Week after week, Iva Burks sees people in the grip of heroin addiction.
As director of Clallam County Health & Human Services, Burks has watched the drug, once considered a scourge of the inner city, infiltrate the North Olympic Peninsula. Clallam County has the state’s highest per capita death rate related to opiates, which include heroin.
Both Burks and Jefferson County Health Department public health manager Julia Danskin have watched demand rise at their syringe exchange programs, where intravenous drug users can obtain clean needles.
Not long ago, when Burks saw a young woman come to the Health Department, she thought this client was there for the WIC, or Women, Infants and Children nutrition program.
She was there for syringes, Burks soon found.
How do you keep going, when you’re a social worker with this close-up view of a deepening epidemic?
If you’re Burks, you stay focused on the possibility of recovery. Now and then, Burks learns of a former addict who got well. This is what sustains her.
Lacy Turner of Port Angeles and Ericka Larson of Sequim are two who started new lives.
A little over a year and a half ago, Turner’s veins had collapsed, so she was injecting heroin into her muscles.
She’d used the drug for a dozen years, ever since she was a grieving 19-year-old in Port Angeles.
The drug “numbed my pain,” she said. And Turner had suffered a lot.
In 2001, she lost her mother, Linda Turner, to suicide.
A motorcycle accident that left her with a fractured jaw contributed to her deep spiral downward.
Unable to hold a job, she racked up a string of felonies, crimes she committed for drug money.
“I robbed stores and people I knew,” she said.
“You’ll pretty much do anything to not get sick” from heroin withdrawal.
But Turner got a second chance in a place called Drug Court.
The program, offered in both Clallam and Jefferson counties, offers offenders a chance to go into treatment instead of prison.
Turner went to Genesis House in Seattle, for a six-month behavioral modification program.
There, Turner learned basic life skills, like how to work and how to have relationships with family and friends.
She and her fellow patients “grew up,” she said, by “learning skills our parents didn’t teach us.”
Back in Port Angeles, Turner has reconciled with the brother who had stopped speaking to her.
“When I got home from treatment, I reached out to him,” she said.
Now, Turner helps her brother care for his four children while raising her own baby daughter, Jordan.
She has been clean for over a year and a half now and credits Clallam’s Drug Court as the first push toward this new life.
“They really show you the way,” she said.
While the Peninsula has many outpatient drug treatment centers — Klallam Counseling in Port Angeles, Safe Harbor Recovery Center in Port Townsend among them — the area had no inpatient center until this fall.
In September, the Spokane-based American Behavioral Health Systems opened a 16-bed treatment and detox center at 825 E. Fifth St. in Port Angeles.
“The detox center here is going to help a lot of people,” Turner said.
She wants to go to college but doesn’t yet know what field of study she’ll choose. She volunteers with Klallam Counseling Service and spends time supporting other recovering addicts in treatment there.
It’s a new life she’s embarking on, and it feels great.
“I have bad days like everybody else,” Turner said. But “I’m super grateful.
“It’s a miracle I’m still alive.”
Larson, a close friend of Turner’s, is another young woman who has wrestled with addiction.
She lost the love of her life, Robert Norman, one summer day in 2006, when their Ford Explorer collided head-on with a Toyota 4Runner between Port Angeles and Sequim.
State Patrol troopers found the Explorer engulfed in flames. They could not save Norman.
Larson, the driver, was airlifted to Harborview Medical Center with severe leg injuries. Her two little girls, pulled from the wreckage, also survived.
Then, less than a year later, Larson’s older daughter, Emily, was diagnosed with cancer. She died in June 2007.
By this time, Larson was 28 — and dependent on the pain medication she’d been given after the wreck.
“I was manipulating the doctors . . . it got harder to get,” she recalled.
Then “a friend introduced me to heroin.”
It “shut my brain off; it took my pain away,” Larson said. “It was there when no one else was.”
By the time she got arrested, she was using a gram and a half a day, and had survived one overdose.
Ironically, her arrest was for shoplifting. In jail, however, it was clear that she was a candidate for Drug Court.
“Judge [Rick] Porter said, ‘You can take this opportunity and go into treatment.’ At first, I wanted to opt out,” Larson remembers.
Which is why she’s grateful now that she was kept in jail until the heroin left her system.
Ultimately, Larson chose inpatient treatment and was sent to a six-month program in Yakima.
She completed it July 3, then moved to Sequim, where she has found a new community.
In a 12-step program and in her outpatient treatment at Klallam Counseling, Larson has connected with people who walk beside her.
In recovery, she learned how to feel her feelings. She learned how to grieve, as she hadn’t allowed herself to do when she lost her husband and her daughter.
She also had to let go of her old friends, people she grew up with in Port Angeles. Leaving them behind was one of the hardest parts of getting clean.
But Larson, 36, is determined to stay healthy. Her surviving daughter, now 8, lives with her grandfather, and her 17-year-old son from a previous relationship lives with his father.
Reconciliation, Larson knows, could be a long time away.
“I left a lot of wreckage in my past. I can’t expect everyone to welcome me in just because I did a six-month treatment.
“I’m just now learning how to be a productive member of society . . . how to be a mom, how to be a friend.”
Her first anniversary of being drug-free was Nov. 7 — and it’s still a struggle at times.
But “I am fighting for my sobriety like I fought to stay high,” she said.
“And now I have people to turn to.”
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
