A Story Of Addiction And Recovery

By Laura Fitzgerald

Miami University journalism student

In 2009, EMT Dean Mason responded to a call in Hamilton, Ohio. He walked into a house at 4 a.m. A tall, lanky young man was sprawled on the couch, the only person left after a house party was scattered by a 911 call. Lips blue, he was deathly pale.

"He had no pulse," Mason says. "He was basically dead."

The other EMT’s started working on the man, trying to bring him back to life. Then Mason looked down and saw a pair of shoes.

"I’m like, 'That’s his shoes. Those are his shoes.' And I look and I said, 'That’s him,'" Mason says.

"Him" was Kyle Thompson, Mason's 19-year old step-son. Kyle overdosed on heroin the second time he tried it. The EMT’s gave Kyle naloxone, a drug that reverses the effects of a heroin overdose, and he came back to life. Mason borrowed a police officer’s phone to call Kyle's mother as Kyle walked to the ambulance.

"I was basically in shock," Mason says. "I couldn’t believe it. Well this isn’t happening. This can’t be happening."

Dean Mason met his wife and Kyle's mother, Jennifer Mason, at the hospital. While his parents suspected Kyle used drugs before, they didn’t suspect anything like heroin.

Kyle assured them it wasn’t going to happen again, Mason says. And yet, a few months later his parents entered him into the Center for Chemical Addictions Treatment in Cincinnati after finding him alone and sick with no food or heat in the place he was staying.

So began years of treatment, relapses, sober-living houses, jail, and eventually recovery.

Kyle’s Addiction

Kyle grew up in southwest Ohio, in a comfortable middle-class family. He liked baseball and basketball, driving ATV’s and playing outside.

His parents divorced when he was 11, and he switched school districts from Hamilton to Ross in seventh grade. He kept to himself for the first few years, and when he finally did make friends they were drug-using friends.

He tried his first drug when he was about 14 years old. His friend gave him Adderall so they could stay up all night playing Xbox on the weekends. He didn’t think anything of it then.

"It didn’t really even occur to me that I was using a drug at the time, it was 'Here take this pill and we’ll be up all night doing stuff,'" Kyle says.

Weed in high school turned to nerve pills then to cocaine and psychedelics after graduation. Then it was heroin.

Kyle became manipulative through his addiction. Once, Kyle lied to his mother to fund his habit, telling her he needed money for utilities. She wrote the check to his roommate.

"Deep down inside I was quite confident I just wrote a check for dope," Jennifer Mason says. "If your kid has a need they’ll play on that. When you’re a parent you want to help out."

He relapsed more than once. He was discharged from Serenity House in Cincinnati twice -- once successfully, once because he failed a drug test.

He stole money out of lockers when he worked at Morris Furniture. He stole a credit card, a felony that landed him in jail for six months.

The ups and downs of Kyle's addiction were hard on his family. And now his mother is working in the community to fight back.

Offering Help

Jennifer Mason is the EMS coordinator for Fort Hamilton Hospital. She also participates in Fort’s Opiate Recovery Taskforce (F.O.R.T).

While many police stations have started opiate response teams, Fort Hamilton is one of the few that has a team based out of a hospital. Mason goes out on Thursday mornings with Brian Wynn, a Hamilton city police officer, and Caleb Blevins, Medication Assisted Treatment Specialist (MAT) Coordinator/Addictions Counselor, to try to reach addicts where they can find them and offer them help.

Their morning starts with phone calls. Wynn and Mason call addicts' family members, the addicts themselves, friends, or anyone they can reach to find the addicts.

Most of the time, they never reach them.

"It’s dead-end after dead-end after dead-end a lot," Mason says.

The three leave in Mason’s car. Wynn doesn’t wear a uniform because he says it scares off some people. He isn’t there to arrest an anyone, he is there to help get them treatment. Legal issues come later, and even then, they can be reduced.

Sometimes, Wynn can even use the addicts to learn about the dealer.

"That’s the main goal, is to stop the dealers," Wynn says.

They stop at a clapboard house in a neighborhood lined with family homes first. Someone answers Wynn's knock, but not who they're looking for. Wynn tells them to contact him if the addict they're looking for comes by.

Plans form as they drive. Sometimes they don’t know exactly where they’re going. It could be an apartment, a house, a motel, a car, a sidewalk. The addresses given to the team are often wrong, old, or a place the addict goes just to get their mail, Wynn says.

Driving around, Mason spots a man stumbling down the sidewalk, playing obsessively with his hoodie strings. She's out of the car and asking if anyone in the neighborhood needs help with addiction before Wynn can get his car door open. The man says he doesn't know anyone.

"Sometimes they’ll say that when they have blood dripping from their veins they just injected," Mason says. "'I don’t have a problem.'"

The team points the car back toward the hospital after driving through almost every section of Hamilton, from family-owned homes to seedy motels.

"It’s just sad," Mason says. "The destruction."

A Community Responds

In the past two years, the number of overdose deaths has outnumbered the number of natural deaths in Butler County, according to the Butler County Coroner.

The CDC has ranked Ohio in the top five states for highest rates of overdose deaths per 100,000 people for 2014 and 2015.

Heroin is cheap and easy to get, while prescription pills are more expensive. Now, fentanyl, a dangerous synthetic opioid, is on the rise, and heroin is often laced with it, Mason says. So, every hit becomes a gamble.

"The problem is nobody knows what there’re getting. And the addicts know that. I know that I am at risk of overdosing and potentially dying and that is not enough to keep me from injecting this in my arm," Mason says.

And the problem of adulterated drugs isn't isolated to heroin.

Two people in Oxford died on March 25, both of suspected cocaine overdoses. A toxicology report has not been released yet, but Oxford police suspect the cocaine was laced with something more powerful.

Now, whole communities are fighting back.

The Butler County Opiate Task Force hosted a forum at Miami University's Hamilton campus where medical experts talked about addiction and treatment. Mothers talked about losing their children to the disease. Recovering addicts talked about how the disease consumed their life and their recovery.

Community members, medical professionals, and law enforcement framed addiction as a disease instead of as a criminal activity as they tried to remind the public of the people behind the statistics.

The state is also working to fight the epidemic.

Ohio legislators recently introduced a bill that would lower the maximum amount of prescription painkillers that could be prescribed for a single individual from 144 pills to 24 pills per three month period.

The over prescription of painkillers has been linked to the current opioid crisis.

Kyle’s Recovery

Kyle could have been a statistic. During his last relapse he knew he needed to get clean, but he couldn’t stop using.

[Learn more about the places Kyle has been with Google Maps]

"I could be sitting here telling myself that I shouldn’t be doing this or why am I doing this as I go to get it [drugs] or as I’m putting it in me," Kyle says.

Then Kyle was sentenced to jail for 60 days. It was long enough for him to begin his recovery using knowledge he'd gleaned during those earlier stays in treatment centers.

Now, at age 27, he is over six months clean. He currently lives at Greg’s Place, a sober-living community in Hamilton that keeps him from going back to an environment where drugs are readily available.

He works on his spirituality. He leads and attends 12-step meetings, a program designed to aid in recovery through sharing with others and seeking help from a higher power.

Wesley Leibrook, operations director of Greg’s Place, says Kyle is very helpful with new men that come into the house, encouraging them and taking them to meetings.

"He’s a good encourager, he doesn’t engage in any risky behaviors," Leibrook says.

Kyle has a job at Thyssenkrupp Bilstein, a shock manufacturer, as an assembler. The job gives him purpose and drive. He can fully join the company when he passes a hair follicle test in April.

"I see pride in him because he’s working, he’s earning money, he’s paid off his fines," his mother Jennifer Mason says.

Kyle says doesn't want to go back to what he was before, living in what he calls a hell on earth. But even if he never touches another drug again, his addiction will always be with him.

"Right now I have a choice that I can make every single day and that is to work on my recovery and work on me," Kyle says. "As soon as I put one drug in me that choice is out the window."

If you or a loved one are struggling with addiction, there are several numbers to call:

Photos: Jennifer Mason, Brian Wynn, and Caleb Blevins form the Fort Opiate Recovery Task Force. Their runs on Thursday mornings take them to all sections of Hamilton. They move from a street lined with family homes, to a motel popular with dealers and users, to the cracked sidewalks. Time in the car is spent calling, trying to reach addicts, and offering help. -- Photos by Laura Fitzgerald