The Road to Recovery

By Andrew Bugel, Tyler Trill

Life is good for Jessika Easterling these day. The 35-year-old Ravenna resident is a mother to a healthy 2-year-old boy, has a good job and has been happily married for a little over three years. You wouldn’t know from talking to her that her happy life was once a life of hell.

Easterling is recovering from an addiction to heroin and other opiates. It’s an addiction that is rocketing through Portage County and all parts of Ohio as we speak. It’s a battle she has been fighting for the better half of the last six years, one that she can happily say she has control of.
“I was a big partier, especially back in high school,” Easterling said. “I did a lot of different drugs, I smoked and I drank. The trouble with heroin really began when I started dating someone who was addicted to it.”
Easterling says she met a guy who had an issue with the drug and at the beginning of the relationship, all seemed to be going well.

“I decided to just try it,” Easterling said. “I figured since I had already done so much, I was in control. I felt that I could handle something like that. I never expected it to get to the point that it did.”

Drug Taking Over

Easterling says her dependency on the drug started to spiral out of control pretty quickly.

“I know that we started using together in 2009 and after the first few days of using it, I was already having physical withdrawal symptoms,” Easterling said. “I never injected myself because I was scared of that but it was something I became very dependent on. I would get sick to my stomach if I wasn’t using. We developed a happy almost instantaneously and I was using every single day. Then I started selling it. I think I was up to doing about a couple grams a day. I’m just very lucky to be alive after doing it so often for so long.”

Easterling said the selling habit was something that had been going on for a long time. She was very comfortable with it and had been doing it for over a year before she was caught.

“Our habit at the time was so bad that we needed the money to get more heroin,” Easterling said. “We needed all the customers that we could get to make the most money we could to supply our habits.”

Easterling says her and her boyfriend met this guy who wanted to buy off of them. It turns out the guy was an undercover cop.

“We didn’t expect anything because the cop had a truck that looked similar to someone else’s that we were selling to,” Easterling said. “We had no idea and this cop was recording us and it was really bad. I ended up with like 14 counts and it was just so bad. Being addicted that badly to heroin was literally a daily nightmare. It was awful. I would wake up and it was all I needed.”

At the time of her arrest, Easterling was selling to somewhere around 20 customers. She faced 21 years in prison since she had a prior felony at the time. Easterling was also charged with having a gun in the house that wasn’t registered. It was her boyfriend’s.

“It was super scary knowing I could be in prison for a very long time,” Easterling said. “I ended up only getting about five and half months in prison with house arrest and multiple drug tests a week. It was very difficult but I am in a better place now than I was before. I qualified for an intensive prison program that really cut my time in prison down and I was lucky not to receive the full sentence.”

Road to Recovery

Bradford Price is an addiction counselor at Copley Counseling Center and also works at Townhall II in Kent. He has been counseling individuals since 1981.

“What addicts are addicted to is the effect of the drug, basically what is generated,” Price said. “You’re going to feel miserable when you’re detoxing and withdrawing from the drugs, but you will not die or anything like that. Once that process is over,it’s a matter of the person realizing what has happened in their life and how the drug has affected them.”

“I came off the heroin addiction in prison,” Easterling said. “It was hard. I wouldn’t be able to walk somedays. I was throwing up every day. I didn’t feel like myself again for many months.”

Easterling said it wasn’t a perfect road to recovery after prison.

“I’d like to say that I never used again, but it didn’t go down like that,” Easterling said. “I had some contact with my ex-boyfriend and I kept using but it was a lot less than before.”

Easterling said she made a decision she wanted to quit. She did it in a slow process, something she said was the only way she would be able to fully recover.

“I couldn’t do the AA meetings,” Easterling said. “It wasn’t for me. It didn’t work. I would drink a lot after. I decided to use less and less each month. I may use twice a month and then it would be once a month until it got to the point that I stopped completely. It slowly rolled out.”

Price says it’s motivation that will be the biggest factor in change.

“I have a client who is going through the process of recovery and he is realizing just how much he put time off from being with his children,” Price said. “He realized it was wrong. It generated change in him and he has been putting the pieces back together. It varies from person to person.”

Easterling stopped using in 2012. She met a man who she quickly fell in love with that was her main support, along with her child, Ethan.

“I do everything I can to keep my mind off the drug now,” Easterling said. “I have a job, I have a family. I have hobbies now and it keeps me occupied. I’ve always had a good support system and that was really important. Keeping your head in the game and focusing on quitting is the most important thing. Triggers are everywhere.”

Urges to Use

“I think about using all the time,” Easterling said. “It triggers me when I take other medicine, but I have to be careful. I have dreams about it. My ex still calls me asking me to get ahold of our old dealer and it runs through my mind how fun it would be to use again, but I don’t. I’m in a better place.”

Easterling says she has lost a lot of friends to the drug.

“A lot of my really good friends are gone because of heroin,” Easterling said. “I feel like I’m lucky enough and educated enough to want to be clean. People are struggling because they don’t know how to quit. It’s devastating. I would tell people who are using that if they want to quit, they really can. I learned how to stop and I know others can too.”