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To avoid prison, she must get clean

By Mary Meehan

MMEEHAN1@HERALD-LEADER.COM

"I messed up," reads the plea in careful, girlish script. "I used. I don't know why or what's wrong with me. ... I thought I didn't have a problem, that I could just quit. But I'm wrong. How can all those other people just quit? ... What if I can't get better? I don't want to be this way anymore. ... I want to be normal again."

Dawn Nicole Smith is desperate to get clean when writing this letter in May 2004, pleading with her Fayette County Drug Court caseworker, Elton Terry, for help.

She's praying that if she admits to taking drugs before a drug test shows she has, the judge will take pity and not send her to jail for a year. That's her sentence for stealing a prescription pad to obtain 540 pain pills in 53 days.

She's been using almost daily for two years. If too many hours pass without a pill, her body revolts. Her hands shake. Her insides cramp. Her head aches. Sitting up, tracking a conversation or watching television takes almost unfathomable energy and focus.

"It just feels like I'm fighting myself," she says. "My mind is tired. I've asked the Lord to help me not to do those pills no more."

She's tired because it's not just her life, but her family's, hanging in the balance. Dawn, 22, already has three sons, from her six-year marriage to Tony Smith. She's convinced herself she's shielded them from the worst of her addiction, one of the many lies she tells herself to get through the day. Tonio, 5, acts as if it's his job to make his mama better; David, 3, is an ever-watchful boy with a head of wild curls, and baby Kobe, 2, copes with the family chaos by careening between fits of anger and tears.

These dark-haired boys — her "heart," Dawn calls them — cling to her even when she's too high to feel the gentle rise of their chests as they nestle close in sleep.

She smiles a face-splitting grin, a rare instance of joy, at a mention of them. As she talks about them, she leans her head to the right, taking one strand of her long, dirty hair and twirling it around the inside of her ear, a calming tic she's had since she was a kid.

The drugs exaggerate in their lives the imperfect affection found in all families. But the children love her, as only kids can. And she loves them, as much as she is able.

THAT FIRST PILL

Dawn's goals, even when she was a kid, were never ambitious. She thought, once, about becoming a veterinarian, but she never finished high school. Now she longs for much more basic things: a house with the heat on, food for her kids, 24 hours without taking a pill.

Growing up in Crab Orchard and Lexington, she saw others turn to alcohol, then crack and sometimes pills. Even as Dawn begins drug court, her stepfather, Larry Raines, is on probation for forging a prescription for the painkiller Percocet in the name of Brenda Raines, his wife and Dawn's mom. Brenda is on probation for writing bad checks to support a crack habit that, she says, once cost her $1,000 in a day. Dawn says she doesn't know anyone who has, long-term, quit using drugs or alcohol.

Dawn was wild in middle school. For running with a fast crowd and drinking, she was sent away to a group home.

The drugs started after her babies were born.

She was dragging, exhausted from working, taking care of the boys and worrying about paying the rent and having food in the house. Someone she worked with at McDonald's said she had something that could help. Dawn waited until she got home to take that first oblong pain pill — a Lortab. As she sat on the couch in the dark with a battered old television on, a hazy sense of peace settled into her bones.

It was like a missing piece of herself slipped into place.

"It just made me feel sooooooo relaxed," she says, smiling at the memory, even after all the trouble that pill set into motion. "It's like people do crack, that one hit gets them. That one pill got me."

The warm release was followed by a burst of energy. She felt like she could actually do things better, take care of the kids, clean the house. "Weird and wonderful," Dawn says, dreamily, of that first time. "Weird and wonderful."

When she was offered drug court as an alternative to prison, she didn't really think about going day after day without pills. Such a life was unimaginable.

"I just thought it would keep me out of trouble," Dawn says.

Participants in drug court, which soon will be available in all of Kentucky's 120 counties, have committed non-violent crimes — usually in support of their drug or alcohol habit. Few come in committed wholeheartedly to staying clean, says Terry, who oversees about 40 drug court participants at any given time. He grew up watching his mother struggle with addiction, and he knows the hold it can have on people.

The hope, he says, is that the strict regime of drug court gives addicts enough clean time "that something kicks in and they want to change their lifestyle."

Some drug court participants, like Dawn, are poor. Others are at the bottom of a long economic slide. But for all, creating a clean and sober life means changing almost everything: how and with whom they spend time, where they live. For many, the program means learning skills most people take for granted: how to hold down a job, how to show up on time, how to cope with daily frustrations without a drug or drink to push those feelings away.

But, ultimately, success or failure depends on some things no program can create — hope that things really can change, and faith in yourself to make it happen.

For Dawn, that has yet to emerge.

PAWNING TOYS FOR PILLS

Drugs have been central to her life for too long for her to have an easy escape. One pill quickly became two, then three, then four. Too many would unleash a torrent of histamine into her system and make her crazy-itchy. She has scars on her feet where she scrubbed herself raw with a foot brush to end the maddening tingle. She once tore apart a pain patch like the ones they give to terminal cancer patients so she could suck out the sedating gel and get just a little higher a little quicker.

Within six months of that first pill, that "weird and wonderful" feeling was gone. Once she started using, her family was evicted from the tidy Middlesboro apartment where they had lived for four years, and where the boys all had beds.

Soon, she, Tony and the boys were living in a bare, one-bedroom apartment in Lexington.

Not using wasn't really an option. "It got to where I was feeling all groggy and tired and didn't even want to get out of bed if I didn't have a stupid pill." All day, every day, was centered on pills. Getting pills, taking pills, figuring out where to get more pills.

When she was curled up on the couch unable to function, Tonio would get a Tylenol or whatever pill he could find, and bring it to her. Peering out from under silky, straight, black bangs, he'd say, "Here, Mommy, here's one of your pills," hoping, as little boys will, that he could do something, anything, to make things better.

Even in a haze, Dawn knew that was wrong. Yet, compelled by the physical craving and emotional pain, she kept doing things she said she'd never do.

She pawned her sons' GameBoy, their DVD player and a big box full of their movies. Maybe $200 worth of stuff. She got less than $10.

She always planned to get that stuff back with her next paycheck. But it always went to pills.

She snapped at the kids if she didn't get her "alone time," time to do drugs. Frustrated, she once spanked the oldest, Tonio, so hard it left a red mark on his bottom.

One time, she came to in the morning after a night of destructive thunderstorms. For a few panicked moments she couldn't find Kobe, who had slipped out into the back yard.

She started going to the emergency room to supplement what she could get on the street, using her signature move, what she calls her "sweet, little, innocent thing." Hanging her head, long, mousy brown hair blocking her face, she cries with increasingly measured hysteria and begs for relief. Sealing the deal, when necessary, involves briefly looking up to lock pleading eyes with the doctor.

"It's easy," she says, a rare confidence warming her pale, round face. On this she is something of an expert. "Say your back hurts, say your ribs hurt, say something hurts that they can't see, and you'll get some medicine."

It worked, often.

The time it didn't was what landed her in drug court. She went to a dentist at the University of Kentucky. She wanted painkillers. The answer was no.

That made her angry.

In her opinion, the dentist was stupid enough to leave the prescription pad in a drawer where she could get it, and she was smart enough to take it.

So she wrote prescriptions, 100 pills here, 90 pills there, and had a little side business. If she paid $40 for a prescription, she'd sell some of the tablets for $7 each to make at least enough money to cover the next pills. She had at least one person helping her: her mom, Brenda. They already had learned tricks for doctoring legitimate prescriptions — how easy it is to change a 10 to 100, or to take information from a prescription for a non-narcotic and copy it to a forged one for painkillers to make it look real.

Recklessness set in. Dawn filled five prescriptions for 540 pills in 53 days.

A pharmacy employee called police. Dawn was arrested and was offered drug court as an alternative to jail.

But even that didn't stop her from using as the case worked its way through the court system. In her first month in drug court, she twice went to the emergency room, exaggerating injuries to get doctors to give her pills. From November 2003, when she was arrested, to May 2004, Dawn has been in jail five times after testing positive for drugs.

APPEARING BEFORE THE JUDGE

This time, because she confessed, she's hoping the judge will have mercy and not send her away.

She has to appear before Judge Sheila Isaac, a tiny woman who looks like a china doll but commands the courtroom like a Teamster. Dawn has been sobbing, off and on, for hours. After her name is called, she moves slowly through the room in a maroon shirt that she got when working at Wendy's — the best job she ever had. It says "Sparkle." Her red-rimmed eyes are wild and panicked, like someone just seconds out of a nightmare.

Behind her, on the back benches, sit the other drug court participants. They must assemble every Thursday, as required in this stage of the program. A bailiff makes them move closer and, week after week, instructs them to take off their baseball caps. The participants clap as instructed by the judge when one man gets promoted to assistant manager at a pizza parlor, and again when another gets a 25-cents-an-hour raise.

Judge Isaac's courtroom is not a place for coddling.

"I don't know how you live with yourself," she says to a man as he tries to argue why he shouldn't have to pay child support. Another, recently charged with DUI and smelling today of a yeasty combination of sweat and beer, is taken to jail. Three guys will be sent away, one to serve 18 years.

But as Dawn does her own slow trudge to the bench, the judge has a certain softness. She has read Dawn's carefully penned plea to Terry: "Help me. I want to be normal again."

Dawn doesn't, like some, offer elaborate excuses. She just says, tearfully, that she did it.

"We appreciate your honesty," Isaac says.

Dawn will have to serve 20 days in the Fayette County Detention Center for breaking the rules. But she's still in the program. "We want you to see the end of the road. There is an end of the road," Isaac says.

"It's all about hope," the judge says, "so hang on to that. It will see you through."

But not today.

EXPIRED EGGS, OLD BREAD

Five minutes after court, Dawn's down the elevator and smoking a cigarette so generic it's called Basic, and talking about how her husband Tony, who works as an aide in a nursing home, has a check coming.

She figures since she's going to jail anyway, and she's never fully detoxed, she might as well get high this one, very last time. She goes to three different dealers over two days before finding someone selling the painkiller Lortab. She tells herself she needs a little something to ease the pain of leaving her babies.

The morning she is to report to jail, she wakes up in a semi-stupor with her boys in a tangle like puppies on the couch. Kobe, 2, is without underwear or a diaper. The older boys are dressed in shorts, although there is a chill in the air and the gas has been cut off because the family didn't pay the bill. The house smells like dust, cigarettes and old grease.

Smoking her first morning cigarette and swaying ever so slightly on the couch, she seems oblivious as Tonio rides a battered tricycle repeatedly over some crushed cereal on the floor. David climbs on the back of the ragged couch and jumps to a shelf on the wall. She does nothing to correct them. Eventually, slowly, she makes her sons a breakfast of eggs past their expiration date and old bread, which they pick at but don't eat.

Hours later, she gets together some socks and underwear, an extra bra, a new box of 64 crayons and a coloring book to take with her. She'll have to wear that itchy, green jail jumpsuit and eat bologna sandwiches. But she'll watch TV, play solitaire and sleep.

She'll get some rest.

When she comes back, she says, she'll be better able to take care of herself and her boys.

When the boys fuss, she reluctantly gives them one of the brown cardboard cartons filled with 16 sticks of color, although there's nothing to draw on but a tattered notebook and the walls.

As she walks out the door, Tonio asks in a baby voice too young for his age whether she is going to jail.

She doesn't answer.

She sits on the step, and David begins to cry, arms around her neck. "Don't go," he whines, smashing into her face with his cheek. "Don't go. I want to go."

As his mother gets in her car, Kobe flings himself to the ground, then clings to the yard's fence as his dad tries to peel him off.

Kobe's wails trail her down the block.

But the drugs work. She doesn't cry.

The tears will come tomorrow, and the next day, as she sits in jail with nothing to stop them. When drug court officials discover she's used after being told to go to jail, the 20 days are extended to 30.

"I don't want them to feel like I abandoned them," she says of her kids while driving to jail, high on Lortab, chain-smoking, sucking down a Mountain Dew and listening to a Christian radio station.

She knows what it's like to feel abandoned and unloved. She knows how that can mess you up, how it stays with you even when you're grown.

She'll make sure, she says, that her boys understand she's not going to jail because of anything they did.

She'll tell them; they'll know how much she loves them.

She'll tell them, but not today.

Reach Mary Meehan at (859) 231-3261 or 1-800-950-6397, Ext. 3261, or mmeehan1herald-leader.com.