Heroin Town: Part Four

THE COURAGE TO HEAL

The flip side of addiction is recovery, and Willimantic is filled with
services, self-help groups and those who have beaten the demon.

WILLIMANTIC -- Religion, non-impact aerobics and polka music each get
their own public access TV shows and audience here. So does drug addiction.

It's called "Positive Faces," an upbeat show on cable Channel 14 that
focuses on recovery. It's the flip side of the town's intractable
heroin problem - the success stories of people who have kicked their
habits.

"Willimantic is a recovery town," said Terri Keaton, a recovering
heroin addict who works as a counselor with Perception House, one of
the community's several treatment centers. "I can't go to the market
without seeing someone in recovery who waves or stops to talk."

Since the 1970s, a network of state-licensed programs has tossed
lifelines to addicts seeking to escape their suffering. Halfway houses
and supervised-living apartments are sprinkled throughout Willimantic,
providing homes for recovering addicts while they rebuild their lives,
find jobs and try to root out the behaviors that trigger relapse.
There's a men's home, a women's home and a house for recovering people
who also are sick with HIV. There are self-help meetings every night
of the week.

"Addiction is a disease," said Diane Potvin, the creator and co-host
of "Positive Faces." She's a recovering alcoholic who for 14 years was
the executive secretary to the first selectman of the town of Windham,
of which Willimantic is a part. She's now a member of the staff of the
nonprofit Connecticut Community for Addiction Recovery.

"We don't make it easy for people to stop and get better. Especially
with heroin. We put shame on them," Potvin said. "On this show we try
to bring recovery out of the shadows, to rid it of the stigma."

Twice a month, Potvin and a volunteer crew of recovering addicts meet
at the cable TV studio to field viewers' calls and ask guests in
recovery about their new and sober lives. Quite often, the drug the
show's guests have kicked is heroin. Heroin was the downfall of
Columbia native James Couchon, a guest on the show in July.

"When I was using, I couldn't walk down the street in Willimantic
without the police slowing down to see what I was up to," said
Couchon, who is now clean and has a good job, a good marriage and a
home.

Couchon hoped his televised story of transition to a better life might
aid someone struggling with addiction.

"It's been 10 years in recovery for me. I don't mind talking about
it," Couchon said later. "I had a lot of fun doing the show."

So do the people who tape it.

One hot August night, bright TV studio lights heat up the set. Potvin
and a co-host, Geri Langlois, a former Thompson first selectman and
state representative recovering from cocaine addiction, get ready for
the latest show. Their guest, Heather McDonald, will speak about a
program in East Hartford that helps people battle both addiction and
mental illness.

Across the hall in the control room, volunteer technicians Alan
Szumkowski, Carlos Rivera and Kara McMellon joke around before taping
begins. The three are recovering heroin addicts.

Szumkowski, Potvin's brother, kicked heroin four years
ago.

Rivera and McMellon got sober while incarcerated. They met at a
12-step meeting in Willimantic, where they were living in separate
residential treatment programs. Both had been sent on probation by the
Department of Correction to long-term programs to kick their habits.
The two programs in Willimantic where each landed are among the 58
state-licensed residential rehabilitation sites across
Connecticut.

"I'd never heard of Willimantic," said McMellon, who was born in New
Haven. "Coming up here in the van from York prison in Niantic, I
looked outside at the country and fields and thought they were going
to drop me off at some little farm. Willimantic turned out to be a
positive place for me."

Offering A Haven

The addicts and drug-addicted prostitutes in Willimantic are more
visible than they might be in larger cities. Here, they stick out like
rocks poking from the surface of a shallow pond. But sympathy - and
empathy - are also closer to the surface.

"In this small town, everything is more concentrated, more obvious,"
Potvin said. "Heroin has destroyed everything for these people. I'm
sure not one of these girls woke up one morning and thought they'd
like to become an addict and a prostitute. It's where the drug pushed
them.

"But we shouldn't lock them up in jail because they're `bad people.'
... We need more treatment and less prisons."

Willimantic has outreach programs to help addicts still on the
streets, social workers who try to keep addicts and prostitutes from
risky conduct that could result in AIDS or hepatitis, and several
church groups that provide food, clothing and friendship.

"All the agencies work together as a team with referrals, finding work
or jobs," said Mercedes Arroyo, director of the Puerto Rican
Organizational Program, a nonprofit agency that helps the town's many
Hispanics. "A lot of people come to Willimantic because it's a better
place to live and raise children. But they may need help."

Moises Ramirez, who is captain of the local Salvation Army post on
Pleasant Street, offers several youth programs, including soccer
teams. He said he gets assistance from other agencies if he runs into
a situation he can't handle. Willimantic is a friendly town, and he
says he has seen no racism since he arrived here six years ago.
Ramirez said he tries to steer children away from drug use and crime.

"That's what the Salvation Army did for me in Mexico City," he said.
"I began going there when I was 8. We're not here to change the whole
town. We can't. But you never know what that one kid you help will
turn out to be - a scientist, the next Martin Luther King."

There's also a soup kitchen that started in 1981 to help those who
became unemployed when the town's thread mills were shutting down. The
Covenant soup kitchen is in the basement of St. Paul's Episcopal
Church on Valley Street, a few blocks from the Hotel Hooker, town hall
and Jillson Square. Its director, Paul Doyle, is a minister who came
from a church in Palm Springs, Calif.

The kitchen averages 24,000 lunches and 14,000 breakfasts a
year.

"The soup kitchen is a safe haven. We work really hard to make sure
there is no judgment," Doyle said. "Heroin is the drug of choice here
for poor people in this town. It's cheap and available. Heroin is
extremely prevalent here."

If people ask for help, Doyle and the staff will do what they can to
get them into treatment.

"Sometimes the easiest part of all of this is stopping using. Then
comes the hard work - dealing with life without using," he said. "To
get rid of your `lifeboat' for the hard times is the most difficult."

The Rev. Fred Wright, pastor at the First Baptist Church on Jillson
Square, said he is sometimes asked by out-of-town folks if he's
nervous about the drug-addicted prostitutes who hang out at the park
next door.

No, he said.

"I'm a country preacher and this is my first time really learning
about addiction," Wright said one night at a meeting in his church.
"But I see it's not about a bad person becoming good, but a sick
person getting better."

At least once a week, social workers arrive at Jillson Square in a
camper, put a card table in front of it and begin passing out handfuls
of condoms to prostitutes. Inside the air-conditioned camper are cold
sodas, fresh pastries and Dorcas Velazquez.

At 5 feet 2, Velazquez isn't an imposing figure. But the 54-year-old
mother of two commands respect from the prostitutes and homeless as a
caring counselor.

"One guy told me I do more for him than his mother," she said. "Who am
I to judge? The person who is addicted - they ache, they're sick, and
the only thing that will make them feel better is a bag."

Velazquez was raised in a strict Christian home in New York City by
parents who taught her to respect everyone and not to laugh at
anyone's pain. She moved to Puerto Rico to raise her two small
children, fearing the drugs and crime in New York. She moved to
Willimantic about 12 years ago and worked for a local pediatrician. He
suggested that she apply for a job as a social worker because she was
bilingual and an excellent listener.

Velazquez has seen many addicts die of overdoses on the street or
inside the Hotel Hooker.

"Each room in the hotel has a story you can tell," she said. "People
have been raped, people have died in there. There have been overdoses,
beatings."

She cried when one of her clients, John Davis, died recently. She
comforted his girlfriend, Jessica Canwell, who came to see her in
Jillson Square.

"I feel that the people who died, I can't do anything for any longer,"
she says. "The people who are alive, I can help."

She waits for the moment when an addict knocks on the door of her
camper and says he wants to get into a program.

"We're here to wait for that moment, when they say it's time," she
said.

`What A Journey'

Szumkowski, one of the "Positive Faces" volunteers, had tried to stop
using heroin many times. He's been clean and sober now for four years.

"I began using heroin in my teens," says Szumkowski, 48. "We used to
come down to Willi from Manchester to buy if there was a raid in
Hartford and the heat was on."

Today, McMellon, 32, is a trusted clerk in a local store. It amazes
and humbles her that she has a "normal" life.

"I don't want to ruin this. I have my own hopes and dreams. I just
want to be happy. I used to walk down the street and proclaim that I
was an addict and I truly thought I was happy. But I didn't know how
much drugs distort until I stopped."

She started using at age 13, quickly progressing from alcohol to
cocaine to heroin.

"I kept it up until Oct. 2, 2000, when I went to jail. ... I had a
terrible habit. Three bundles [30 bags] of heroin. I began shooting
cocaine to offset the heroin. Heroin made me feel wonderful. It makes
all your troubles melt away and the world is wonderful. You know the
feeling? Well, it's like hugging a big warm, fuzzy blanket right out
of the dryer on a winter day."

Rivera, 34, another volunteer, is a strong, stocky man with a hoarse
voice and a warm smile. He was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, where he
dreamed of becoming a boxer or ballplayer. Instead, he became a
gun-wielding heroin addict who broke his mother's heart by fighting,
robbing and stealing. He spent most of his teens in prison.

"I never got past the fourth grade. To me, jail was the school of
life. I was a thief. A liar. A cheat. A troublemaker. A punk. My
father was an addict. My mother wasn't. He was shot and killed in
1980. Drug business. I have four brothers and three sisters. They're
all crazy for dope. I had three brothers die of AIDS."

He says he was a "revengeful person" then who loved
fighting.

"You want to mess with me, punk? Put a bag of dope in my system and I
was superman. I was the same punk, the same jackass everywhere. To me,
the American Dream was to go to New York and sell drugs."

So he came to America, first to New York, then to Waterbury, where his
mother was living with a married daughter. His arrest there on drug
charges put him on the path to recovery.

"I graduated from the streets to the pen. From the pen, I got sent to
Perception House in Willimantic. That's how I got here."

Today, he's a kitchen supervisor at a local restaurant, proud of the
promotions he's gotten and thankful for sobriety and for Kara. He
speaks to any addict who seems receptive.

"My faith is strong. My biggest enemy is loss of hope and despair," he
says. "Biggest thing I ever did for myself in recovery is open myself
up to white people. First I got a maintenance job. Now I'm a prep
supervisor. What a bless. What a journey."