By: Marisa Hooper, Contributor
Originally Published April 23, 2024
“He was probably around thirteen years old when it all began. Well, at least that is what I would consider the start,” says Dana, a mother of three whose sons have all served time in prison due to drug-related charges and have struggled with addiction for most of their lives. “It was the weed he was smoking…Yeah that was it…”
Her son, Liam, age 38, is the child most afflicted. Liam has been using illicit drugs from the time he was thirteen, when he was caught stuffing marijuana in his locker. His addiction escalated to the time where he was shooting heroin in his cousin’s room at eighteen and to when he was running around naked at a local Sheetz, blissfully unaware and high on meth. In tears, his mother cries out, “I feel hopeless for him. There is only so much I can do for him.”
In the world today, there are many more people, like Dana, who feel the hopelessness that drug-use has caused Altoona. Earlier this year, Altoona Mirror printed an article that featured the Blair County Coroner, Patricia Ross, who reported on the drug-related deaths in the county. “We are out of control. I think we are tremendously out of control,” exclaimed Ross when interviewed. Her report showed that in 2022, Blair County broke the record for drug-related deaths. Fox News and CNN have reportedly done investigations on the high rise of drug activity in Philadelphia, which pinpoints the eastern part of the state as the likely cause of the increased drug traffic and deaths in small-city Altoona.
Along with the increase of drug activity, the population of Altoona has been dropping over the past few decades. The city of Altoona used to be a huge railroad town, but as more of the railroads shut down and people lost their jobs, the more people abandoned the city. The people who have taken the places of these hard working railroaders are people partaking in the drug trade, which worsens each year. The traders see Altoona as a half-way point or pit-stop since Altoona is a more centralized location in the state of Pennsylvania.
The reports have been bleak in this past year especially, with Ross reporting that more than 130 overdose deaths have been investigated by her office in 2020 through the beginning of 2022. In her first year, Ross scanned her computer and found that she had investigated six overdose deaths in 1999. Even worse is that it is not mainly young people who are afflicted with addiction. Ross reveals from data that it is mainly people in their thirties, forties, and fifties who are reported with overdose deaths in 2021. This would make sense, since data has repeatedly shown that Millenials are the generation most affected by the drug epidemic.
The drug problem in Altoona is a widespread injury, inflicting its pain on all people, even the ones who are not shooting up. “My heart breaks for him ....I am up at night thinking about whether he is going to be dead in the morning,” an anguished Dana chokes out. Bystanders to this crisis experience the same helplessness from addiction. Family members and friends are hoping and waiting for a day of change that may never come. “I used to believe that one day he would actually get clean, but now….Oh, I hate to say it, but he’s too long gone.”
She pulls out albums and shows me photos of Liam. He was once a young boy with a goofy smile full of promise. Now, she scrolls through her phone to find an album titled
“Identification photos” with more than a dozen pictures of Liam’s head-to-toe tattoo-covered body. “I never know when I could use them. Especially when he runs off far from here and I can’t be there in an instant. It happened to all his friends, it could happen to him.” Dana had no idea that all her sons would end up suffering from addiction, and she certainly never thought Liam would be this afflicted.
Dana discussed how she would try and convince her son to attend rehab, but her attempts mean nothing without the cooperation of her son. “You can’t just force someone into rehab. They have to want to be there on their own accord. When you force someone to be there, they never stay.” When patients dealing with addiction are admitted into a rehabilitation center, they are allowed to sign out when they want to, even if they have not finished their detox period, therapy, and treatments. “With that in mind, did I really think Liam would stay? They told him that from the very start. So of course he wouldn’t.”
Dana’s efforts were more widespread than hospital stays. If Liam was not in rehab, Dana reported that he would be living under the 7th and 8th street bridges or in jail. “I would give him clothes when he was on the streets living under the bridges. I wanted to make sure he was warm and had some sort of clothes.” Yet whenever Liam was high, he would give all his clothes away to the other people experiencing homelessness, too high to realize that he needed those essentials. “I would drop over two hundred dollars on him in two hours to buy him supplies,” Dana describes. “But the moment he comes down from his high, he calls me (on the minute phone Dana bought for him) saying how he needs this or needs that. I ask him where the hell the stuff I bought him went, and he tells me that he is the Messiah and gave it to those in need.”
The worst part of the situation is that Dana could never take Liam into her home or give him money, even if she wanted to do so. Dana is a foster mom to Liam’s second child and she adopted Liam’s third child, whose biological mom died shortly after giving birth from a heroin overdose. All three of his children are to three different women, all of whom suffer from substance abuse themselves. Dana’s youngest child was only in the care of his mother for eight months before Dana had to take the baby. “I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if something had happened to my grandchild. I couldn’t trust his mom for a second. That’s the problem with addicts. They are unpredictable.”
Because Dana has one of Liam’s sons through the foster care system, she is not even allowed to have Liam near her house. If she refuses to abide by the rules, the child is taken from her custody and placed into a stranger’s home. “I knew the best thing for the baby was to adopt him. That way the foster care system couldn’t take him or even worse, he wouldn’t go back to his mom.” She thought one day that Liam would get better when he saw his children were being raised by someone else, but that desire died the moment he started using after a short stint of being clean.
In regards to giving him money, Dana refuses. “ I used to give him money all the time. Ten bucks here. Twenty dollars there.” Now Dana has learned her lesson. What she thought was food money, Liam uses for drugs. “The biggest amount I give him at a time now is two bucks.” According to Dana, two bucks is not enough to buy a hit, but five dollars is the golden ticket for abusers like Liam to purchase their high. “I don’t want to be the one who pays for his death,”
Dana shouts. “I used to get mad at my husband for giving him more than two dollars, and I would tell him that he would be to blame if Liam dies.”
It pains Dana when Liam is not himself. “I miss the boy I once knew. And I try telling myself that the baby I held in my arms many moons ago is still with me, but my counselor has explained to me that he is gone.” Liam treats Dana and the family horribly when he is using. From blaming Dana for his addiction, to loitering around her house, and to shouting at the top of his lungs at night screaming how he is the Messiah from the second coming, Liam’s behavior is making Dana debate whether she wants to sever ties with him for good. “The problem is that I will feel like a bad mother if I don’t try to help him. That’s what mothers do: we give and give and give, even if our children resist. We are always standing there, waiting behind them.”
Asking Dana to remember what made her son initially purchase marijuana, Dana could not answer. When asking Michelle Martellacci, a Telephonic Care Manager who works for
UPMC Health plan, how drug addiction starts in people, she gave me simple words as answers. “It’s there, it’s easy to get,” Martellacci plainly divulges. “It only takes one or two hits and then you're hooked ....you're craving it and it is all you think about.”
Most of the people Martellacci works with are the vulnerable that have both Medicaid and Medicare. To qualify for Medicare, patients have to be at least sixty-five years old or have a chronic medical condition which is mostly related to mental illness or substance abuse. For people to access medicaid, they have to have a low income. From Martellacci’s experience, she has seen a strong correlation with mental illness and substance abuse. “I see it everyday. I feel like people only know half of the problem going on today with drugs. People need to know more.” The “more” that Martellacci is talking about is how people with substance abuse disorders are more likely to be incarcerated and have a mental illness.
Incarceration is especially prominent in Blair County, where District Attorney Pete Weeks stated in an interview with the Altoona Mirror that his key focus for the drug problem in Altoona was putting gang leaders behind bars for a “very, very long time.” Long incarceration sentences are supported by the judicial system of Blair County with its method of keeping drug lords out of the picture for several decades. Despite the logic behind the long incarceration theory with drug ring leaders, this approach puts the dealers in state prisons, not the users. “Liam has only been to jail for ninety days. That was his longest prison sentence.” According to Dana, the jail time was not even from purchasing drugs, but from not appearing in court for public intoxication.
When asking Dana if she believes serving jail time will help Liam, she replies, “It keeps him off the streets. It gives him shelter. But it only makes him detox for a certain amount of time and then he gets released and he is back at it.” The National Institute on Drug Abuse agrees with people like Dana on their stance with drug use imprisonment. Dr. Nora Volkow expresses that “We have known for decades that addiction is a medical condition—a treatable brain disorder—not a character flaw or a form of social deviance. Yet, despite the overwhelming evidence supporting that position, drug addiction continues to be criminalized.
Blair County District Attorney Pete Weeks has explained, there has to be an “appropriate step toward” solving the drug crisis in the area. Perhaps if Altoona is not pursuing the strict jail time route, it needs to invest in the treatment plans for those with a substance abuse problem. Leaning on insight from Dr. Nora Volkow, Michelle Martellacci seconds her statement. “There
needs to be something done. In my assigned region, I make sure I call my patients every day to check in on them and see what they need.” Martellacci makes health risk assessment calls for her patients whenever they are discharged. Some of these patients are discharged from in-patient or out-paitent rehabilitation centers. “If they need to be referred to more therapy, I connect them with an agency. If they need a prescription, I reach out to their primary care physician. But I can only do so much. The rest is up to them.”
Mental illness has a huge impact on those with substance abuse. “There are so many of my patients with addictions that report having at least one mental health disorder. I have a feeling that one leads to another.” People with mental health disorders turn to drugs as an outlet. Some people are not provided with the proper treatment needed for their illness, so abusing substances is their coping mechanism. This is a sad reality that our area is now faced with today. The fact that people who need real treatment choose illicit drugs shows that people are desperate and unsure of where to seek help.
There is hope for this population. From hearing the story of other Altoona residents John and Miranda, there is proof that some people do recover. John started using drugs because he was anxious, so he was sold weed from a fellow classmate. “I started going downhill quickly from there,” John shares. “I feel like smoking only made [my anxiety] even worse. John then began to hang out with the wrong crowd. There, that group introduced him to meth and cocaine.
“I was in complete shock,” says Miranda, his mom. “John was such a fun-loving, goofy kid, but once he got into the hard stuff, I didn’t recognize him anymore.” The breaking point in the eyes of Miranda is when one of the users in his group beat him up. Hospitalized, Miranda knew that she needed to do something for her son. “He was going to fail his senior year if I didn’t do something.” Miranda took him out of school and placed him in an in-patient rehabilitation center. “He came back a little more like himself. I am sure John still struggles, but he is moving in the right direction. A positive one.”
“Receiving treatment certainly has helped me get my life back on track. Looking back on myself, it feels like I was throwing it away for a while. I know I still have a long road to recovery, but I will get there in time,” John concludes. Altoona just has to assure that its victims step foot on the long road to recovery as John mentions. As a society, no change can transpire unless there is work done to seek out those who are in the midst of a battle with addiction before they lose.
I certainly hope that one day Altoona will see the numbers it once saw with overdose deaths before the crisis began. These interviewees hold a special place in my heart, as Dana and Liam are my cousins and Miranda and Liam are close family friends. I know for sure that I am not the only one who has seen loved ones suffer at the hands of drugs. Not only for the sake of my family and friends, but for my community as a whole, we must work together to raise one another up from the woes of addiction.
Editor Note: The views and opinions expressed in this piece are solely the author’s. Publishing of any opinion piece does not represent endorsement of the piece by The Review staff or Saint Vincent College.