Hooked

From treatment center, an update on Kristen

Kristin Alexander took photographer Marc and me for a tour of Akeela House on Tuesday afternoon along with Rosalie Nadeau, the executive director of Akeela and some of the other managers of the house.

Read story

Archive by category ''Hooked

HOOKED

Treatment for addicts would be smarter than jail alone

After following Kristin Alexander through the courts, jail, the Office of Children's Services, probation and drug treatment, Julia O'Malley calls for a smarter, cheaper approach to dealing with addicts.
HOOKED AUDIO SLIDE SHOWS

Kristin tells her story - Part 4 of Four

Kristin relapses in her heroin addiction.
HOOKED

Her darkest places

After four months of sobriety, Kristin relapsed in her heroin addiction in early June. Kristin describes what happened and faces the consequences of violating her probation. "It's a lot harder to feel proud of who I am today," she says.
HOOKED AUDIO SLIDE SHOWS

Kristin tells her story - Part 3 of Four

Kristin recalls what life was like at the depths of her heroin addiction.
HOOKED

Four months clean, and finally some good news

Kristin Alexander stood in the hall outside the probation office downtown one afternoon in mid-May. I panned over the faces outside the crowded waiting room: a bored older woman with "L-O-V-E" tattooed across her knuckles, a nervous, dusty laborer in his Carhartts, a teenager in a ball cap talking...
HOOKED

Financing an addiction: Prostitution has its own cost

Kristin Alexander looked great one morning in April. Her eyes seemed clearer every time I saw her after she got out of jail, but that day she had on makeup and a new outfit. I noticed she had a designer purse. I asked her if guys were giving her money.
HOOKED

What can't be undone

Of all the wreckage Kristin Alexander left behind in five years of heroin addiction -- losing her job and her house, ruining her relationships, risking her life -- this had the biggest consequences. An accidental pregnancy. A baby she exposed to heroin in her womb.
HOOKED

Heroin promises relief from daily struggle

A half hour ticked by as I waited for Kristin Alexander at a table in the Spenard Kaladi Brothers. The last time I saw her, the day she got out of jail the week before, photographer Marc Lester and I watched her throw her needles and heroin in a trash bin, her first step to getting clean.
HOOKED AUDIO SLIDE SHOWS

Kristin tells her story - Part 2 of Four

Overwhelmed and lonely, Kristin struggles to establish a drug-free lifestyle.
HOOKED

So far, so good

Kristin Alexander leaned against the counter in the discharge area at Hiland Mountain Correctional Center, filling out paperwork. It was mid-March, a month and a half since the last time she shot-up, injecting heroin and cocaine into her neck in the bathroom of a Holiday gas station.