Spencer has felt like a god lately.

“I’ve lost three friends to heroin overdoses in the last eight months, but it doesn’t scare me. I feel like I can’t die and I’ve always felt that way when one of them goes,” said Spencer, 24.

What he mostly feels, when he gets news of another overdose, is anger.

“I’ve had to breathe for many people by doing CPR and that is something that sticks with me, but I’m more angry that they didn’t know their limits,” he said.

The lie of invincibility is just one of many the drug has whispered in his ears since he was 18 years old.

Unlike those who have sought the refuge of heroin after a supply of pain-killing opiates dried up at the doctor’s office, Spencer’s first dances with heroin came while doing the drug circuit as a student at McNary High School.

He started with marijuana but doesn’t believe it’s a gateway drug, instead it was one spoke on a wheel of changing tastes for certain students.

“It wasn’t like we moved from weed to other drugs, we just messed around a lot with a lot of different drugs. There were groups that smoked pot, some that drank and others that did meth and heroin. We would switch off every couple of weeks. We found what we liked and just stuck,” Spencer said. “Heroin isn’t even my drug of choice, it’s just the one that grabbed me by the balls and got me in trouble.”

Spencer’s mother, Beth, wasn’t overly concerned with Spencer’s use of marijuana as a teen, but her eyes grow wide and she expresses shock at learning his next stop on the circuit was methamphetamine.

“This whole experience has been a roller coaster and you just don’t let go,” Beth said.

Spencer said he started smoking pot out of desires to escape problems, but he became more addicted to the party scene and the people living in it. He met one acquaintance, former McNary student Brandon Crist, as a result.

“We had German class together and we were misfits. We hung around the same circle. We hung out and smoked pot a bunch together, but he was never like a best friend,” Spencer said.

In late September, Crist was found dead of an overdose in Salem. Spencer had seen him at a Salem methadone clinic mere hours before Crist took his lethal dose.

“He wanted me to get him something (heroin). And I knew it was the wrong place and wrong time. He tongued his medicine and spit it out to sell for money to buy heroin. Most of us have done something like that,” Spencer said. Tonguing medicine is the act of slipping pills under the tongue or in the cheek and pretending to swallow them.

The two started experimenting with heroin about the same time.

“It was introduced to me by someone coming up and telling me it was the new weed. They told me it had about the same effect, but it lasts a lot longer. It wasn’t introduced to me as the strongest painkiller. It was dumbed down to the level it didn’t seem scary,” Spencer said.

Within a couple of years, Spencer was shooting up every day. Realizing how far he’s fallen into the addiction appears to disappoint him.

“I remember telling myself I would never touch needles and I would never do heroin, specifically,” he said.

Ironically, Spencer said he wanted nothing to do with Crist when he was chasing the dragon, a common slang term for heroin use.

“I didn’t like the person he was when he was on heroin. I wouldn’t deal with him and I wouldn’t talk with him. His demeanor completely changed from being a nice, caring and giving person to someone who complained all the time and nothing was ever enough. Selfishness was all I saw,” Spencer said.

Spencer said he was unsurprised to learn of Crist’s death. On the other hand, Spencer’s sister, Talia, was devastated.

“I’d been watching Facebook posts since his parents told everyone he was missing and then one came up saying they’d found him dead. He was a cool dude who always had a big goofy grin on his face. He was always so nice and he was so excited to see people,” Talia said.

A large part of what’s unsettling to Talia is the ever-present fear that she’ll be the one to discover her brother dead.

“It sucks,” she said as she began to cry while recalling one incident. “There was one time specifically when I came home from school and I couldn’t find him anywhere. I thought he was dead. I finally found him asleep on the back porch. I get upset watching these people die because I don’t know when it is going to be him. “

Talia said she doesn’t understand how Spencer cannot see the path unfurling ahead of him. She’ll detach from Spencer as much as possible when he’s high on the heroin.

“We have a great time when he’s sober. We’ll go and eat sushi until we both look like we’re nine months pregnant and then go home and digest our food. I will latch onto those things as much as I can. As soon as it’s gone, I’m done with him because he becomes mean and selfish,” Talia said.

Spencer calls it getting a case of the “eff-its.”

“It makes me mean. Meth makes you bright and happy, but heroin brings the dark. They call it ‘dark’ for a reason. It brings out the darkness and the evil in people,” he said. “I honestly enjoy that. It’s almost like being possessed. You get a case of the eff-its and you don’t care about anything.”

The even darker side of the drug is that being high becomes the new normal for the addict.  Withdrawal symptoms include a harrowing mix of anxiety, muscle ache, insomnia, sweating, diarrhea and vomiting. And they can begin as soon as 12 hours after the last usage. Faced with going through that or staving it off with another high, many addicts choose the high.

More troubling for Spencer are the things he’s done to get that high. “It will make you do the worst things in the world to get it and then rationalize it,” he said. “My extremes are the things other people wouldn’t even dream of.”

Spencer said he’s sold heroin to friends to make money for his own habit, but claims that doing so was more an act of mercy.

“Any addict who sells to his friends isn’t doing it because he wants to make money, they’re doing it because they want to help their friends feel better,” he said.

Spencer has done time in jail for drug-related offenses and was headed back to county for a 60-day stint the day after being interviewed for failing to meet the terms of his probation – he was found in possession of a used needle. It will mean his second consecutive Thanksgiving dinner in a jailhouse cafeteria. He even confessed to using heroin earlier the day of our interview. He was a ball of manic energy as he talked, pulling at his sleeves and pants legs, scratching at itches that may or may not have been present.

He said he wanted to use the time in county to dry out, but he knows it’s a mixed bag of opportunities.

“You think about one of two things: how am I going to stay clean or how will I get away with it the next time? It’s really just a place to find better hook-ups,” he said.

Spencer sought treatment for his addiction twice, once at the behest of Talia and another, more successful time, at his own initiative. The latter came down to an option of treatment or jail and he opted for the former.

“I was clean for 90 days,” he said with a mixture of pride and remorse. “The problem was I was only in for 10 days for an addiction that’s lasted 10 years. As they were letting me out, the counselor told me I would have to go live at the Salvation Army, which is like telling someone to go live with the people they were selling dope to. Thank God I have good family that I can call.”

Even then Spencer said he knew he wasn’t through with the drugs.

“I started out doing a little bit of nitrous and that led to drinking and it led to a little bit of pot and that led to coke and on and on,” he said. Nitrous is nitrous oxide, an inhalant used to achieve a high.

Spencer, Talia and Beth all advocate for more recovery services instead of more prison time. More beds in halfway houses to avoid referrals to homeless shelters are just one part of the puzzle as they see it. An established needle exchange would also prevent some of the tangential complications that arrive from intravenous drug use. One of Spencer’s friends is dealing with outbreaks of hepatitis C as a result of using dirty needles.

While Beth has attended Narcotics Anonymous meetings to seek support, she’s found more solace in a Facebook group called The Addict’s Mother (TAM).

“NarcAnon was good, but always so sad. With TAM, it’s mothers looking to help one another even if it means going out to pick someone up off the streets who is ready to come home. It feels like they are having more of an impact,” Beth said. There are both national and statewide Facebook pages for TAM members.

Spencer said one of the issues he struggles with is judgment of others because changing hearts and minds on the issues of addicts and recovering addicts rapidly becomes politically charged.

“Accept that we’re not hurting other people, that we’re killing ourselves and we need help,” Spencer said. “Put us in programs that help us live better lives rather than jail where we just learn to hustle harder and more about how to get away with it.”

“People don’t realize that it’s not much different than needing dialysis for a kidney problem. Addiction is a disease that needs dialysis of information and love. You have to get that,” Talia added.

Spencer suggested only charging addicts with felonies if they fail to complete recovery programs as one possibility.

While there are many avenues yet to explore, Talia said personal choices are still at play for any addict.

“They have their own community and their only friends are people who are addicted or struggling to recover. I’ve always wanted to ship (Spencer) off to Mars or something where he can’t be around the same friends,” Talia said.

Over the course of an hour with the family, one thing rises to the fore. At their core, Spencer’s struggles are, at least in part, connected to identity. His best memory – of being in an apartment with several naked women, giant speakers and plates of drugs – is inherently tied to the drugs themselves. He readily admits having trouble with planning.

“I’ve never been able to make plans for more than the next day. I don’t remember ever wanting to do something or be something. I remember wanting to run my dad’s business and my dad’s business went down the toilet,” he said.

The struggle extends to Talia and Beth.

“I remember being the little hockey sister. He taught  me how to hit a puck in the garage. But I was like two feet tall then, I honestly don’t know if I made it up or who my brother is now,” said Talia, now 22.

Beth said she is still waiting for Spencer to come out the other end of his addictions.

“I’m waiting for when it’s all done, for when he’s through with this crap and moving on to do other stuff. I want him to find a job he likes and where he’s doing good things,” she said.

Despite all he’s been through so far, Spencer doesn’t have a firm grip on where he’ll be at the end of this 60-day stint in a cell.

“I still don’t know who I really am and that’s hard. I don’t know what I’ll do next year or if I’ll be alive. I didn’t think I would live to be 18, now I’m 24 and I still don’t know who I am or what to do. That’s why I’m going to jail tomorrow. Maybe getting locked up for a little while will clear my head,” he said.

Given his track record, it hardly seems like the ideal space for a journey of self-discovery, but it’s the best Spencer feels the system is offering him right now.

(Originally published in the Keizertimes Oct. 23, 2015)

Stories like this don’t get enough happy endings. This one was different. Two years after I met “Spencer” and his family, his mom called me and said there was now more to the story. The follow-up ran Nov. 14, 2017.

The light at the end: Keizer man clean and sober after speaking about heroin addiction

Curtis DeVoursney has felt more human lately.

That might seem like a small accomplishment but, when we met for the first time two years ago, Curtis was deep in the throes of heroin addiction. He had watched numerous friends and associates die of overdoses in the preceding months. At 24 years old, he was still standing and that made him feel invulnerable and godlike.

The day after we talked, he was reporting to jail for violating his last parole and even then the drug use didn’t stop.

“It’s difficult to remember because the amount of drugs I was on. I went to jail and continued using. I was smoking meth and smoking weed. Everything I wasn’t supposed to do,” Curtis said.

He was let out shortly before New Year’s Day 2016. He was staying with his father, but that came to an abrupt end. On New Year’s Eve he left his father’s house with the clothes on his back, a pair of shoes on his feet and another pair in his hand in search of drugs. He walked five miles into Salem in 30-degree weather in a last ditch effort and then began walking back to Keizer.

“It’s bad when you can’t get drug dealers to answer the phone. I couldn’t get any drugs because I had robbed every drug dealer I knew. I had burnt every bridge possible. The only options were going back to jail or to be homeless and walk the streets,” Curtis said.

He was walking on Cherry Avenue near his mother, Mary’s, home when he sent her a text message because she wasn’t picking up the phone. Curtis didn’t blame her.

Curtis told Mary he had no where to go. Mary asked if he was willing to go to treatment. Curtis said he would. The next time he called, Mary picked up the phone and told him to get to her house.

“I wasn’t going to put myself out, I’d been there and done that. Once he was here, Mom kicked in and I was trying to feed him and get him to take a shower. Then I told him he needed to call the treatment center. I didn’t call anyone,” Mary said.

Curtis made the call and detoxed on Mary’s couch while waiting to check in at Pacific Ridge: Residential Alcohol and Drug Treatment Center.

“It wasn’t hard to get in. They knew me and this time I knew what I wanted. I just knew anything was better than what I was doing. I didn’t know how to live life. I knew how to do narcotics and lie, cheat and steal. And, obviously, get arrested,” Curtis said.

He’d also gone through treatment before. He knew the things he was supposed to say and do, but not how to apply them to the way he lived. Part of the problem was he could never find someone to connect with at treatment centers.

Early attempts with treatment also left him feeling cynical about the process, he met with one counselor who told him he understood what Curtis was going through because the counselor had smoked pot.

“I asked him if he’d ever stuck a syringe in his neck and his mind was blown. I told him to shut the eff up,” Curtis said.

However, in a strange way, the encounter set him on the path he’s following now.

“From that day on, I knew that if I was able to get to the place I wanted to be, I would be able to tell people I did understand,” Curtis said.

After two weeks at Pacific Ridge, Curtis got permission to transfer to Oregon Trail Recovery (OTR) in Portland. His days were filled with mandatory group and individual therapy meetings at OTR and he was encouraged to find others he’d be willing to attend. He earned his first shot at a job in years. He worked in construction, then in a paint shop, then in fast food.

The program required him to do many things he found uncomfortable like find a sponsor he could be open and honest with, re-establish relationships with family and even pray. Custis’s hackles went up at the latter, but he gave in to that, too.

“I said I didn’t come here to pray and then my sponsor reminded me I said I was willing to go any lengths to get this. Once he said that, I knew I would go stand on my head in the corner for three hours if that’s what they told me to do,” Curtis said.

He soared in his recovery and in his responsibilities at work. Curtis was contemplating moving into fast food management when OTR hired him as a client support specialist, house manager and addiction interventionist. He’s been doing that for almost a year now and is approaching his second anniversary clean and sober.

“I am the front line of the treatment center. I live with the clients and have to lead as an example. I have a level of accountability that is unbelievable,” Curtis said. “My clients are either fresh off the street, fresh out of detox, fresh out of jail or fresh off of treatment.”

Curtis runs their group meeting, helps them with transportation and has even traveled to Tennessee and California to guide others through intervention training.

When his clients relapse, Curtis is the one to confiscate their drugs and paraphernalia. He is able to dispose of it without giving into temptation by keeping his focus on the needs of the clients.

“I put myself in their shoes knowing what it would have been like to have had someone step in and take away the thing that was killing me,” Curtis said.

Recently, he’s found himself buying more button-up shirts than he’s ever owned in his life. He keeps giving them away to new clients headed to job interviews.

“The professional part of it is still a challenge. What was really difficult was transitioning between the ways I talk on the street and how to talk in meetings,” he said. “When you put me in a situation with clinicians, they almost have to decipher my language.”

He knows the odds are against most of his clients, but his favorites are the ones with long criminal histories and lots of experience with drugs.

“That stuff fires me up. I live for watching these guys who come in filled with hatred and fear and anger and watching them turn into people who are happy and joyous and free. Living a life they didn’t know was possible,” Curtis said.

His experience with addiction has led to insights he now shares freely. Curtis laments the current way society chooses to deal with addicts, by tossing them in jails and and prisons.

“You’re punishing people for killing themselves. Why do you want to kick me when I’m down? If we could put people in treatment rather than prison, prisons wouldn’t be so full,” he said.

For those who encounter addiction among friends and loved ones, Curtis cautions against trying to relate when there isn’t enough common ground.

“Don’t act like you know what it feels like. If my clients have gone through something I haven’t gone through, I tell them that. I tell them I don’t understand that, but tell me what that is like. Come from a place of compassion and understanding and love,” he said.

Of all the changes in Curtis’ life over the past two years, this enthusiasm for other people and their needs – ones who arrive in his life as complete strangers – is the most stunning. When I met him in November 2016, Mary and his younger sister joined us. At one point in the conversation, his sister broke down crying when she talked about fears of being the one to find him dead of a heroin overdose. Unprompted, Curtis said he felt nothing about his sister’s tears any longer.

He sees more clearly now how he was able to be so callous.

“I had learned to disconnect myself. I had watched people die over and over. In my eyes other people were a liability. It was my way of protecting myself. If I showed emotion, it meant I was weak,” Curtis said. “When I was cleaning up my mess – and I’m still doing that – I was talking with her she told me all she wanted was for me to be there for her children. She has kids now and I’m there for them. I am able to be present in their lives and money can’t buy that.”

Mary said the changes are a complete 180-degree turn.

“What I know is that this is where he needs to be and his life up to now has led to this. It was hell living through it, but he’s giving back in amazing ways. His life was so dark and it’s not now,” Mary said.