Editor’s Note: Greenfield public health officials are considering establishing a needle exchange program as a way to alleviate some of the problems associated with heroin addiction. Here is a perspective of needle programs instituted in Hampshire and Hampden counties.
NORTHAMPTON — Every time a heroin user walks into the needle exchange clinics in Northampton and Holyoke, program director Liz Whynott sees a part of herself.
That’s because she was once, like them, a heroin addict, who relied on the program run by Tapestry Health to exchange dirty needles for clean ones, to seek counseling — and to stay healthy.
As a teenager who was shooting heroin as many as four times a day, Whynott’s trips to the Northampton clinic were her only refuge outside a chaotic life that spiraled downward shortly after graduating from Northampton High School in 2000.
A life that brought her almost overnight from the classrooms to apartment buildings in Holyoke, where she traveled alone to score bags of heroin. A life that saw friends and their friends die from overdoses. A life that devastated her family. A life she hated.
“I hated using, I hated the hustle, I hated having to find heroin every day, the cash,” said Whynott, who is now 33 and has been clean for 13 years this month. “It’s like a full-time job. I didn’t know what to do. I tried different things to stop it. I felt extremely lonely, extremely confused and my life was in chaos.”
Whynott says her story is not unlike those who frequent Tapestry Health’s needle exchange clinics. She has chosen to tell it for the first time publicly after a court ruling in March ordered Holyoke’s busy needle exchange clinic to cease distributing needles and syringes within 120 days, absent approval from the City Council.
The council had filed a lawsuit around the time the clinic opened in October 2012, pointing to language in a state law that requires such programs to receive “local approval,” which councilors believe should have included the city’s legislative body.
When Tapestry opened its needle exchange clinic in Holyoke, it had received unanimous approval by the Board of Health, mayor and police chief at the time, though not the council.
The Northampton needle exchange clinic opened in that city 17 years earlier and in the wake of a 1993 state law, which authorized the state Department of Public Health to permit up to 10 needle-exchange pilot programs in Massachusetts. The state-sponsored clinics, of which there are six, receive state Department of Public Health funding.
Amid the political controversy involving Holyoke’s needle exchange program, Whynott said the public must not lose sight of the clinic’s important work in educating the public, getting intravenous drug users help, testing for infectious diseases and providing clean needles and syringes that can help prevent HIV and Hepatitis C infection.
Whynott said the public perception that heroin users frequenting these clinics are somehow different from everyone else both saddens and angers her given the influential role needle exchanges played in her journey to get clean. It is partly why she kept her past drug addiction quiet these many years, even to many of her co-workers.
“That’s me,” she says of the approximately 2,000 intravenous drug users who received clean needles in Holyoke in the past year. “I imagine myself not having access to it and the damage it could have caused me.”
“I was one of the lucky ones because I didn’t die and I didn’t get HIV or Hep C,” she said in an interview at her office at 16 Center St. in downtown Northampton. “I know a lot of people around me who have died.”
As a teenager growing up in Northampton, Whynott said she experimented with drugs, including marijuana and alcohol, but like most youths her age, steered clear of heroin.
“It was always the drug you didn’t do,” Whynott recalled. “It was a line you didn’t cross.”
A self-described quiet kid who was well-liked by her teachers and did well in school, Whynott said there were no traumatic or out-of-the-ordinary events that drew her to heroin. She had a pretty good childhood, but something was missing in her life, she says.
A group of friends had begun using heroin which piqued her curiosity. One day, she decided she would try it at a friend’s house. She was 18 years old and taking a year off to work after graduating from high school.
“They were injecting and showed me how,” Whynott said. “I wasn’t scared. I was intrigued by it. I was excited.”
She also was immediately hooked.
“I tried it, and I loved it,” she said, describing that first sense of euphoria she felt after injecting the drug. “After that day, I did not stop obsessing about that drug until finally, I stopped using it. I never stopped thinking about it. I realized I was probably physically addicted two weeks later.”
Whynott said she bounced around from one job to the next as her addiction, which lasted two years, worsened. Her family stepped in to help.
It was Whynott’s older sister, Isha Contway, who first noticed changes in her sister during her visits back home in Northampton. During a holiday trip to New Hampshire to visit their father, Whynott, whose life was unraveling, eventually confided in Contway about her heroin use. At Contway’s urging, Whynott confessed to her father about her drug use on Christmas Day and then, to her mother back home.
“A lot of anger, a lot of sadness, a lot of not understanding why,” Whynott said of the reaction of her family, who brought her immediately to a detox center in Greenfield.
“It was awful just leaving her there with some old guy walking around with a bathrobe,” said Contway, who is 39 and lives in Billings, Mont. “It was just horrifying.”
“No one was angry with her,” she added. “We realized the reality of the situation.”
For Whynott, it was the first of many trips in and out of detox centers and recovery homes in the area. She left the area several times, to go to India and then New Mexico to live with her sister, but returned each time still battling her addiction.
She says her low point as a heroin user cannot be pegged to any one time or place, but to daily physical and mental torture, as she put it. All of her heroin came out of Holyoke, she said.
“I felt like I was selling my soul to the devil,” Whynott said, thinking back. “Feeling so alone, hating my life and what I was doing. That was the low point, that constant feeling, over and over again.”
Whynott says there was no single solution that helped her defeat her heroin addiction. Instead, it was a long process that included the counseling and support services of recovery programs, the friendships she established during that time and her own inner drive to get clean.
“It was the hardest part of my life, but it was also the most beautiful part of my life because it was a struggle,” she said. “I remember being like ‘I do not want to do this anymore.’”
Whynott says Tapestry’s needle exchange clinic in Northampton played no small role in where she is today.
“They were very influential in helping me get through that struggle,” Whynott said. “It really was the one place I could go into and not feel judged and anyone pressing me to do something I didn’t want to do.”
She credits the access she had to clean needles for keeping her healthy and free from infectious diseases and the counseling, educational and support services the needle exchange clinic offered her at the time.
“I needed that education, and I needed someone to get down to my level,” she said. “I identified with that. It was the only place I had a healthy connection. Thank goodness the needle exchange was there for me.”
Contway, a school psychologist, said she recognized that the needle exchange program was an important part of her sister’s recovery and like her sister has known others who have died from heroin use.
“I’ve thought a lot about it throughout my life and what it was that saved her and not so many others,” Contway said. “I know so many people are against (needle exchanges) and I get that. People are going to use regardless of what other people are thinking.”
After a long-term stay at the Arbor House on Pine Street in Holyoke where she developed some strong friendships with others recovering from drug addiction, Whynott began turning her life around. She went back to school, taking classes at Greenfield Community College while in the Beacon House, a recovery home for women in Greenfield.
She then moved to Boston where she continued her education at Suffolk University, before returning to the area to obtain a master’s degree in public health at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
She took a paid internship at Tapestry Health eight years ago, which led to a position as a reproductive health counselor in Amherst. She worked her way up to program director of the organization’s needle exchange programs, and played a key role in getting the Holyoke clinic off the ground in 2012.
Today, she is a passionate advocate of the overdose-reversing drug naloxone, commonly known as Narcan, conducting educational sessions on its use across the region.
At the time of her hiring, she had told no one at the Florence-based agency of her past life as a heroin addict, and it was a full six months before she confided in any of her co-workers about it at all. Some, like its CEO Cheryl Zoll, are finding out this week.
“Up until that point, nobody knew about my past unless they were part of it,” Whynott said.
Tim Purington, the agency’s director of harm reduction services, is among those who were aware of Whynott’s past struggle with drug addiction, and praised his co-worker for coming forward to share it so that others can learn from her experience and the role needle exchanges played in her recovery.
“I’m very, very proud of her for essentially coming out,” Purington said. “It’s part of her experience and it’s part of her experience as a leader in this field. She’s brilliant.”
When appropriate, Whynott said she sometimes shares her past as a heroin user with those who come to the clinic and receive counseling, which can help establish connections with intravenous drug users trying to get clean.
She said she has often thought about sharing her story with the wider public over the years, but shied away from it for various reasons, not least of which is the negative stereotypes of heroin addicts. She believes attention should have been brought to the opioid epidemic years ago.
“I’ve always found that what I’m afraid of is what I should do,” Whynott said. “I’m no different from anyone else that comes into the needle exchange.”