By SUZANNE ROOK, Senior Reporter
Posted: Friday, July 4, 2008 5:05 pm

When Brian imagines his future, he sees drugs.

At 13, he was smoking pot outside a downtown coffee shop and getting drunk at the other end of Division Street while carrying a backpack full of drugs. From there he turned to methamphetamine, cocaine, OxyContin and finally, heroin.

“I don’t know what else to do,” he said. “It’s what I’ve always done. I have this drive in me that says ‘Get high, get high, get high.’”

Brian has tried treatment, but nothing has worked for more than a few weeks. He has been ripped off by so-called friends, left a girlfriend for dead, been trailed by police and locked up.

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When he’s high, all Brian cares about is his next fix. And when he isn’t, he’s looking to score.

Brian grew up in Northfield, in what he says is a good family who loved him.

“I don’t have some sad story why I started using drugs,” he said.

Now in his mid-20s, Brian is struggling. He has been clean for a couple of months, but had to give up the prescription he takes for heroin withdrawals when he was tossed in jail for possession. He can’t eat or sleep. He’s anxious all the time, his hands shake and his heart races.

As he talks, he’s nearly emotionless. His eyes, which seem empty, reveal everything: they’re flat, lifeless, like a window into despair.

He knows he’s made a mountain of mistakes and wishes his life were different, but to him it is what it is. The drugs, he said, were stronger than he is.

After high school, he moved into his own place, making his living selling pot. His supply, he said, came from the Cities, where prices were often half as much as in town.

It took a while for police to catch up to him, but when they did, they found him with a trunk full of marijuana. He served less than three months, but never had to give up his heroin and OxyContin habit. The facility, he said, didn’t test for opiate use.

After his release he started selling heroin — anywhere from five to 10 grams a day, he said, just to support his three-gram-a-day habit.

At first he snorted the powder, but shooting it was cheaper and faster. “When you go to the hospital … they give you a shot, they don’t give you a pill,” he said.

He sold only to close friends, he said, though he regularly got calls from people he didn’t know, including high-schoolers. “When you start selling to kids you get arrested,” he said. “Not to mention they’ve got big-a** mouths.”




Brian said the cops caught up to him again last year, after following him and his friends nearly everywhere they went. Though he didn’t want to get caught, his need for drugs and his fear of withdrawal overrode common sense.

His friends, he says, have had varying degrees of success in getting away from drugs. Some are in jail. Some are clean, others still use.

“They’ll probably use ‘til they die with a needle in their arm and that’s cool with them just like it was cool with me,” he said. “I guess it wouldn’t be that bad, it’s easier than dealing with all this s***.”



— Suzanne Rook can be reached at srook@northfieldnews.com or 645-1113.