TRYING TO STAY DISEASE FREE -- FROM ONE HIGH TO THE NEXT

Kellie, 48, one of Prevention Point Pittsburgh's most important contacts,
has lived most of her adult life from one fix to the next. She and her
boyfriend, Paul, 53, have shared a heroin habit for 25 years. In the
street-corner commerce of drugs and sex, both have mastered the skills to
survive.

"People tell me, 'You'd get along with the devil in hell,'" says Kellie,
with a laugh. "We know everyone. And everyone trusts us."

Neither would give their last name.

Because she is well-known and well-liked, she distributes clean needles for
Prevention Point Pittsburgh to the streets, the big shooting galleries and
smaller places where people do drugs. If others take what she hands out and
sell it for a profit, she says, it doesn't diminish the bigger bottom line:
stemming the spread of infectious disease.

She says she and Paul are trying to get clean.

"I don't want to be a slave to methadone, either," she say, of the
substance she mixes with orange juice each morning and swallows to quell
her heroin craving. She has been on methadone before and gotten bored.

Kellie hopes this time will be different. Her dream is to travel,
untethered by the need to put a needle in her arm. She wants to write a
book about addiction.

"It's finding something else to occupy your time," says Kellie, a former
prostitute who says she is on government assistance. Paul does odd jobs,
painting mostly, and "runs" drugs when they need money.

Kellie distributes at least 600 syringes, a week, and keeps some, for the
"select" clientele who come to her apartment to shoot up. She hardly runs a
gallery, she says. "They're mostly, you know, just a small group of friends."

One of them is a 46-year-old Mt. Lebanon homemaker and former registered
nurse, who won't give her name. She visits Kellie on Sunday afternoons. For
the woman and her husband, a carpenter, dope is a once-a-week indulgence.
The Mt. Lebanon woman says her fondness for opiates developed while she
worked in a hospital.

"I started taking Tylenol with codeine. I wasn't the only medical person on
drugs," she says. "I'd sit at a table taking reports and nobody around me
was straight."

In the parlance of the drug culture, Kellie also is a "nurse," and Paul is
a "doctor." Paul injects people who have trouble finding good veins, and
Kellie helps.

"I preach to young people all the time, this is not the kind of life you
want to lead," Kellie says. "But I'd say, if you have to do this, you might
as well do it right. You may as well use clean works and be safe."

She says she remains HIV-free because she won't share needles.

"It is not a life one would want to endure," Kellie says. "If I took all
the money I've spent on drugs, I could go around the world twice. Whatever
years Paul and I have left, we want to enjoy."

Another regular recipient of the needle program is Toi, who lives two doors
away from Kellie in a squalid room. A former Marine with a dishonorable
discharge, Toi, a transsexual, says she supports her habit by prostitution
and that has worked as a female impersonator. She gives only her street name.

Now 45, she began using 22 years ago because she was curious about heroin.
"Stars and hearts was flying everywhere. I really like it. It was like a
sex act," Toi said of her first experience with the drug.

"There are some good people out there, doing good work," Toi said,
referring to Acker, the Prevention Point Pittsburgh volunteer whom she sees
most often. "People don't think we're human, living this life."

Toi lives in a building where Mookie, another needle recipient, operates a
shooting gallery 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Sometimes, Mookie
leaves with a knapsack full of clean works and a letter from Prevention
Point Pittsburgh, which explains what he is trying to do, as he makes
deliveries to smaller enclaves on the Hill.

Mookie also is a user. "I shoot as much as possible, eight or nine times a
day," he says, rubbing the bloated hands typical of an addict. "I do it
'til I pass out.

"It feels nice and warm, just like you're getting ready to go to sleep. It
feels comfortable," he says. "It takes all your troubles until you feel
they don't exist anymore."