Emily Lopizzo:
I’m from that area.  I lived all over the place in Monmouth County including the jails.
I haven’t lived there in about ten years, and the last time I did I was a homeless heroin addict. So here’s a big ole sorry If I stole from you, broke your kneecaps for toothpaste or peed on your front steps.

GD:
What did you wind up in jail for?

EL:
I've been in jail a bunch of times for solicitation (milling around a drug area but they couldn’t catch me buying) theft, warrants but the big one was possession of narcotics, originally possession of narcotics resulting in a homicide. But it isn’t all cool like the wire or the sopranos or anything - I'm no hit man.

GD:
Well you can’t stop short of telling me you're nearly responsible for someone else’s death without telling me how you did it.

EL:
My best and most intense friend in the world OD'ed, and for some reason they wanted to charge me with more then just coping for us that night. Like...I directly prevented her from living or something. It kept going in front of a grand jury for about 2 years and they could never get an indictment because it was ridiculous. Junkies die. I wasn’t with her - I didn’t watch her go out and then bounce so it wasn’t until a few years after she died and a few more brilliant re-wordings of the indictment that I got charged and it was just distribution of narcotics. By that time I had some theft charges piled up too so I went away with two 3 year sentences and two 4 year sentences (having never been arrested for drugs before) to be served at the same time.
I never used drugs again.

GD:
I'm really fascinated by heroin. It’s the one popular drug I've never done. Its the one that would have left me half dead in its grip. Without knowing just how intoxicating it is, I know that its allure can be infinite. How did you get involved with it? When did you know you were hooked? Did you give yourself over to it, or did you fight it all the way?

EL:
So the beginning of dope is pretty sexy....all hanging out on the rough streets of the lower east side (back when their were snipers on the roof tops) looking all cute and living all dangerous. Then all of the sudden I kept almost getting a cold/flu and heroin was a miracle drug and cured me of it every time. I honestly thought it was the witch hazel of the underworld and that everyone should do it.  Little did I know that it was making me feel better because I was physically addicted to it.  My father was (is) a junkie so for me to be so dumb about it was pretty dumb.

After 6 months I was on methadone and trying to get off. It took me about 5 more years to get off, about 7 teeth gone, I had been paralyzed from the neck down, suffering from malnutrition, had pneumonia, and was in heart failure in 1996, and still didn’t stop getting high. In fact I would inject dope into the permanent IV that went into my neck and straight to my heart. Plus I am 5' 9" and I weighed under 100 pounds. Not so sexy anymore.
Heroin killed any creativity in me whats so ever. Making hula hoops is the first crafty-artsy-creative thing I have done in over 13 years.

GD:
Did you do the whole sentence?

EL:
I didn't do the whole sentence.  I got out on super intense early parole after 1 year. But because I was homeless I had to go to rehab and then a half way house. It’s funny, the difference between girl jail and boy jail. There’s more sex then fighting on the girl’s side. I didn’t even mind jail too much, it was better then being a junkie. Played a TON of cards, read a book a day, wrote a lot of stuff, that I finally just threw out actually.

I was on parole for two years and wasn't allowed to leave the state. I was planning on getting married and moving to Philadelphia. We already had an apartment here, and the wedding was in one week, I was like "judge - I got to GO!"