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By JERRY LYNOTT [email protected]
Monday, May 29, 2000     Page: 1A

WILKES-BARRE – Penny Martin and Jocelyn Butchko got involved with heroin,
as crusaders not users.
   
In very different ways, the two women set out to do something so other
families would not have to experience what they did. Both had family members
who died of drug overdoses.
    And both decided to speak out after reading a recent Times Leader series
about heroin-related deaths in Luzerne County.
   
Martin said she learned firsthand the devastating effects of addiction.
Her 20-year-old son, Tommy Kline, died from an overdose in October.
   
At one point when he was at his lowest, she bought him heroin from one of
his contacts, she said.
   
“I thought I killed him,” she recalled of the night she watched her son
use the drug to blunt his withdrawal pains before he went into a drug
treatment program the next day. A counselor told her to do anything she could
to get her son through the night, she said.
   
He did get treatment but later relapsed and died from an overdose.
Officially, he died on Oct. 22, 1999, when she consented to have him removed
from life support. But Martin said her son died six days earlier when he went
into a coma after using heroin.
   
Martin, 41, offered some solutions based on her and her son’s struggles.
   
Don’t use heroin, is foremost on her list. Increase inpatient treatment to
more than 30 days, she added, and give parents the legal authority to commit
an adult child to treatment.
   
“I had parental authority to take him off life support,” she said.
Because her son was 20, he was an adult and able to enter and leave a drug
treatment program on his own. She would like that changed so that a parent can
have more say in a child getting treatment.
   
Her son’s death still haunts and hurts her. It turned her life upside down,
leading to a suicide attempt and separation from her husband, she said.
   
She has since moved into the same apartment complex as her mother, Lillian
Kline, and works as a waitress at an area restaurant. She has spoken about
heroin to the kids who come in at night and at the treatment center where her
son went.
   
Butchko said she also discovered someone close to her was an addict. The
former Larksville woman used information she learned about heroin and put
together a booklet and slide presentation called “Resist the Risk” as part
of her work toward a degree in health education from West Chester University.
   
Butchko’s father, John, provided a copy of her booklet in response to a
request by the Times Leader for comments after a newspaper series on
heroin-related deaths in Luzerne County.
   
“I don’t think there’s a lot of education going on in the schools,” said
Butchko, 29. There wasn’t when she went to Wyoming Valley West high school,
she said.
   
Her program contains prevention information, Luzerne County demographics,
data on drug use in the county and specifics on heroin – what it is, where it
comes from and what it does.
   
“I would like to see it used,” Butchko said of her work.
   
So far she has only presented it to her teachers at school and they gave
her a passing grade. Maybe a school district could pick it up for a health
education class. It could be used outside of school for parents because they
often are unaware of what to look for when it comes to drug use, she said.
“It could be a basis for something.”
   
Knowing what she does about heroin, Martin said she wonders why people even
use it. “How could somebody enjoy a drug that numbs every sense that you
have?”
   
But describing her son’s addiction, she answered her own question. “He
knew it got a hold of him and it wouldn’t let go.”
   
She waited for the moment when she would lose him and said she awaits their
reunion. “I live every day until I’m with him again.”
   
She keeps pictures and mementos of him – his baby teeth, locks of hair from
his first hair cut and the plastic band he wore around his wrist after his
birth. She keeps his ashes in a wooden chest as a table-top shrine to him in
her apartment. And around her neck she wears his medal, a small cross with the
head of Jesus Christ wearing a crown of thorns.
   
Her memories of her son are good ones. “You don’t fail doing this if you
keep trying,” she said of someone who relapses while making an effort to stay
clean. “I could never even think he failed when he died.
   
“Tommy was everything I could ask for in a son.”
   
(FOR THE RECORD A story in Monday’s paper on families dealing with heroin
addiction contained an error. Jocelyn Butchko has someone close to her who is
a recovering addict. Penny Martin lost a son to a drug overdose.)