leave school, the first thing I did was go to the U-M psych ward, because I was just so out of it that I couldn’t function. So I got assessed, and the doctors said I didn’t have anything wrong with me psychologically, and even if I did they couldn’t tell because I was on so many drugs.

They pretty much said that since drugs were my primary problem, I needed to go to rehab or AA to deal with that before anything else. I did know that though; it was just wishful thinking to think that I could be in there for one week and get out. So the second time around I opted to go to a really nice rehab facility called Hazelden, in Minnesota, for three months. Right after that I went to a recovery facility in Montana that Hazelden recommended, where I was supposed to stay for seven months. The idea was that it would be like a halfway house, where you could live in a sober community and also go and do things in the outside world. But since almost everyone there were minors, they weren’t really allowed to let us wander around by ourselves, so it was basically like rehab again, but with school….

I started having some pretty bad anxiety. I never made it to the school year part anyway, though, because after two months there, I left to visit home for a week and just never went back.

Stavi Tennenbaum: What was your relationship with your parents like throughout your addiction and treatment?

Joe Miller: I hadn’t seen my parents in three to four months, because I went straight to Montana after Minnesota, so when I came back we went on vacation together up north. It was good to see them again, but they were totally different from the last time I saw them. My dad doesn’t really show emotion—I remember when he came to visit me at Hazelden he hugged me. When I came back, he started showing a lot more affection towards me.

It was different with my mom, because we’re really close, but we fought like crazy when I was using. She isn’t afraid to show emotion, so she would always try to talk to me about stopping and getting clean…she cried so much over me. It was awful. And I would just get mad about it, because I was so into what I was doing that I couldn’t take responsibility for any of it, and I blamed everyone around me for the things I did. I blamed her mostly. So she was pretty upset about that, for a long time.

My older brother goes to college on the east coast, and he was always pretty isolated from everything that was going on with me. He would come home on breaks and be really surprised about what was happening. He’s pretty straight arrow now and he never did drugs in high school, so he didn’t know about me using. He didn’t really get it.

Stavi Tennenbaum: How long have you been sober?

Joe Miller: I’m going on eleven months sober. March 30 was the day I was admitted to Hazelden last year, so I’ll have one year sober then. In rehab they kept telling me that you don’t even know what sobriety feels like until nine months in, because that’s when the chemicals in your brain finally start going back to normal, but I never really believed that, because after one week of being clean, it felt like the whole world had changed.

But in the last couple months, I’ve finally started to realize what they were talking about. Because even after I got sober, all I really thought about was trying so hard not to use and talking about other people using and watching other people come into the program at AA. All you think about is drugs and sobriety, all the time. It took me the past few months to start thinking about other things more seriously. It’s like my life could finally become less about trying to stay away from drugs and more about what whatever I wanted it to be.

Being around other people who use is actually not a high risk situation for me. Maybe if they were to use in front of me, but I’ve never put myself in that situation yet. It’s more places and behaviors that I find triggering. Doing drugs was a whole lifestyle for me—my room was messy, my clothes were dirty, my day wasn’t regimented. I’m the most triggered when I revert to my old habits, like sleeping in all day and not doing anything productive. That’s a high risk situation for me.

Stavi Tennenbaum: Did you lose friends once you returned from rehab? Do you have friends that were and still are there for you?

Joe Miller: I go to WAY Washtenaw, which stands for Widening Advancement for Youth. It’s an online project-based learning program where you can pretty much go at your own pace. At first it was really hard for me to take it seriously, because it just seemed like so much of a last resort, but after a while I really started to enjoy it. Since you can work as far ahead or as slow as you want to, I’ll be graduating this year, and I’m only a junior….

My really old friends from middle school and I never actually did drugs together, and they’re all clean now, so when I got back from rehab, I got to see them and I felt like being with them wasn’t a high-risk situation for my sobriety. But my CC friends I haven’t seen at all…

Stavi Tennenbaum: What have your experiences taught you and helped you become? If you could change one past event, what would it be?

Joe Miller: I don’t think I’m going to go to college next year—I think I’m going to stay at home and then go to college the following year. Right now I’m looking into the University of Vermont, but I’m also thinking about going to Augsburg College, in Minnesota, which has one of the largest sober dorm programs in the world. It’s like being part of the NA or AA program every day: you live with other students who are all in recovery, and I could volunteer and work with people who are still in rehab at Hazelden.

My greatest accomplishment has definitely been getting sober. It seems like something that you just do, like you just choose to do be sober, but unfortunately it’s so much more than that. It’d be much easier if you could just choose sobriety, but then you do and you go to rehab, and that’s not enough to leave. You have to stay there every day and get your life back together as best you can. Getting sober is the hardest I’ve ever worked at something in my life.

I think my experience with this kind of lifestyle did change how I see things, and in a way I’m grateful for that. I see things differently from most people—the average person doesn’t know what it’s like to be miserable or drunk or high all the time, and I do know what that’s like. I also feel more empathetic towards people, like when I see someone talking about how much they hate their family, or how they’re going to run away or move out and just sell drugs and do drugs, and I remember saying that same stuff.

People around me think those same thoughts, and its upsetting, but I’m thankful to be able to see that more clearly because of what I’ve been through. Looking back, I wouldn’t change anything, because I still feel like my addiction was inevitable.

I was always going to do drugs, and I had to ruin everything before I could build it back up. I really think that as an addict, you have to hit rock bottom. You have to lose pretty much everything before you want to stop using. Like for me, I lost school, friends, family. I didn’t have anything, and that’s what made me want to get better.