'I'M EMBARRASSED OF WHO I'VE BECOME'

Hooked Since Grade 10, Johanna Carter Tells Of Her Struggle With
Heroin Addiction

Fifteen years ago, Johanna Carter had it all. As a young girl she
lived with her parents in a grand house on a two-acre estate in West
Point Grey.

In her backyard, she had a pool, tennis courts, and a trampoline. She
went to an exclusive private school and ate dinner every night with
one of the wealthiest men in Vancouver -- her father. She had a
university fund for her future and diamonds were not considered an
unusual gift from her parents.

At the age of 23 however, when she met a reporter on Kingsway in July,
Johanna was battling daily cravings for heroin, and at night, waking
in sweats after dreaming about taking long, deep drags from a crack
pipe. She was visiting the pharmacy around the corner from her house
every morning for her daily fix of methadone. She was on welfare, but
spent her cheques immediately on expensive clothing, fearing she'd
spend it on drugs if she didn't get rid of the cash.

Her skin was slowly healing from years of neurotic, drug-induced
picking and she had gained enough weight to fill the short jean skirt
and tank top she wore the day she was interviewed.

Johanna's diamonds were sold years ago in exchange for heroin and her
university fund was gradually spent on rent, drugs and two attempts at
rehabilitation.

But even without the jewels and money she once had, Johanna Carter was
a remarkably happy young woman.

A few days after celebrating her 23rd birthday with friends and family
at her mother's home, Johanna had a lingering high from making it
through another year.

"I really didn't think I'd make it this far," she said while sitting
on a sun-drenched bench in Burnaby's Central Park.

"I've overdosed [on heroin] three f...ing times. I've had a needle
stuck into my heart through my chest bone because it stopped beating.

"I've been beat up, have broken fingers. I've had my nose broken, my
jaw broken. I've been beaten to s..., chased and robbed."

Johanna was also raped two years ago by one of her "clients" as the
rest of the city rang in the new year.

She didn't deny that she still "chipped" occasionally -- smoking
heroin when the cravings got to be too much -- but said the methadone
generally kept her stable and kept her off the street corner that had
become her territory over the previous year.

Fifteen years ago, Johanna could not have imagined the hell she would
endure as she spiralled into a life dictated by addiction.

Her childhood was not without problems, but she dressed every morning
in a York House school uniform and played every afternoon with her
younger brother on the family's expansive property.

As she grew older, Johanna became familiar with her father's troubles
- -- alcoholism and allegations of raping a young woman -- but said that
at the time, she didn't think his "drunken rages" were anything out of
the ordinary.

"My dad was a harsh alcoholic," she said.

"My mother stayed with him through that, but my father used me as his
mother in a way. I listened to him on the phone saying he wanted to
kill himself."

Despite the trauma of having an alcoholic father and a mother who was
frequently hospitalized with cancer -- but is now free of the disease
- -- Johanna didn't blame just her family for the self-destructive path
she began to wander down when she was 11 or 12 years old.

Instead, she talked about failing Grade 2 at York House and moving to
Queen Mary elementary, a public school in West Point Grey with
classrooms overlooking Jericho Beach and the downtown skyline. She
talked about the competition she faced with her younger brother when
she was placed in the same grade as him at the same school. And, she
talked about the enduring problem of "just not fitting in" anywhere.

"I was a chameleon. I bounced from group to group," she said. "I had
lots of friends, but no good friends. It's hard even thinking about it
now."

In Grade 6, Johanna said she started drinking and smoking marijuana,
but she insisted that peer pressure wasn't the cause of her dangerous
dabbling at such a young age.

"I was always the instigator of the problems," she
said.

"Then, in Grade 8, that's when I tried coke for the first
time."

In her first year at Lord Byng secondary, Johanna tried cocaine once
or twice with friends before finding a supply at her home and doing it
all.

She was kicked out of the west side school later that year for getting
into a physical fight.

After that, she transferred to Byng's satellite school and then to
Eric Hamber's Total Education program, where she managed to attend
classes and maintain decent grades despite a growing cocaine, alcohol
and, eventually, heroin habit.

"As soon as I hit Grade 10 I was a heroin addict," she
said.

"So, all through Grade 10, 11 and 12, I'm trying to fight a heroin
addiction as well as trying to graduate and be like normal kids.

"I was kicked out [of home] at 16 or 17, so I was also trying to live
on my own, support myself and trying to go school and trying to
support a habit."

At the beginning of her heroin addiction, Johanna said she would do
anything to get money for her drugs except prostitute herself. She
sold drugs to other kids, stole and "conned" people, but refused to
sell her body.

"I was not going to be a prostitute. I would be a bank robber, I would
be anything else, but a freakin' prostitute," she said.

"I've done some pretty horrible things that time will not make up
for.

"I sold all the diamonds my parents gave me. I actually broke into my
mother's house, and stole money from her."

Within weeks of starting to do heroin, Johanna wanted to stop, but
couldn't.

Her mother, Sheila Begg, remembers returning with Johanna from a
vacation to Rarotonga only to watch her daughter rapidly plunge into
heroin abuse. Begg and Johanna's father had separated seven years
earlier and she had undergone several major surgeries for breast
cancer, but she and her daughter maintained a close
relationship.

At the time, Begg said she never would have guessed that her young
daughter was using heroin and thought Johanna's erratic behaviour was
because she was upset about something.

But three or four weeks after the strange behaviour began, Begg sat
down at the kitchen table with Johanna and asked her what was wrong.

"She sat down and said, 'Mum, I'm addicted to heroin,' " Begg
said.

In the same conversation, Johanna told her mother she wanted to quit
and Begg immediately called a youth detox centre. Begg was told there
would be a lengthy wait to get Johanna admitted and that she would be
better off trying to detox her daughter at home.

With advice and support from the detox centre, Begg sat with her
daughter as she watched her go through the physical symptoms of withdrawal.

Johanna was fine for a few days, but once she felt better, she started
going out, meeting friends and using heroin again.

As the poison seeped further into her lungs and her brain, Johanna
kept trying to get clean. She would move home for a while, get kicked
out, go into treatment, move home and then get kicked out again.

Her mother said she would always let Johanna come home if she was
clean and trying to get treatment, but whenever she started stealing
and using again, Begg would kick her out again.

"I kicked her out because she was going beyond the limits of what I
could tolerate in my home," Begg said.

Johanna described those years as a "continuous bounce," but somehow
managed to continue going to school and graduated just six months
behind her classmates.

"As long as my brother was in school, I had to be in school too. It
was a big thing for me. Thank God for that, because if not, I don't
think I would've graduated," she said.

"I had to fight for that. For my high-school diploma. ... For me to
accomplish that, it made me realize I could do anything."

But she couldn't quit heroin.

Johanna said she tried intensive residential treatment programs three
times, and each time, would return to Vancouver and head straight for
a fix.

She missed her high-school graduation because she decided to go into
treatment, but returned to Vancouver only to get sucked back in by the
drug.

"I came back here and started using immediately because I didn't know
any other way to live," she said.

"There was nothing up here [in terms of transition services] that I
knew about. And I definitely looked."

Johanna's mother also looked and was not satisfied with what she
found. So, she allowed Johanna to stay at home for periods of time
when she wasn't using or when it was obvious she could not take care
of herself.

At one point, when Johanna was showing signs of psychosis from the
drugs, she showed up on her mother's doorstep in the pouring rain. Her
mother was at work and her younger brother had been given strict
instructions not to let her into the house. But it was a cold rain and
her brother couldn't turn her away, so he let Johanna into the
basement laundry room.

"When I came home, she had pulled the laundry out of the hamper and
was lying on the floor curled up with the laundry and she was crying
and saying the doctors said she had scabies," Begg recalls.

"She weighed about 95 pounds then, was covered in these infected sores
and she hadn't bathed because she was afraid there were bugs in her
bathtub. So she stunk to high heaven as well and her hair was falling
out, no eyelashes, no eyebrows."

It wasn't until after dousing Johanna and herself in a scabies
pesticide that Begg learned her daughter was imagining the bugs as a
symptom of her heavy cocaine use.

She went to hospital at least 10 times thinking there were bugs
crawling under her skin and was turned away each time, her mother said.

"She became really psychotic. She was in terrible straits. She phoned
me at the office and said 'Mum I can't live with these bugs any longer
I'm going crazy, I just can't stand it,' " Begg said.

"The health department says 'we're treating it like a health problem,'
but they're not. If it was a heart attack, Jesus Christ, she'd be
admitted in two seconds."

Looking back on it, both Johanna and her mother said that if there had
been a residential treatment centre where Johanna could have been
locked up and given proper counselling and education, she might have
kicked her addiction years ago.

But such a place did not -- and still does not -- exist in this
province, so Johanna kept returning to the people and drugs that had
become what she knew as her life.

With an increasingly expensive addiction, Johanna turned to
prostitution when she was 18 or 19. She started by joining an escort
agency, learned the trade and then went into business for herself.

A $20 ad in the newspaper reaped in piles of "clients" and Johanna
began watching the money flow into her hands, only to slip through to
a dealer's.

"I made over $300,000 and I have nothing to show for it," she said.
"I've sold my clothes, my car. I've sold my soul, my dignity. I've
sold it all."

Johanna said she was making about $180 an hour as an escort and
spending about $400 a day on her habit.

If she wanted to get a real high though, she said she had to spend far
more than that, because the $400 only covered "maintenance."

"That was just to be well, not to be high. Getting high wasn't an
issue any more," she said.

"My drug habit was maintenance. In order to shower, in order to brush
my teeth, in order to eat, I had to do drugs."

Even though it would have been significantly cheaper, Johanna said she
never shot heroin into her veins -- a statement she proves by holding
out her forearms for examination.

"I never used needles. Look at those arms," she said, showing the
pale, smooth insides of her arms. "I'm a smoker. My lungs are probably
f...ed, but that's fine."

As a young prostitute, Johanna was desperate to keep up appearances in
order to keep earning big money. She vowed that she never had a pimp
and had to keep herself looking good for her own survival.

She braved what she called the "pimp track" -- which runs through her
east side neighbourhood -- and, after getting beaten up several times
by pimps and other girls who felt the strip was theirs, earned herself
a corner and "a little respect."

"The best pimp in the world is heroin and cocaine," she said. "It will
have you out there every single night and every single day. There's no
dispute about that."

But at some point late last summer, Johanna said she got tired of her
overpowering "pimp," and decided to take another stab at getting clean.

"The embarrassment and degradation of prostitution just got to me. I
was sick of it," she said.

With the heroin and cocaine virtually out of her life, Johanna wasn't
going out to her corner every single night and day.

But without the constant need to fix, Johanna was lost and not sure
what to do with her time during the summer.

She said she was handing out resumes at clothing stores and trying to
convey the message that she was well on her way to recovery.

"I want people to know that I'm not just some dumb junkie hooker. I
want them to know I'm embarrassed of who I've become," she said in
July.

Since then -- when she was showing off her clear white eyes to
strangers and revelling in her new-found glow -- Johanna has had some
ups and downs, but seems to be fairly stable, her mother said last
week.

Johanna has been difficult to reach in recent months, but she left a
message at The Vancouver Sun Friday during which she passed on
Halloween greetings in an upbeat voice and apologized for not
returning phone calls.

Begg said her daughter has had her methodone dosage reduced twice in
recent months and is taking another prescribed medication to stabilize
her moods.

She spends a lot of her time sleeping and doesn't yet have a job, but
her mother says "She's healthy and doing fine."