Stacie kept shooting up heroin, even after her teeth rotted in her mouth and her 5-foot-2 frame wasted away to 91 pounds.
She didn't stop, even after her husband got caught burglarizing a home for drug money.
"You would think my rock bottom would've been the day they came and took my kids away, but it wasn't. I still used after that," she said.
"Stacie" is in her mid-20s and graduated from Monroe High School. Now clean, she shared her story of addiction with The Monroe Times on the condition that her real name and some identifying details be withheld to protect herself and her children. Details of her story were verified through court documents and other sources.
Stacie is just one of many in the area who have become ensnared in the heroin trap. It's difficult to quantify how many heroin users are living in Green and Lafayette counties, but the problem has become so widespread that the Monroe Police Department's annual report describes heroin use in the area as reaching "epidemic proportions" in 2011.
And Stacie's fall into heroin abuse is jarringly typical: an introduction to prescription painkillers that eventually jumped to heroin, first by snorting and then by injection. It matches the stories of other users in the area, as told in criminal court or heard by cops on the street and drug counselors during therapy.
Back in 2009 when Stacie's husband introduced her to heroin, she didn't know what she was getting into.
"You never really heard of heroin addicts, you know what I mean? That was back in the '70s or whatever," she said. Besides, she'd been using prescription narcotic painkillers like Vicodin and Oxycontin recreationally for a while, and to her, the high was no different.
"Snorting heroin and snorting an Oxycontin is totally the same," she said. "The same exact high. It's the same, exactly the same."
But heroin is cheaper: "For one pill, you could spend $40 on an Oxycontin. For $40 of heroin, you're gonna get four bags of it."
It's also insidiously addictive. Stacie snorted heroin for the first time on a Friday. By Monday, she was a junkie.
'I couldn't figure out why I was sick'
When she first took a Vicodin, Stacie was bartending at the tavern her parents-in-law owned in an Illinois town near the Wisconsin border. Her drug use until then hadn't been very heavy or unusual.
"When I was a teenager, I drank and smoked weed. But I wouldn't say I was addicted to anything. Just occasional partying," she said. Cocaine was around, but "it was mainly a Friday night, a Saturday night when I was bartending all night and then had to get up the next morning with the kid."
She quit doing drugs when she got pregnant with her daughter at 22, she said, but started again soon after giving birth. Her mother-in-law was prescribed Vicodin, and gave Stacie one when she complained of a headache that Tylenol wasn't numbing. Stacie got high off it, and liked it.
It also numbed her to the stresses of living with her husband.
"He was not an easy person to get along with," she said. "He was abusive - verbally, emotionally, physically. His father was, too, to his mom."
Eventually the bar shut down, and Stacie and her husband moved to Freeport, where he found a job with a construction company.
"He came home one night and said that I had to give him and this guy he was working with a ride to Rockford. And I didn't ask, we just went. Well, he had bought heroin. And that night was the night I did it for the first time. We partied that weekend doing it," she said.
On Monday, she ached all over and felt nauseous.
"And I couldn't figure out why I was sick," she said. "I didn't know about heroin, really, you know? So I didn't know there was such a thing as being 'dope-sick'. If you don't have it, you get sick.
"I called my husband. He was at work. The guy that was working with him said that I was what's called 'dope-sick', that I had to go get some heroin and I'd feel better. And I did. I felt better.
"It was just from there, I started doing it every day."
'You could blow fire out of your mouth'
For the next year, Stacie didn't go more than a week or two without using. Some days she could only afford a $10 dime bag. One week she and her husband blew most of a $5,000 accident settlement on dope. Soon she was melting the powder with water in a spoon and injecting herself, usually alone in the bathroom so her kids wouldn't see.
"As soon as you inject it, you get this rush and this warm feeling throughout your whole body. You can feel it in the back of your throat. It feels like when you open your mouth, you could blow fire out of your mouth," she said.
"I remember the first time I ever shot up, it was the best feeling in the world. And it's true, you never ever get that feeling ever again. You're always chasing that first high."
Not only is heroin cheap and easy to find in Freeport, Rockford and Madison, Stacie added, narcotics in general were readily available to her, whether from friends with prescriptions, from dealers or straight from medical clinics.
"In Illinois, they have these pain clinics. Pretty much if you have an ID and you have $200 in cash, they give you narcotics," she said. "You say something's hurting, and they'll prescribe you a ridiculous amount of narcotics. And that's it. They'll send you on your way. No questions asked."
Meanwhile, her body was falling apart. Her relationship with her husband had disintegrated into a loveless cycle of scoring and getting high, nothing more. Neither Stacie or her husband could hold down a job. They scraped together money for drugs illicitly.
"Anything and everything he could do to get money, he would. I've done things that I shouldn't have done to get money," she said.
She wanted to get clean and tried several times to purge the habit, but she always returned, full of self-loathing.
"And usually the most horrible you feel about yourself is after you get high," she said. "Because why am I still doing this?"
One day on a drug run with their 4-year-old son in the car, Stacie, her husband and a friend were pulled over by Rockford police. The friend quickly swallowed the baggie of dope they'd just purchased, but an officer still found needles on her. The cops reported the couple to the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. At first, they couldn't be alone with their children. Then the agency took their son and baby daughter away entirely. The kids stayed in foster care.
Still, Stacie and her husband kept using.
"We thought we could beat (the system) and pass our drug tests by using someone else's pee," she said. "We just weren't doing what we were supposed to be doing."
'It just hit me'
In August 2010, Stacie finally hit bottom. Her husband was arrested on burglary charges. The police issued warrants for Stacie, too, since she was driving the getaway car. But she ran on them.
"I took off to Madison. I remember calling my mom, 'cause my mom lives up by Madison, and telling her I needed to borrow some money, and she said, 'That's fine, meet me by this gas station.' Well, she didn't come, the sheriff's department came. But they had nothing to hold me on.
"For some reason, it just hit me," said Stacie. Since she had started using heroin, her father had stopped talking to her. Her mother had tried to turn her in. Her children were in foster care, and her husband was in jail.
"I felt alone, very alone," she said.
That's when she decided to turn herself in. She drove back to her mother-in-law's house in Freeport, asked her to call the Stephenson County Sheriff's Department, and then shot up her last bag of heroin. It was Aug. 15, 2010.
Stacie was still high when the deputies arrived. She detoxed in jail, cold turkey.
"It feels like you're dying. Your whole body hurts. You can't eat. You're throwing up. You can't move. Sweating, shaking," she recalled. "It took probably months before I could sleep a full night."
'I have to be stable for them'
Stacie lives now in an apartment in Green County with her father and younger siblings and works full-time in a restaurant. She went through drug counseling with Green County Human Services, and recently got her son and daughter back.
She looks healthy now, clear-eyed and well-rested, but older than she really is. Her smile is gapped where a dentist pulled rotting teeth.
Her husband is doing time in an Illinois prison. She filed for a divorce from him at the end of February, but she's not dating anyone.
"I don't have time. Don't want to," she said with a shrug.
All she cares about now is her kids. They give her the resolve to stay clean.
"I lost them once, and I don't ever want to ever lose them again," she said. "Now that I got 'em back, I'm the only thing that they have. I have to be stable for them."
Coming Thursday: Fighting heroin is a community effort
She didn't stop, even after her husband got caught burglarizing a home for drug money.
"You would think my rock bottom would've been the day they came and took my kids away, but it wasn't. I still used after that," she said.
"Stacie" is in her mid-20s and graduated from Monroe High School. Now clean, she shared her story of addiction with The Monroe Times on the condition that her real name and some identifying details be withheld to protect herself and her children. Details of her story were verified through court documents and other sources.
Stacie is just one of many in the area who have become ensnared in the heroin trap. It's difficult to quantify how many heroin users are living in Green and Lafayette counties, but the problem has become so widespread that the Monroe Police Department's annual report describes heroin use in the area as reaching "epidemic proportions" in 2011.
And Stacie's fall into heroin abuse is jarringly typical: an introduction to prescription painkillers that eventually jumped to heroin, first by snorting and then by injection. It matches the stories of other users in the area, as told in criminal court or heard by cops on the street and drug counselors during therapy.
Back in 2009 when Stacie's husband introduced her to heroin, she didn't know what she was getting into.
"You never really heard of heroin addicts, you know what I mean? That was back in the '70s or whatever," she said. Besides, she'd been using prescription narcotic painkillers like Vicodin and Oxycontin recreationally for a while, and to her, the high was no different.
"Snorting heroin and snorting an Oxycontin is totally the same," she said. "The same exact high. It's the same, exactly the same."
But heroin is cheaper: "For one pill, you could spend $40 on an Oxycontin. For $40 of heroin, you're gonna get four bags of it."
It's also insidiously addictive. Stacie snorted heroin for the first time on a Friday. By Monday, she was a junkie.
'I couldn't figure out why I was sick'
When she first took a Vicodin, Stacie was bartending at the tavern her parents-in-law owned in an Illinois town near the Wisconsin border. Her drug use until then hadn't been very heavy or unusual.
"When I was a teenager, I drank and smoked weed. But I wouldn't say I was addicted to anything. Just occasional partying," she said. Cocaine was around, but "it was mainly a Friday night, a Saturday night when I was bartending all night and then had to get up the next morning with the kid."
She quit doing drugs when she got pregnant with her daughter at 22, she said, but started again soon after giving birth. Her mother-in-law was prescribed Vicodin, and gave Stacie one when she complained of a headache that Tylenol wasn't numbing. Stacie got high off it, and liked it.
It also numbed her to the stresses of living with her husband.
"He was not an easy person to get along with," she said. "He was abusive - verbally, emotionally, physically. His father was, too, to his mom."
Eventually the bar shut down, and Stacie and her husband moved to Freeport, where he found a job with a construction company.
"He came home one night and said that I had to give him and this guy he was working with a ride to Rockford. And I didn't ask, we just went. Well, he had bought heroin. And that night was the night I did it for the first time. We partied that weekend doing it," she said.
On Monday, she ached all over and felt nauseous.
"And I couldn't figure out why I was sick," she said. "I didn't know about heroin, really, you know? So I didn't know there was such a thing as being 'dope-sick'. If you don't have it, you get sick.
"I called my husband. He was at work. The guy that was working with him said that I was what's called 'dope-sick', that I had to go get some heroin and I'd feel better. And I did. I felt better.
"It was just from there, I started doing it every day."
'You could blow fire out of your mouth'
For the next year, Stacie didn't go more than a week or two without using. Some days she could only afford a $10 dime bag. One week she and her husband blew most of a $5,000 accident settlement on dope. Soon she was melting the powder with water in a spoon and injecting herself, usually alone in the bathroom so her kids wouldn't see.
"As soon as you inject it, you get this rush and this warm feeling throughout your whole body. You can feel it in the back of your throat. It feels like when you open your mouth, you could blow fire out of your mouth," she said.
"I remember the first time I ever shot up, it was the best feeling in the world. And it's true, you never ever get that feeling ever again. You're always chasing that first high."
Not only is heroin cheap and easy to find in Freeport, Rockford and Madison, Stacie added, narcotics in general were readily available to her, whether from friends with prescriptions, from dealers or straight from medical clinics.
"In Illinois, they have these pain clinics. Pretty much if you have an ID and you have $200 in cash, they give you narcotics," she said. "You say something's hurting, and they'll prescribe you a ridiculous amount of narcotics. And that's it. They'll send you on your way. No questions asked."
Meanwhile, her body was falling apart. Her relationship with her husband had disintegrated into a loveless cycle of scoring and getting high, nothing more. Neither Stacie or her husband could hold down a job. They scraped together money for drugs illicitly.
"Anything and everything he could do to get money, he would. I've done things that I shouldn't have done to get money," she said.
She wanted to get clean and tried several times to purge the habit, but she always returned, full of self-loathing.
"And usually the most horrible you feel about yourself is after you get high," she said. "Because why am I still doing this?"
One day on a drug run with their 4-year-old son in the car, Stacie, her husband and a friend were pulled over by Rockford police. The friend quickly swallowed the baggie of dope they'd just purchased, but an officer still found needles on her. The cops reported the couple to the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. At first, they couldn't be alone with their children. Then the agency took their son and baby daughter away entirely. The kids stayed in foster care.
Still, Stacie and her husband kept using.
"We thought we could beat (the system) and pass our drug tests by using someone else's pee," she said. "We just weren't doing what we were supposed to be doing."
'It just hit me'
In August 2010, Stacie finally hit bottom. Her husband was arrested on burglary charges. The police issued warrants for Stacie, too, since she was driving the getaway car. But she ran on them.
"I took off to Madison. I remember calling my mom, 'cause my mom lives up by Madison, and telling her I needed to borrow some money, and she said, 'That's fine, meet me by this gas station.' Well, she didn't come, the sheriff's department came. But they had nothing to hold me on.
"For some reason, it just hit me," said Stacie. Since she had started using heroin, her father had stopped talking to her. Her mother had tried to turn her in. Her children were in foster care, and her husband was in jail.
"I felt alone, very alone," she said.
That's when she decided to turn herself in. She drove back to her mother-in-law's house in Freeport, asked her to call the Stephenson County Sheriff's Department, and then shot up her last bag of heroin. It was Aug. 15, 2010.
Stacie was still high when the deputies arrived. She detoxed in jail, cold turkey.
"It feels like you're dying. Your whole body hurts. You can't eat. You're throwing up. You can't move. Sweating, shaking," she recalled. "It took probably months before I could sleep a full night."
'I have to be stable for them'
Stacie lives now in an apartment in Green County with her father and younger siblings and works full-time in a restaurant. She went through drug counseling with Green County Human Services, and recently got her son and daughter back.
She looks healthy now, clear-eyed and well-rested, but older than she really is. Her smile is gapped where a dentist pulled rotting teeth.
Her husband is doing time in an Illinois prison. She filed for a divorce from him at the end of February, but she's not dating anyone.
"I don't have time. Don't want to," she said with a shrug.
All she cares about now is her kids. They give her the resolve to stay clean.
"I lost them once, and I don't ever want to ever lose them again," she said. "Now that I got 'em back, I'm the only thing that they have. I have to be stable for them."
Coming Thursday: Fighting heroin is a community effort