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AAUW Heroin Panel Reveals Stories Of Addiction

Julie Apperson, local psychiatric nurse, spoke about her experiences with heroin both as a nurse and as the mother of someone who was addicted at the AAUW/MHA Heroin Epidemic: Women’s Voices, Needs and Impact at the James Prendergast Library on Thursday.

Pictured are Matt Smith and Willow Fodor, St. Luke's Winged Ox Players members, performed a part of the upcoming play,

Pictured are Matt Smith and Willow Fodor, St. Luke’s Winged Ox Players members, performed a part of the upcoming play, “Least Resistance,” at the AAUW/MHA Heroin Epidemic: Women’s Voices, Needs and Impact panel on Thursday. Smith and Fodor performed a scene which focused on grandparents coming to terms with the possibility of raising their grandchild. The play is a locally written piece based on real-life stories of people from the Jamestown area.
P-J photos by Katrina Fuller

It’s no secret that Jamestown has been fighting a battle against heroin that seems impossible to win.

Yet, with great courage, individuals from the community met together Thursday night to share their experiences with heroin, and their hopes for tomorrow at the American Association of University Women and the Mental Health Association’s “Heroin Epidemic: Women’s Voices, Needs and Impact” panel. Held at the James Prendergast Library, the Johnson Community Room had standing room only as community members and officials filled the space.

Several panel guests addressed the crowd, including Dr. Lillian Ney, Julie Apperson, Lori Keller and Heather Brown. All have had some kind of experience with heroin, either professional or personal.

In the case of Apperson, a local psychiatric nurse, it was both.

“Seven years ago, I first became aware of my 20-year-old son’s problematic drug use,” she said. “My first emotions were understandably fear and confusion, which was soon followed by guilt and shame.”

The stigma surrounding addiction is real, and creates an environment of isolation, Apperson said.

“Friends and acquaintances looked at us with sympathy, and my family felt shunned by many,” she said. “I like to say that no one brings you a casserole when your family is battling addiction.”

Apperson said she researched addiction, asked for advice and received a variety of answers, such as “tough love” or “do what you can do to break the cycle.” She said she tried to have an intervention for her son with a condition that her son go into treatment or he would be arrested on check fraud.

“I won’t get into the details of that intervention, but suffice it to say the end result was an arrest,” Apperson said.

While she doesn’t spend much time on regret, Apperson said involving the criminal justice system was not a big help to the situation. Instead, she said she has come to believe that incarceration is not the answer, especially for non-violent offenders who meet the criteria for a substance-use disorder.

“In fact, 68 percent of incarcerated people in jail meet the diagnostic criteria for a substance-use disorder,” she said. “There is an astonishing lack of treatment services in correctional facilities, especially local jails that rely on local taxpayer money as funding.”

Apperson said while incarceration cannot and should not always be avoided, the impact on the children of those incarcerated cannot be overlooked. A child that has one parent who is incarcerated has a 50 percent chance of being incarcerated themselves, while a child with two incarcerated parents has a 75 percent chance of being incarcerated.

Also, Apperson said she is aware of eight pregnant women that are currently incarcerated in the county jail.

The impact on the community is great, especially when considering the stigma attached to drug-use and addiction, she said, adding a community, it is important to have compassion and share kindness instead of  “tough love.”

Things that can help are the syringe exchange program, community access to narcan, access to treatment and safe injection facilities, she said.

“Yes, I said it,” Apperson said.

One mother offered her story about losing her daughter to addiction, and being left as a grandmother raising her grandchildren. Lori Keller said she found out three years ago that her daughter was using drugs, and moved her to another city to try to help. However, Keller said that it only took her daughter two weeks to find another way to get heroin. Later on, her daughter moved back in with her, and unbeknownst to Keller, she was using drugs in her house.

Her daughter functioned very well; got up in the morning, took care of her kids and went to work. However, it did get worse.

“She was incarcerated, and that’s when we started learning more about the heroin addiction,” Keller said. “I was scared to death for my daughter to get out of jail because at least when she was in jail she wasn’t using.”

She said her daughter got out of jail, and they spent three weeks together — the best they had in years. However, her daughter then passed away one day before her treatment evaluation.

“Now, I am part of a growing community in the U.S. where I am now a grandparent, and I am raising a 5-year-old and a 6-year-old,” Keller said.

She said she speaks about the issue because she wants to raise awareness, and believes there is hope.

Members of the Winged Ox Players also performed two scenes from their upcoming play, “Least Resistance,” written by Richard Olson-Walter. The play takes the stories surrounding heroin addiction and the people involved in the Jamestown area and brings them to life on the stage. The Winged Ox Players is a theater ministry from St. Luke’s Episcopal Church. For the panel, Director Steve M. Cobb and Olson-Walter introduced the actors, and performances were given by Adam Hughes, Matt Smith and Willow Fodor. Smith and Fodor presented a scene of grandparents faced with the reality of raising their grandchild due to their daughter being a heroin addict, while Hughes offered a harrowing scene in which a military veteran describes becoming addicted to prescription pills.

The play is scheduled to run at the end of April into the beginning of May in a theater that is yet to be determined.

Afterward, Kia Briggs, Mental Health Association executive director, spoke of her personal experience with heroin addiction, recovery and how she came to work in the recovery field. Briggs said at one point, all she thought about was death and how she could die.

She said she feels that everyone, no matter their position in life, can make a difference.

“There’s all different types of approaches,” Briggs said.

She offered a few tips for those wanting to help. Ask someone how you can help them, reframe language if someone is using stigmatizing language about addiction and she asked employers not to immediately turn away an application if someone has been incarcerated because often they are non-violent crimes.

Briggs said it is also important for parents to know that they are not failures because their children have faced addiction.

For more information on the AAUW, visit www.jamestown-ny.aauw.net. For more information on the Mental Health Association, visit www.mhachautauqua.org.

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