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SALT LAKE CITY — Substance abuse experts said the number of people seeking treatment for heroin addiction in Utah has been growing for seven years.
Many heroin addicts said the intense high is almost indescribable but that the drug comes with the high price of destroying families.
Derek Hinton and Niten Mondragon are both former heroin addicts, and they said they both were consumed by the isolating addiction.
"It totally takes you over," Mondragon said. "It's the best feeling in the world, but it brings the demon out inside of you."
"The physical withdrawals get to the point where you would do anything for it," Hinton said.
Hinton and Mondragon are both in Odyssey House treatment now and are recovering from their previous addiction. Their paths crossed only after spending years of being hooked, desperate, sick, and alone. Mondragon said his first heroin experience was smoking it at age 14.
"It's almost the new thing now, everyone is just doing heroin," Mondragon said. "And all my friends are still doing it, most of them."
The drug is cheap, easily accessible and popular, and experts say that people of all ages are scoring balloons of heroin at the expense of everything else.
Project Reality addiction expert, Joel Millard, said the drug is life sentence.
"It's a chronic disease — not an acute one," Millard said. "So once a person gets addicted for whatever reason, then that's a vulnerability they'll have for the rest of their life."
Experts say that was the case for actor, Phillip Seymour Hoffman. After going through rehab and becoming clean years prior, he succumbed to his addiction last weekend and was killed as a result. The drug systematically destroys families of the people using it.
"You lose trust. They lose faith in you sometimes and it creates a lot of problems in the family," Millard said.
"It really destroyed my family dynamics," Hinton said. "They lost trust in me. They lost faith in me. I know my mom would wonder if I was alive or dead and that makes me feel horrible looking back on it."
Both Hinton and Mondragon are fighting for their lives together in a friendship that could be key in their recovery. Experts say that one of the keys to recovery is healthy relationships, and that the sudden loss or lack of those kinds of friendships could be a sign of trouble.
