A beautiful young woman, with long blond hair and blue eyes like crystal orbs, Joey had graduated from Hidden Valley High in 2007, the same year as Tess. She excelled in art and music, and once had a three-year string of near-daily Goodwill shopping fueled by a personal style rule that every accessory or piece of clothing had to match the color she’d chosen that day—if her outfit was green, then her earrings, shoes, and tights had to all match, down to her rings. Joey liked to share her opinions on everything from Freddie Mercury to eye makeup to the best dance moves when making a Facebook workout video to the Prince song “When Doves Cry.”
“She’s the funniest person I’ve ever known; she’s literally a ball of fire,” said her best friend, Emma Hurley. A boyfriend had introduced Joey to pills in high school, then heroin shortly after that. They were part of the Hidden Valley group of early opioid users that included the late Scott Roth and Janine’s son Bobby. Over the next decade, Emma would lose three close friends and ten acquaintances to opioid overdose. A friend of many of the Hidden Valley users told me he no longer asks what happened when people phone him to say that another friend has passed. “I already know,” he tells them.
“Hidden Valley was where it all started with my friends,” Emma said. “I just happened to say no to the harder stuff. You’d be at a party, and it was, ‘Hey, try this, have a beer, pills, cocaine, anything you could use to get a little bit higher.’” She separated herself from the group when IV heroin became part of the mix, she said.
“It was just overwhelming, the ups and downs of clean Joey and relapsed Joey,” Emma said, recalling that supposedly sober Joey had talked her into sharing an apartment in 2013, and swore that she no longer used heroin. “I wouldn’t have let her move in with me if I had known,” Emma said. “Eventually, she’d do it [heroin] right in front of me; it was tough.” They parted ways over a missing six dollars, and for six months they didn’t speak.
“This too shall pass,” Joey had written around that time on her Facebook page. “It might pass like a kidney stone, but it will pass.”
Joey was not only still using, but she had also allowed an abusive drug dealer and the dealer’s girlfriend to move in with her in exchange for drugs, unbeknownst to her dad. “She was ashamed of how low she’d gotten herself in her own eyes,” Jamie said. She and Cheri Hartman, a Hope volunteer, worked to find Joey a residential-treatment bed, according to the new Hope policy of volunteers working only in pairs, which allowed them to share the heartache as well as the tasks.
Several interventions later, including a visit with her at the emergency room, the women persuaded Joey, battered and with bruises around her neck, to move away from the dealer. As Jamie helped her pack up, they found some of Tess’s clothes.
Cheri Hartman talked her psychiatrist husband into taking Joey on again as a Suboxone patient. (He’d once prescribed her Vivitrol, during an earlier period of sobriety, before she turned twenty-six.) Joey’s divorced parents shared the cost of the prescription, visits, and lab work, and uninsured Joey applied to the hospital-run clinic for charity care.
But Joey bumped into treatment barriers in March 2017, just as Tess had with waiting lists and funding hurdles: The only inpatient facility willing to accept her at the moment was a free, faith-based program in Charlotte that did not permit the use of Suboxone or any other drugs.
To get into the rehab, Joey decided to wean herself off MAT, even though she knew the dangers. And while Jamie tried to be encouraging, privately both she and Cheri worried. “She was so motivated and wanted to do it, and we all felt like it would really be a good fit,” Cheri said, even though the MAT tapering presented a catch-22.
“Her addiction was so severe, I don’t think she was fighting withdrawal symptoms as much as she was fighting her mental illness demons,” including bipolar depression and probably PTSD, Cheri said. In her experience, those who have serious psychiatric problems on top of their addictions and who also use multiple drugs (not just opioids) are the very hardest cases to