Addict tries to cope, turn her life around

Baby Gage. He's the motivation.

After half her life spent "runnin' and druggin,"' half her life on heroin, half her life spent chasing the dope man and all that comes with it, Corrinne Bradley is trying to turn her life around for Gage.

"I'm here trying to figure out what I'm doing and learning how to be a regular mom," Bradley says between sessions at Odyssey House, a drug-treatment center.

"I want to be a good person with goals, and I want to be a good mom," she says. "I want to have my children with me."

Gage is 3 months old. Bradley, 32, gets to see her baby an hour a week from her temporary home at the Salt Lake City treatment facility. Child-protection officials took the baby when he was born with heroin and methadone in his system; then doctors had to wean the infant off the powerful drug his mom is also using to taper her way off her opiate addiction.

Methadone has been Bradley's friend and foe for much of her adult life — and the past few years have been a whirlwind of drug use, crime and bad parenting, she says.

Her fourth child, Valerie, was born in March 2004. The baby girl was addicted to methadone and heroin, too, and child-protection officials took the baby and her older brother away that day. Bradley admits she used numerous drugs during that pregnancy. "Methadone, opiates, heroin, benzedrine, crack, methamphetamine, weed ... you name it, I was doing it," she says.

She was also working as a prostitute in Salt Lake City.

She'd get tested for other drugs once a month when she went to get her daily dose at the methadone clinic but says there really wasn't a penalty for a urinalysis that showed positive for drugs. "It just didn't matter that much.

"I knew I was pregnant. I knew I had to stop or I'd get caught, but I kept telling myself, 'I've got a couple more months. I've got a couple more months."'

She couldn't stop using. She wasn't worried about the baby's health, she says, only about getting caught with drugs in her system when she gave birth.

In fact three of Bradley's five children were born on methadone and other opiates.

But she went into treatment when she got out of the hospital after having Valerie back in 2004, and she eventually got all of the children back.