The Big Deal - Part 4 Of 5

ADDICTS COME CLEAN

Victor Ortiz should have been dead by now.

He has been addicted to heroin and dealing it for the better half of his
44 years. He has been shot at countless times and hit twice, once in the
stomach and once in the back.

Only after flipping his cousin's brand-new Chevy Blazer in a lake, then
nearly drowning in it, did Ortiz seek help. He found it far from the
violent streets of his native Buffalo, in Ontario County, where at least
1,000 people receive substance abuse treatment every year. ''To me, this
is like Shangri-la,'' says Ortiz, a father of two who now lives in
Canandaigua. ''I don't have to walk the street packing a pistol. I don't
have to shoot anybody today. I don't have to rob anybody today.''

Ortiz arrived in this rural refuge to escape drugs. Joanie Angell, a
white, middle-class, 42-year-old homemaker, found them here.

It was in the tiny hamlet of Hall that Angell, already on the road to
alcoholism, discovered cocaine.

Because of her addictions, she embezzled thousands of dollars from her
employer, lost weight and some of her hair, alienated her two children,
and ended her 13-year marriage.

She, too, got treatment -- first in jail, and then at Finger Lakes
Addictions Counseling & Referral Agency in Clifton Springs, one of four
treatment centers in Ontario County. The others are Clifton Springs
Hospital & Clinic, Canandaigua Veterans Affairs Medical Center and the
county-run Turnings in Hopewell.

Each center is responding to Ontario County's growing problem with
illegal drugs. Crack cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamines are
ever-present here, but heroin and ecstasy are on the rise, as is the
abuse of prescription drugs, according to the Sheriff's Department.

The age at which people have begun to experiment with these drugs
continues to drop. Turnings, the county's substance abuse treatment and
prevention center, recently admitted a 12-year-old client.

Yet Ontario County may be better poised than neighboring rural counties
to combat drugs. It recently approved construction of a $28.5 million
jail to house a burgeoning drug-addicted inmate population. And it also
has made a number of advances in treatment and prevention:

Ontario County has installed a new drug court and expanded a group
called Alternatives to Incarceration. Both attempt to route addicted
criminals to treatment instead of jail. The Finger Lakes Addictions
Counseling & Referral Agency last month expanded its crisis center from
14 beds to 22. All but two of the county's nine school districts have
prevention officers on site. And the Partnership for Ontario County, a
nonprofit prevention agency composed of 150 community officials, has
conducted surveys of students and parents about perceptions and use of
drugs, as well as the factors that lead to abuse.

Members of the Partnership's seven sectors -- business, community
service, education, faith, government, health care and public safety --
meet regularly to discuss their respective roles in the fight against
drugs.

''The mood has changed over the years,'' says Thomas Harvey, an
associate planner for the county, who was involved in researching the
need for a new jail.

''People are finally waking up to the fact that it's cheaper to
rehabilitate than to incarcerate. We're ahead of many rural counties and
behind many urban counties. We're playing catch-up.''

But treatment providers say the county is behind in some major areas:

Its adolescent treatment services are not tailored for the county's
youngest users, who might benefit from specialized therapy. ''The system
we had was fine for 16-, 18-year-olds, but not for 12-or 13-year-olds.
They really need different models,'' says June Fisher, director of
Turnings. ''If we don't treat the adolescent population, we really are
building a bigger jail population.'' The county also has no methadone
maintenance clinic. That's a lamentable absence, treatment providers
say, in an area where heroin addiction, especially among Hispanics, is
increasing. ''We have to find a better way to serve the Hispanic
community,'' says drug counselor Salvador Caban. ''We do not have the
right services for this (addiction). There is more heroin in the streets
than help we can give.''

Road To Shangri-La

Ortiz got hooked on heroin during a three-year stint in the U.S. Navy.
The drug was more prevalent on his ship, he says, than on the Florida
coast where it was stationed.

He would never have another hit like the first. ''It felt like an
orgasm,'' he says.

But from that point on, he would do whatever it took to repeat the
experience. He would survive attempts on his life, and stand trial on a
murder charge. ''I was accused of slitting someone's throat,'' he says.

He would be acquitted.

He would deal heroin himself, until he dipped too far into the profits
to make it worth his while. He would then proffer cocaine, a drug for
which he had no taste.

He knew already what drugs could make him do. As a teenager, he stole --
from his school, from his pastor's house -- to support his marijuana
habit.

Ortiz was born to Puerto Rican parents. His father worked in a steel
plant for 30 years; his mother was a housekeeper in a hospital. They
were loving and supportive, he says, but Ortiz was compelled to rebel.

He tried marijuana at a party, to impress some girls, ''and that was
it,'' he says. ''I was off and running.''

He ended up running into serious legal trouble -- enough so that when
his father visited him in jail, he brought along a Navy recruiter.
''He's now U.S. property,'' Ortiz remembers the recruiter telling the
judge. Ortiz was 17.

By the time he left the Navy three years later, he had a heroin habit.

''As soon as I got home'' he says, ''I hit the streets.''

In Buffalo, he says, he was surrounded by Hispanic people who, for no
other reason except to make a quick buck, had gotten into the heroin
business.

In Ontario County, too, heroin use is widespread among Hispanics --
which mystifies treatment providers here, even those who are themselves
Hispanic. Recovery is not nearly so common. Migrant workers, illegal
immigrants and women, for example, could be suffering from addiction,
says Caban, but unwilling to seek treatment because they fear losing
something: their jobs, their freedom, their children.

Heroin addiction can be excruciating for anyone to overcome. For Ortiz,
the need to feed his addiction and protect his goods would make him
mean: He would steal from rival drug dealers. They would retaliate. He
would never go unarmed.

And it would make him sick. ''I looked so bad people thought I had
AIDS,'' he says.

Ortiz would take multiple trips to jails, prisons and emergency rooms
before getting sober. He would attempt rehab 22 times.

Someone -- a counselor whose name Ortiz can't recall -- finally got
through to him at the Canandaigua V.A. There, Ortiz learned that he may
have been more addicted to the dangerous, fast-paced lifestyle that
drugs afforded than he was to drugs.

Today, the burly, goateed Ortiz bears few physical traces of his junkie
days. He wants a ''normal life": his own apartment, a college degree,
maybe a job as a drug counselor.

He can still feel the mean streak he spent so many years cultivating,
but he takes medication to quell it -- eight or nine pills, as many as
two or three times a day.

''I used to be on a lot more,'' he says. ''When the doctor first gave
them to me, I said, 'What are you doing? I'm trying to get off drugs.'
''

Ortiz's world has steadily shrunk: It is limited to the brief commute
between his home in Canandaigua and his counseling sessions in Clifton
Springs. He will not allow himself to venture even to Geneva.

''Exchange Street, man. You can just see it from the bus, if you know
where to look,'' he says about Geneva's main drag.

The temptations, even in this ''Shangri-la,'' are still great, Ortiz
says.

''I hear rumors,'' he says. ''Canandaigua's got a lot of dope. I know
there's a lot of young kids on heroin. They're dropping like flies. I
know where they're headed.''

Drugs Of Choice

Relatively few of them are headed to treatment -- a result, says Fisher
of Turnings, of not having available the most effective treatment for
people as young as 12.

Fisher is a proponent of ''multisystemic therapy,'' in which a team of
therapists visit or talk to clients daily in home and community
settings, as opposed to clinics or hospitals.

''This has become more pertinent than ever because the age of our
adolescents that are needing treatment versus prevention keeps
dropping,'' Fisher says.

But the average age of people receiving treatment in Ontario County was
35. And most of those people were white.

That discrepancy is especially obvious to Caban, one of two bilingual
counselors working at clinics in Geneva and Newark, who worked with
Ortiz at one point.

The majority of Caban's Hispanic clients are addicted to heroin, he
says, and the therapy that could best help them -- methadone -- also is
unavailable.

A synthetic narcotic medication that effectively blocks cravings for
heroin and other illicit opiates, methadone is the most widely used
treatment for heroin addiction nationwide. Batavia, Genesee County,
recently approved a clinic there.

But in Ontario County, the proposed methadone clinic is controversial.

''I know heroin is supposed to be on the rise, but I think we'd need a
lot more information,'' says Donald C. Ninestine, who represents the
city of Geneva on the Ontario County Board of Supervisors. The board has
not yet discussed a methadone clinic.

Heroin is one of many substances under scrutiny by The Partnership for
Ontario County. The group addresses the harms caused not only by illegal
drugs, but also by tobacco, alcohol and other substances.

Alcohol abuse is still the No. 1 problem in Ontario County, says Rob
Lillis, the partnership's research consultant. ''If you took all of the
problems related to illegal drugs, it wouldn't hold a candle to the
problems caused by alcohol.''

Infatuated, Obsessed

She is a Canandaigua native, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed former
cheerleader, a mother and a one-time nursing student. Addiction sneaked
up on her.

''It didn't fit,'' says Joanie Angell. ''I kept thinking, 'How could
this happen to me?'''

Here's how:

At the age of 20, Angell started drinking, mostly beer, with a group of
girlfriends who called themselves the Hooterville Social Club. They
would get together once a week, play cards or softball -- and drink. ''I
wasn't doing anything different than any other person in the group,''
she says.

Except that she was drinking every day, and suffering for it, with
violent mood swings and marital problems. The marital problems led to an
affair. The affair led to an experiment with cocaine.

''I heard sex was better on cocaine,'' Angell says. ''I heard it was
going to make me skinny. (The beer, she says, had added pounds.)

''I was immediately in love.''

It didn't last, though. Angell's infatuation with cocaine became an
unshakeable obsession, something she could not support on her
bookkeeper's salary. But her employer of more than 12 years, an
agricultural supply company, would unwittingly help to support her
habit: From them, over a period of two years, she stole $48,711.54.

''I told myself I was just borrowing that money,'' she says.

Getting caught, she says, ''ultimately was a big relief.'' But first, it
made her suicidal.

''I drank a lot of beer and took a bottle of sleeping pills,'' she says.
''I just wanted to die. I was so ashamed and so scared. I really thought
I would be better off dead.''

Angell, who had no previous convictions, served three months of her
6-month jail sentence.

Her recovery after that was fueled by a singular desire: ''I never
wanted to go back there.''

''I couldn't stand that cell door slamming.'' she says. ''I can still
hear that.''

Angell received intensive outpatient treatment at Clifton Springs
Hospital & Clinic. She reconciled with her children. And after six
months of searching, she found a job at the very place that had provided
counseling while she was in jail, Finger Lakes Addiction Counseling &
Referral Agency.

Angell's addiction still hovers, like a gremlin on her shoulder.

''It's sitting right here, waiting for me, saying 'Come on back. If you
want to stop hurting, this is all you need.' ''

SIDEBAR:

Victor Ortiz says his spirituality is helping in his daily battle to
stay free of drugs. The Buffalo native, who has fought heroin addiction
since his youth, found support in Ontario County, where he now lives.
(accompanies photo)

When Addicts Can't Travel To Treatment, It Goes To Them

Substance abuse services in farm-studded Genesee and Orleans counties
are so few and far between that many addicts simply cannot get to them.

Some of those addicts cannot drive because the courts have taken away
their driver's licenses. They and others are "hitchhiking, or depending
on someone else for a ride," says Beverly Maniace, deputy director of
the Genesee/Orleans County Council on Alcoholism and Substance Abuse.

In both counties, public transportation is limited. "It's not like you
can just get a bus and go somewhere," Maniace says, adding that taxi
service, too, is sparse.

And so, rather than wait for clients to travel to treatment, the council
takes treatment to them -- through satellite offices in local churches.

That is how First Baptist Church, a white clapboard building on Le Roy's
Main Street, became the setting for biweekly substance-abuse counseling
sessions for a dozen people trying to overcome addiction to alcohol,
heroin and other drugs.

The sessions are held Monday and Wednesday evenings, in the church's
"group meeting room," a nondescript space with the council's single desk
crammed into a corner.

"We don't want the building to be sitting empty, just being used once a
week," says Nancy Tripp, the church pastor of 11 years. "It was an
important part of having an open ministry for the community, instead of
just on Sunday."

Some of the agency's clients must ride their bicycles for many miles,
across counties, to get to the sessions at First Baptist. But it's still
more convenient for them, they say, than getting to the agency's sites
in Batavia and Albion.

The location is the only satellite so far, but the council hopes to open
others in churches in Indian Falls, Genesee County, and in Medina,
Holley and Lyndonville in Orleans County.

The agency had been searching for "any available space," says Maniace,
but churches have proved ideal.

"This setting kind of reduces the intensity of the therapy," says
counselor Rick Caton. "It's just a little less threatening."

It's also cheap. For $20 a month plus utilities, the agency gets use of
First Baptist for no more than 18 hours a week (per state regulations).
It has no affiliation with the church or any other religious
organization.

"I don't have anything to do with it except turning on the heat," says
Tripp. "it just happens to be a ministry we're committed to."