Forces of habit: Addiction tough to beat

Editor's note: Abuse of alcohol and drugs is a Utah epidemic. One out of 20 Utahns has a substance abuse problem needing treatment. The Deseret News examines addiction in a five-part series focused through the eyes of former and current addicts as they run the gantlet of political, social, economic and medical factors associated with those addictions.

Roger Ashworth smirks when asked about anti-drug slogans.

" 'Just say no.' 'Choose Life.' I didn't choose life, that's for sure," Ashworth says, briefly looking down as if he's watching his 19 years as an addict cross the clinic's vinyl floor. He pauses another second, thumbing his ring emblazoned with the initials CTR — "choose the right."

"It wasn't life; it was something else," he says, absentmindedly taking up the straw in the soda cup that was dry at least four sips ago. "My life became my drugs. It was like I was the drugs. That's all I did, that's all I wanted, that's all I was."

When he was arrested and jailed for shoplifting in 1997, Ashworth had been choosing the wrong for some time. He had a $700-a-day heroin and cocaine habit. He was underwriting it mostly by stealing expensive items like faucets and front door handles from home improvement stores, then trading them in at the customer service desk for money or vouchers. "It was pretty common to make $1,500 in three hours."

He shot seven years and who knows how much money up his arm before he stopped for good two years ago.

He first started getting high in school, still going to church on Sundays, "as normal and everyday as any kid." By the time he kicked, his need to not get sick far outweighed any desire to get high.

"It's a very different motivation just to keep well," says Ashworth, who at 38 stays that way on a daily dose of methadone. "At some point with everyone, the high flips over to needing the drug just not to get sick. Every day after that becomes a chase, and finally you just can't do it any more. You just wear out, and you stop, or else you die. But one way or the other, you stop."

Substance abuse is hardly a problem confined to festering crack houses or the shadows just off the State Street neon. It reaches into virtually every social, religious and economic group in the state. There are suburban moms addicted to pain pills, euphemistically called "Sandy candy," and working-class dads grappling with secret heroin habits.

There are children far too young to carry the monkey; there are grandparents too old to remember their last moment of clarity.

They come from good families. They come from bad ones, too.