After His Mom’s Overdose Death, a Heroin Addict Confronts Recovery in Cleveland

Nicholas DiCillo vividly recalls the day he fell in love with heroin. It’s at once a story that binds every moment in his life since then, seven years ago, and yet a story that he feels shouldn’t define who he is. This is not an easy line to draw in Northeast Ohio these days.

“That was the beginning of the end,” he says from inside his counselor’s white-walled office at Community Assessment Treatment Services (CATS) in Slavic Village. It’s April 18, nearly two months after he voluntarily checked in for another spin through rehab. He wanted to stay for three months, but funding is scarce for opiate addiction treatment across the nation, and that fact is no different in Cuyahoga County. There’s local money for court-ordered clients at rehab facilities, but the cash flow for voluntary clients is paltry. DiCillo is riding the dime of the Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services Board of Cuyahoga County. “They stripped me of those extra 30 days,” he says. He’d be checking out by the end of the month.

As DiCillo describes that first tryst with heroin, his voice is bold and confident. He’s wearing a T-shirt and gym shorts, leaning forward in a swiveling office chair, one leg resting across the other’s thigh. Back in 2009, he says, he was working at a downtown bar on West Sixth Street, and one of his friends told him that she was going to go buy some heroin. Would he like to try it?

DiCillo, 28, had a long track record of experimenting with drugs by that point. For years, even through the full-ride scholarship that took him to Northwestern University, he had been dabbling with just about anything that crossed his path. “You lay it on the table, and I wanted to try it,” he says.

He snorted his first dose of heroin and eyed his friend as she stuck a needle in her arm. “I watched her mainline it and watched this sort of metamorphosis and transition — from lucid to what looked like heaven,” DiCillo says. “I had a weird curiosity and fascination with that. So the next day I started IVing the drug.”

It was new to DiCillo in the moment but familiar territory in some ways. His father overdosed on heroin and died when DiCillo was just a few years old. His mother, Celeste, overdosed on a combination of heroin and benzodiazepines and died this past January. They had been supportive of one another, him and his mom, both in that unconditional sense of familial love but also in a codependent sense of trying to get by in a world where addiction drives every action.

For her, that story ended at her home in Cleveland, where DiCillo found her unresponsive body.

For him, that story became a sinking, deep depression. But he used the cataclysm of his mother’s fatal overdose to push him toward his own rehabilitation, toward life. “I had just enough hope and just enough strength and courage to pull myself out of the gutter and do something different,” DiCillo says. “Dare I say it, I think my mom had to die for me to live. That’s a really tough cross to bear, but I’m certainly going to honor her — but live for me — in my sobriety.”

Like many addicts approaching recovery, he tried going cold-turkey solo at first. When that didn’t work, he landed back at CATS, the treatment center on Broadway Avenue in Slavic Village, in February. He’d already been through those doors before, in 2012, and he needed that familiar setting to attempt to rebuild his life.

The opiate plague has ticked across America and hit every demographic without prejudice — urban, suburban; white, black, Hispanic, Asian; rich, poor; male, female — and it’s impossible to listen to the stories of addicts without being overwhelmed by a sense of how unsuspecting it all is. Each story is different, but they’re all the same. DiCillo, as he spins his life’s yarn in a plain room with four white walls, motivational posters breaking the visual static, sounds very much like you or someone you know. He was a college student once. A musician in his mid-20s. When he’d see an open swing set at a park, hell, he’d hit the swings for a spell and relive the childhood he never had. And then there were the drugs.

“Whether or not they were gateway drugs is almost inconsequential,” DiCillo says. He tells Scene that when he fell in love with heroin, the high felt like a “hug from God,” but then … “The fact of the matter is heroin took me to the depths of hell and beyond.”

***

It’s a narrative that no longer rests below the surface of Northeast Ohio. You can’t turn on the news without hearing a reporter lay out the latest overdose statistics. According to the coroner’s office, about 1.5 people die each day of opiate-related overdoses in Cuyahoga County. “Epidemic” is the word we use, for lack of a better term. It captures the scope, but not the complexities. Still, the body count is stunning and the brute force of the data is, at the very least, a conduit in beginning to describe the public health emergency.

The Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s office, for instance, began publishing spreadsheet-style press releases, alerting the community to the ongoing death toll. Eight people overdosed and died between March 16 and March 20. Twelve people overdosed and died between March 30 and April 4. And so on. White female, 26, Parma Heights. White male, 46, Cleveland. Hispanic male, 53, Cleveland.

String them together and, during the first four months of 2016 alone, 150 people in Cuyahoga County fatally overdosed on heroin, fentanyl or a combination of the two.

If that trend continues — getting worse before it gets better, as many predict — the county will end up with around 450 overdose deaths by year’s end. That’s compared to 194 in 2015, 198 in 2014, and 194 in 2013, according to the medical examiner’s data. In other words, more than twice as many deaths than last year. More than the last two years combined.

Cleveland’s problem is bad — horrible — but certainly not unique. Mid-sized markets like Cleveland and Columbus and Dayton grew desirable in the eyes of traffickers as doctors across the country built a culture of overzealous opiate prescriptions through the 1990s and 2000s. Heroin, as DiCillo puts it, is easy and cheap as hell to buy. Much easier than tracking down OxyContin in a pinch. The numbers only begin to tell the story. The real picture is a modern twist on a Norman Rockwell painting, the disease of addiction running rampant in America.

Aaron Marks works with the Heroin and Opioid Task Force led by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Ohio. He survived his own bout with heroin addiction more than a decade ago, and he’s not optimistic about the region’s prospects these days.

“I think we’re still at a point where this is going to continue to get worse before it gets better,” he tells Scene in an Ohio City cafe one morning. “I don’t want to sound defeated, but we’ve been working on it for three years and you see these numbers and it’s tough. I don’t think people realize how much is going on. You see the numbers and it’s kind of shocking, but once you take a step back and look at the scope of the problem, this is the public health crisis of the next generation. It’s the No. 1 cause of accidental death in the United States of America.”

Marks can’t help but zoom out for the aerial shot. This is bigger than imaginable, he says. Last month, the U.S. Congress passed the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, which President Barack Obama is expected to sign into law. The bill would shift federal drug policy away from punishment and toward treatment. The hope is that this is a bellwether for states and local governments’ handling of addicts. This, Marks says, is the tone that this country needs right now.

In Ohio, for instance, drug offenders comprise 27 percent of the state’s rising prison population. That image of the addict-inmate is a perpetual problem for folks like Marks and countless others who are trying to reroute public perception of the addiction problem in the U.S. Simply put, this isn’t being treated as a public health crisis. It’s something to be hidden, mocked, reduced to base criminal behavior.

Here’s a moment you’ll remember: Video footage of a man overdosing in a Fairview Park McDonald’s hit the local news networks in April. The woman he was with came over to his side of the table and applied a shot of naloxone up his nose. (Naloxone – brand name, Narcan – reverses overdoses and is available over the counter in Ohio.) The woman went on to overdose herself within an hour back at home. She lived. But the tone of the reports and their online comments — the simple framing of a moment in the life of a heroin addict in Northeast Ohio — further etched the narrative that addicts are criminals destined for jail or worse. That sort of fear isn’t helping the county’s case at this most harrowing juncture.

“This is the crisis of the generation. People don’t realize it, but it’s going to wipe us out,” Marks says. “It’s touching every aspect of society, and it’s going to wipe out an entire generation of people.”

Marks pauses a beat for emphasis before finishing his thought: “It’s going to kill so many people.”

***

These things don’t happen in a vacuum. Addiction touches all corners of a person’s life, including all the people who revolve around him or her. Karyn Faranda met DiCillo five or six years ago. He had wandered into her social circles, bringing with him a curiosity and a burgeoning heroin habit. The two of them knitted a fast friendship.

“You kind of couch-flop wherever somebody will let you,” Faranda says of the social flow in the junkie circuit. “He struck me as a very beautiful soul: very kind, very intelligent. That’s something I didn’t get a lot of while I was out there. People aren’t talking about the evolution of time and space and, you know, the meaning of life while shooting heroin. But Nick and I did.”

They were honest with each other about the nature of their addictions.

“We never fit in,” Faranda says over coffee on a recent Saturday afternoon. She speaks from behind big brown eyes heavy with stories, earrings dangling amid black locks and a blue patterned headband. “We had that need to want to see the world, to see more than shitty-ass Cleveland, Ohio. We were meant for better things, and we always knew it. However, we also knew our limitations because of what we were doing. And we shared in our sorrow of that — that there seemed no way out at that point.”

DiCillo was studying at Northwestern University before he returned to Cleveland in 2009. He describes a fairly typical college lifestyle: the rites of passage of beer-soaked parties by night, the ambitious classload by day. He was on a full-ride scholarship for music; DiCillo was an accomplished flautist. He offset his creativity with the rigors of the university’s acclaimed journalism program. He kept busy.

For all the opportunity and open paths ahead, he didn’t feel the sort of optimism and pride one might expect. He’d suffered from depression for years. And while prescription painkillers are one path to heroin, depression can be too.

“I went from cosmopolitan cultured collegiate — you like that alliteration? — to gutter junkie,” DiCillo says with a slight laugh. “When I moved here I bought a car for the first time and I moved out on my own. I had a great job. I freely gave it all away. Nothing was taken from me, you know what I mean? I gave it all away. I gave every bit of it away. But today I’m re-empowered to a certain degree, and I’m able to take ownership of my life again and slowly and surely rebuild and re-attain all of those things I so freely gave away.”

It took a few months after his first hit before DiCillo started getting dopesick. That’s the word for the physiological nightmare of heroin withdrawal, those creeping moments when you need the drug but don’t have any (or won’t give your body any). The symptoms are brutal: nausea, headaches, restlessness, sleeplessness, diarrhea, cold sweats, hot flashes, seizures, hallucinations, suicidal thoughts.

When you start getting dopesick, that’s when life takes a darker turn inward. The addiction is real and unrepentant at that point. And whether it’s a loving family, a good job or a nice house, heroin dwarfs the things that give life its structure. Nothing is taken, but everything is lost.

***

To hear the stories, it’s a very simple matter to pick up a bag of heroin in Cleveland. DiCillo and his friend, Bryan Stadtler, from the confines of a rehab clinic in Slavic Village, recount to Scene horrific stories of their respective addictions in Cleveland. It’s a simple process, yes, but this is not an easy path to walk. “It’s amazing how intricate it really is and how much ingenuity is required [to sustain a heroin habit],” DiCillo says.

Many dealers refer to the drug as “dog food” on the streets. With the right glint in your eye, all it takes is a knowing look in certain neighborhoods to score. Stadtler recalls trekking out to Union and 116th, Kinsman and 116th: “I never failed getting it there. There’s a Walgreen’s and Sunoco at Union and 116th. If you’re white and you’re sitting out there — I mean, me and my girlfriend, when we didn’t have money, we would sit in my car in the parking lot and we’d get up to a gram in an hour with people just handing us their phone numbers and free samples … ‘Here, here, here, here.'” The street version of a Trader Joe’s sample stand.

They’d hang out in the parking lot until they got enough free samples to get high. If the stuff was good, they’d keep the phone number and parlay the freebie into a future transaction. But anything beyond the next immediate high was of little concern, really.

Stadtler — six months clean when he first met with Scene, and now living in Parma — says his habit started eight years ago with prescription painkillers. Recreational use. “When they were around, I’d eat them,” he says. “Then I started searching for them. I would get sick if I didn’t have them.” He was taking Percocets and Vicodin. He soon moved on to eating 100-mg. fentanyl patches that he got from a friend. Then came heroin, about four years ago. (Ninety-four percent of respondents in a 2014 JAMA Psychiatry survey of people in treatment for opioid addiction said they chose to use heroin because prescription opioids were “far more expensive and harder to obtain.”)

“My friends and I used to sit in the parking lot of the Garden Valley housing projects on Kinsman at 2 a.m. for an hour, waiting for this dealer to show up,” DiCillo says, adding that that dealer has since died of an overdose. “If you were on the edge of the earth, we would go there. That was just what was required of our addiction.” Simple, but not easy.

There are certainly plenty of good reasons to question how we got here, how the problem got so out of hand. But DiCillo, from the depths of a love affair with heroin, preferred to debate the ontology of his and others’ addiction. There’s something deeper at work here, and it’s not something that can be rehabilitated in our current social and political systems. It’s the sort of conversation that Faranda, always keen to advocate for solutions, wishes this county engaged in more often. DiCillo, with trademark precision, lays out the facts of the matter, with no punches pulled.

“Even in spite of the increased consequences for drug dealers … I have many friends that are in prison right now for shooting up other friends,” DiCillo says. “They were charged with involuntary manslaughter. I mean, they’ve created and paved a totally new road to prosecute people, but it’s barely making a dent, because your addiction is so gripping and takes hold of you to such a frightening extent that none of that matters. That’s what people fail to realize: that it doesn’t matter what kind of laws you institute, what kind of consequences there are, how alarming the statistics are. None of that matters.”

There’s a certain editorial mission in government agencies and news media outlets publishing death statistics and the latest trends in dealers cutting their stuff with high-octane fentanyl. But, for instance, when a rash of overdoses blazes across a particular neighborhood, junkies in town are already well aware.

When DiCillo says none of that matters, he means it.

“I wanted to go find the dope that was the best, that people were dying from,” he says.

Stadtler adds: “I would look to see where somebody died from dope, and I’d say, ‘That must be good dope. I’m going to that neighborhood, get some of that dope. Must be pretty damn good dope if it’s killing people. Let’s go shoot some.'” Anecdotally, in heroin and opiate forums online, of which there are many, the same things are said. The shit that kills people is the shit people want. It’s antithetical to how non-users think users would react, but it’s the truth.

“People don’t realize that that’s where we are,” DiCillo says.

***

One time, DiCillo and a friend copped on 112th and Superior. This was in 2011, a few years into DiCillo’s heroin addiction. They never wanted to wait until they got home to shoot up, because they were often teetering on the edge of dopesickness, so they pulled onto a side street. Then they saw the cop car. As they turned down another street to get out of there — two white twentysomethings cruising around the East 110s late at night, mind you — the officer followed them.

He and his friend were charged with drug possession and possessing criminal tools. Within two months, he was assigned to Cuyahoga County Judge David Matia’s drug court program. A guilty plea granted him a shot at recovery: two and a half years under Matia’s supervision. Drug tests and treatment meetings. The structure is such that drug court clients will shed their felony charges if they can clean up and report to the judge each week. It’s a model that is being hailed as the hopeful middle path — threading the punitive and treatment-based philosophies — in battling the addiction epidemic. For DiCillo, it went well for a while.

But in March 2012, he tested positive for heroin. Before his next day in court, he fled. (This isn’t uncommon in drug courts around the country. But the consequences are harsh: jail time, sanctions, probably a handful of fresh charges.)

“That’s how I coped with things,” he says. “While on the run I had gotten involved with some people who I had been previously incarcerated with and previously in treatment with. We developed a swell idea to create money and commit crimes.” What transpired in the spring of 2012 harkens back to the “intricacy” of a sustained heroin addiction. DiCillo and three others began manufacturing payroll checks from Berea Beverage and Pickwick and Frolic. Free money, free drugs. “We’re really sophisticated criminals, us heroin addicts,” he says, tongue in cheek.

DiCillo and the others were arrested on the west side of Cleveland in July of that year. He was sentenced to 18 months in state prison on one count of forgery, a fifth-degree felony.

This is a fairly typical pattern in the throes of heroin addiction. More and more non-violent crimes like that are traced back to drugs in Northeast Ohio. Earlier this year, Lorain County Drug Task Force commander Dennis Cavanaugh told the Chronicle-Telegram that drug crimes in his county comprise an estimated 85 to 90 percent of the cases his officers were investigating. Property crimes, thefts, burglaries. “It doesn’t look like it’s getting better anytime soon,” he said at the time. It’s not.

Like DiCillo, Karyn Faranda tripped along the same hazardous path in life for years. She had been a lifelong drug user too, beginning with alcohol at 12. What followed was a parade of marijuana, acid, ecstasy, methamphetamines, cocaine — that last one garnering her a strong eight-year addiction — and whatever the hell else she could find.

“Anything you got, and more and more of it,” she says now, looking back. (Faranda has been clean for two years by the time we meet.)

For a few decades, though, heroin waited in the offing. Then she returned to Cleveland, where a new friend in rehab introduced her to dope.

“I always thought I would never try it because I knew I would love it,” Faranda says. “I knew it would be everything I thought it would be and more. And it was. I can’t say honestly that I don’t love the feeling of it. I just don’t love — if this makes sense — I don’t love the feeling of it that I get as a person when I’m using.

“It was exactly the substance that I needed,” Faranda continues. “It didn’t smell, it didn’t have this or that — I was like Superwoman on it. I could accomplish so much. I was better at work. I was better at sex. I was better at everything. I was unstoppable.” Within a month, Faranda was spending hundreds of dollars a week on heroin.

By that point, Faranda was only snorting the drug. She checked into the detox program at Rosary Hall downtown and, before long, skipped out with a few people she met there. Then she started shooting the stuff.

“Heroin was the love of my life,” Faranda says, echoing words that DiCillo used. “That was what I truly fell in love with, because it was the one thing that made me feel exactly how I thought God should create everybody.

“What I know now is that I didn’t feel shit. All I was doing was feeling better about myself and my issues and problems that others had with me and hurts that I had created for others. That all went away when my friend heroin was there. But it was also my worst nightmare, because if I didn’t have it, now I’m at the point where I can’t get out of bed without a shot. I couldn’t function anymore without a shot. It ain’t getting high anymore; it’s just getting well.”

***

On Feb. 15, DiCillo checked in at the detox program at Rosary Hall downtown. He summoned the strange sense of motivation that comes with hitting rock bottom, and he took another shot at sobriety. During the previous few weeks, he had mostly hid from the world. He tried a few cold-turkey detoxes, encamping in Painesville, where he knew no one. It wasn’t working.

At Rosary Hall, he didn’t sleep. (“I forced myself to endure that, because that’s just part of the process of getting sober as a heroin addict, an alcoholic, a benzo addict,” he says.) He moved into CATS in short order, trying to keep in mind his promise to himself: that he would honor his mother and live. He sought a 90-day stint, but the county only ponied up for 60 days. The money is tight, resources paling in comparison to need.

“There becomes that blurred line of helping people and getting paid,” DiCillo says of local government funding and treatment centers’ business models. But there was nowhere else to go, really. After his mother’s death in January, he was homeless. CATS had an open bed.

“I wanted to be dead right along with her, because I felt a part of my identity had died with her,” he says. “I didn’t know that I would ever be able to come back from that. Yeah, she was the one that cosigned my bullshit, but she was also the one who loved me unconditionally, and I never had to question that.”

He took the ghost of his mother’s support system and turned it into a dose of motivation, a source of something that would actually change things. He settled into a groove at CATS, despite his wariness of the whole situation. Two months clean, and his self-awareness was still looking around the corners of his psyche for the return of the monster.

“Don’t get me wrong: I’m never going to say that I’m never going to use again,” DiCillo says. “I don’t want to place that expectation on myself. But as long as I can make it to midnight tonight, I can start over again tomorrow. That’s how I’ve had to force myself to live. Do I want to use today? Absolutely. Do I want to run out the door and shove a needle in my arm? Absolutely. But right now the good outweighs what would come from that. At least for today, at least for the rest of today, I’m going to do my best to choose not to use, so I can lay my head down and do it all again tomorrow. I have to live like that if I’m going to be successful. That’s the only thing that will work. I’m taking baby steps, but I’ll tell you what: Each day is better than the previous one.”

We had plans to catch up with DiCillo again to hear about those days and that progress.

But on May 4, Scene received an email from Stadtler: “Hey man just giving you an update on Nicholas … He sadly passed away yesterday. He left CATS about a week ago and ended up overdosing last night.”

The police report fills in the details Stadtler couldn’t.

On the night of May 3, DiCillo picked up a bag of heroin on the east side. According to the report, he came back to a house on West 116th Street, where someone — a friend or an acquaintance — told him he could crash in the bedroom. After taking out the trash, that person returned to the bedroom 20 minutes later to find DiCillo slumped over in a chair with a needle lying on the floor next to him. The police were called. A medic arrived shortly after and performed CPR. It didn’t matter. DiCillo was pronounced dead at 1:47 a.m. on May 4.

“I’m absolutely horrified about dying,” DiCillo said in our last conversation. “I don’t want to die. I like what’s happening right now. I’m just now starting to like myself again. I have a whole lot more life to live. I have a whole lot more things that I want to do. I don’t want to die today, man. I don’t want to become another statistic. I don’t want to be another one of those people: ‘Oh, what a tragedy, he overdosed and died.'”

This is the modern epitaph for thousands in America. This is the thing that is going to kill so many people. This is the thing that killed Nicholas DiCillo.

This article appears in Jun 8-14, 2016.