As the officer approached his car, Jake could feel that something was different in his body. “I actually got pretty good at that,” he told me. It was also normal for him to smoke, or “freebase” heroin while driving, heating the powder on a piece of foil and inhaling the fumes. That morning, he had followed his normal routine, smoking heroin before brushing his teeth. He was driving erratically, speeding and swerving between lanes. On 21 May, a highway patrol officer stopped Jake on his way to work. “What’s up with your voice?” she asked him repeatedly. In May 2017, Ellen noticed that he was talking funnily, his words slurred and off-pitch. “I was out of control, selling lots of heroin, using even more, spending a ridiculous amount of money on drugs and alcohol,” he said. He had lied without hesitation, but she soon found out the truth, and within months, the marriage was falling apart. Early in their relationship, Ellen had asked him if he was using heroin. Heroin offered a euphoric high, staving off the intense nausea and shaking chills of withdrawal.ĭespite his worsening addiction, Jake married his girlfriend, Ellen, in late 2016. For months, he had been fending off the symptoms of opioid withdrawal, which he likened to “a severe case of the flu with an added feeling of impending doom”. By the summer of 2013, Jake was struggling to find prescription opioids. At 25, Jake tried heroin for the first time, with a co-worker (narcotics are notoriously prevalent in American kitchens). “I numbed myself with partying,” he said.Īfter culinary school, he took a job as a chef at a local country club. He hid his drug use from family and friends behind a sociable, fun-loving front. He started culinary school, where he continued to experiment with opioids and cocaine. If I was out to dinner with my family at a restaurant, I would go to the bathroom just to get a fix,” he said. “Like a lot of kids at my school, I fell in love with oxy. By then, he had already been selling marijuana and abusing Ox圜ontin, an opioid, for years. His mother died of breast cancer when he was 19. He grew up between their two homes in a couple of small towns just beyond reach of Boston, little more than strip malls, ailing churches and half-empty sports bars. Jake’s parents had divorced when he was young. In a matter of months, Jake’s existence became reduced to a voice in his head. When he was 28, his heroin addiction resulted in catastrophic brain damage and very nearly killed him. J ake Haendel was a hard-partying chef from a sleepy region of Massachusetts.
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