Narratives on the 'War on Drugs'(From the Inside)

Opium of the People

The first time I experienced opiate withdrawal was my first day out of jail.

Here’s the story.

This was the only time my father got to meet his Grand Daughter. On the Right-My Oldest Brother Jeremy, who is passed away, on his lap is my niece, his daughter, Emma; In the Middle is Dad, Yes he has a Trach; And Far Left is me, at 20 years old.

I’d been taking them for years, in fact my first time taking a tab, short for Lortab, hydrocodone, I snagged it from my dad when I was 12. I told him later. What fun was it to get high if no one else knew it, right? I wouldn’t keep that philosophy later. In fact, I told him as an opening to ask him for another one, I was a very manipulative kid, especially to my father. He caved and gave me another. He would get high with me to keep me from going to Randy’s, my cousins, to get high because he—as if by some voodoo mind trick—prophesized that someone was going to get killed up there and “I’ll be damned if it’s gonna be my son!” He was right, Randy is serving a 25-year-sentence for murder, and it could’ve very well been me. It could’ve been any of us (I have a lot of writing to do about Randy that I can’t wait to get around to). He had another belief about this that after all I’ve learned, and all the addicts I’ve met who fell in this camp, it was everywhere how evil and terrible these drugs are, they tell kids that they will ruin their lives, then they experiment with some pot and realize, “Hey, this ain’t that bad. Well what else are they lying to us about?” They drink some alcohol, hmm… seems okay, then gradually upgrade to worse and stronger drugs, and at some point, their goose gets cooked and they’re full-on addicts and maybe if you told that kid the truth at the beginning maybe they wouldn’t have gone down this road, but I digress.

We took a lot of pills over the years, did a lot of meth, made a lot of meth, coke, smoked a lot of weed, but avoided withdrawal until my first day getting out of jail, as opposed to the norm, going through withdrawal from being in jail. For years after Dad got sick, he would get a month supply of Percocet, or oxycodone, of which we take most of and sell the rest in about 3 days, and because you have to take them every day for *seven days I never experienced this terrible, sick period. Until I was 18 years old.

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*In order to become physically sick from withdrawal on opiates, you must take them for 7-days straight.

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In fact, the day before my 18th birthday, I was let off of Probation for a Burglary I committed when I was 14. I turned of age the next day, March 1st. The way it works is the Department of Juvenile Justice can no longer supervise you after you turn 18, it’s decided then whether to turn you over to state supervision or release you, they released me.

Juvenile Probation was more intensive than anything the state has EVER put me through. If I missed school without a doctor’s note, it was a violation, I missed counseling, violation, I had to see my officer in office once a month, and that asshole would come to see me at school every Wednesday, where he would drug test me, and get this, a ‘marijuana’ counselor would pull me out of class every Tuesday for an hour, who would also drug test me for the last year and a half of this, and it drove me further and further into rebellion. The counselor put me on a psychiatric drug called Abilify, which I took once and then never again. It was believed by the probation office at that time Abilify showed up in a drug test as methamphetamine, I was court ordered to take the medicine, but refused to take it so I used to joke that I had to make sure I took methamphetamine so I could pass todays drug test…. Yea, they didn’t laugh either. So, anyways I had a pretty constant meth addiction with monthly oxy use.

The Apartment Complex where I grew up.

Our project housing apartment sat 2 blocks from the high school I attended so my apartment was it! All my friends—and I really had no enemies—would pile into the apartment when we would get out of school. I know I just painted a pretty grim picture of my upbringing, but my father was a really great man. Everybody loved him and not for any superficial or salacious reasons, we had nothing to offer anyone, we lived off a $734 a month disability check. Rent was $188, electric $100, and we treated every first of the month like we were rich. Three days later, not a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of.

All of my friends called him Daddy Wayne, and we all took care of him. Oh, I should probably explain now, my father was deathly ill. When I was 11, Dad went to the hospital for 2-months and after that his longest period not in the hospital was a month. He passed away 10-years-later. It’s crazy to me, the vast number of memories I have from those 10 years. Anyways, all my friends loved Dad, and he loved them. For most of them, he was the closest thing to a father-figure they had. When he cooked his specialties he would make enough for the whole neighborhood, everyone would come over and eat. It was a revolving door, friends in, friends out. We didn’t have money, not sure where the next meal might come from, but we were happy.

My father was a stand-up comedian in his own right. He had bits he would do. He had a deviated septum and could run a coat-hanger through it, and my friends would be getting stoned watching me show off on my guitar, especially if it was there first time coming over, he’d come walking through with a hanger coming out of his nose and say, “can I have a hit?” And they’d most of the time freak out and say, “Whoa! What the fuck is that?!” It was the best. He had a bit he’d tell about a hair-lipped girlfriend he had. If there was an open mic where we lived and a Joe Rogan Experience to tell us how to become a comedian, I could see an alternative timeline where he could’ve gotten sober, started going to meetings, and got into stand-up comedy. Maybe he’d still be with us, but from where we stood, opportunities like this were nil.

It didn’t make sense to the onlookers, the traffic of young people coming in and out, and eventually we started getting investigated for drug trafficking. What’s crazy is we never started until they started investigating us, three weekends-in-a-row of police raids and all of them finding is paraphernalia, and we decided, we might as well. It was a definite me plan. We started selling marijuana for, what we would call today, an undocumented Mexican drifter who claimed to have cousins in Florida from the Sinaloa Cartel. To us, we’d just call him Chris. That’s a story for another day. We still didn’t make a lot of money thanks to my smoking up all the profits on ice. A couple of controlled buys and a few raids later, there we were, both in jail.

There was a lot that led up to this that I plan on covering later. We finally ended up in the same cell about a month in. He was arrested on my 18th birthday when the cops showed up at my “Birthday Party” and found the meth my dealer had given me for my birthday, my dad told them it was his, he didn’t want me to end up a felon. He truly had such higher hopes for me than I had for myself, what neither of us knew however is I had already “sold to a confidential informant, within 1000 yards of a school” (my apartment) and those charges weren’t set to come out until 24 days later, therefore I was arrested 24 days after him. He got out due to his health three days before I went in. After about 2 months in there by myself, just getting by, my father was rearrested to answer for 6 more felony indictments of trafficking that were sitting on the back burner in Larue County, and they brought him in the cell with me. It was truly a bittersweet moment, obviously I didn’t want him in jail too but if he was this is exactly how I want it. I want him there with me. Regardless of the rathers, my hard time in the very corrupt Larue County Jail suddenly got much easier.

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The last time I had gotten to see my dad he was hospitalized while he was out, someone contacted the jail and told them that he was DYING AND MIGHT NOT MAKE IT THROUGH THE NIGHT! I was terrified, and because of this message, Mac Trumbo, the Larue County Jailer, made a decision to put me in shackles and take me to visit him. The only Deputy Jailer they had to take me was Homer Trumbo, who happened to be nearly blind, maybe drunk, about 85 years old, and hilarity ensued. The transport car was one of them Crown Vic’s that the police drove back then with zero markings that it was for the jail. Once he got me in the car, he looked back at me and said, I hope you can see cuz I’m blind as a bat, if you see me start to nod off or run off the road, kick the seat, or give me a hoot, get me back in the lines. I was scared to death once I realized he wasn’t joking. We were moving in that car, I don’t know how fast we were going, all I knew is it was too fast! I had a bruise on my knee from hitting that seat so many times trying to get his attention, then we got pulled over by Elizabethtown Police. They flipped on their lights and Homer said, is that for us? I looked around, we were the only one it could be, I said, I think so. So, we pulled over, the cop walked to the window, eyeballing me in a jumpsuit, they must’ve known the deal, I heard him say, Homer, is that you?

Homer grumbled something that sounded like a “Yes”

The officer said, Are you okay? Have you had your insulin?

He said, Yes, I’m doing fine. Gotta get this prisoner to Hardin Memorial to see his father before he expires.

He looks back at me and says, Sorry to hear that young man. Homer, how about this, we’ll give you an escort there.

He says, Nope, we’ll be fine.

He says, Okay, well we’re gonna do it anyways. Thank you, Homer. He looks back at me and says, Best of luck to ya.

That was the nicest interaction I had ever had with a police officer. I couldn’t believe it; I believed they were all bad, truly. The rest of the ride was uneventful, we were there in minutes. When we got to the hospital the police kept going when we turned in. So, my dad’s room was on the 3rd floor, there was some walking ahead but I was in leg shackles, I don’t know who reading this has ever worn them but they are the worst, you can only step as far as the chain reaches and they cut into your ankles, Homer tried to fix them and made them tighter so he went and grabbed a wheel chair. Mind you, he is so old and broke down, I should be pushing him, but we made it. Now the last I had been told was that my father was in intensive care, not conscious, and under a ventilator. Not only were none of those things true, but I also rolled in and he said, Oh shit! And he jumped to his feet. He was fine, perfectly fine. He was hospitalized only because his blood was too thin.

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This jail bit was the first time I had been away from my dad since I was 9. So, this was a great moment but there were real worries, he was still sick, and the on-call doctor at Larue County Jail, get this, was a fucking veterinarian for horses. Our doctor was a fucking horse doctor.

A friend I had made, Adam Simpson, God rest his soul, had been telling me that the doctor to go to here in Hodgenville to get any narcotics was Doctor Tron, I had never heard of him but a few people in the cell had. When they say jail is where you learn to be a better criminal, it’s true. It’s like a 24/7 Meeting of the Criminal Minds. When my father landed in the cell with us, it was understood by the horse doc that he wasn’t qualified enough to see him. So, they started sending him to see an outside doctor, guess who the outside doctor was…. Dr. Tron. So, this was long before narcotic medications were banned, back at this time, if you were prescribed it, they would have it on the med cart for you. So, when my dad comes back from the doctor and asks if anyone knows who doctor Tron is, we had been hearing about him, Dad, of course had already tried him for *tramadol’s and he said, he wrote them so easily, so the next time he asked for *Hydrocodone and *Ativan, to which Dr Tron replied, what milligram would you like and how many a day? The next time he asked for *Percocet 10s, The doctor said, I will write those for you, but you might prefer the hydrocodone because I cannot write refills on oxycodone (Percocet) because they are a higher schedule. So, he stayed with those.

Something else I should point out is Dad was still getting his disability check while in there, dropped on his books, and while $694 is barely enough to survive on the outside, you can live like a king with that much on the inside.

So, Dad was giving me 2 of his tabs every day and we started trading one a week to the *trustee in the hallway for enough tobacco to keep the whole cell smoking for a couple days.

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*Trustee-Inmate in the inmate work program that works specifically on the jail or in the jail.

*Ativan-Anxiety pill, similar to Xanax

*Hydrocodone-Pain pill, highly addictive, generic name for lortab, tab; Percocet-Brand name for oxycodone, Same acive ingredient as the relentlessly maligned-for-a-good-reason OxyContin.

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Then other people in the cell started to figure out, that all they needed to do was have a problem bad enough to see an outside doctor and they would go to doctor Tron. So, people started doing everything, faking blood pressure problems, seizures, kidney stones, one person popped his eardrum with a Q-Tip, I think that one was the worst. Pretty soon, half the cell was on Percocet’s and Xanax, legally. There was guards stealing pills off the pill carts, when my dad got out of jail half of his tabs and all of his Ativans magically disappeared. In fact, we were getting so many pills that there was a dispatch officer that was bringing us pounds of tobacco for Percocets. Before of course, he was fired for nodding off and missing 9/11 calls. I’m gonna write a piece about the corruption and rot of the Larue County Detention Center and Police sometime but I’m still gathering things, a whole lot that was known from living there was never reported but a whole lot was. Coming Soon.

By this time, I have gone from taking a few opiates once a month to taking them every single day for the last five months. Now it’s time for court. I didn’t believe for a second that I was getting out, in fact, I’d stopped considering it. I was happy, I had literally everything that I needed to get by outside of jail, inside. I didn’t have a girlfriend, so I didn’t need that. My Father and Best Friend are here with me, and I didn’t have a home waiting for me on the outside, and I had all the drugs I wanted on the inside.

My first plea bargain they offered was 7-years. I was ready to take that, it would keep me in here where I could keep an eye on dad and give me time to figure out where I would go, then they came with a zinger, a diversion with probation for 7 years, basically once I finished my probation the felony would be removed from my record. I couldn’t turn it down. In fact, the guys in the cell, including my father, wouldn’t let me. So, I took it, and seven days later I was released. With nowhere to go, $16 in my pocket, and wholly addicted to opiates.

24-hours-later, I would experience something, for the first time, that would plague me until I broke free of it, 11-years-later.

Thank you for reading!

Jordan Lee Canter, Editor-in-Chief, Declaration of warLiberty