By Mike Ross
KTUU
WASILLA — Liberty Samples-Niesen’s path to heroin addiction started with a traffic wreck on a snowy road in 2002, when she was a college student. “I was on my way to class, and I got in a car accident. I was t-boned by a Dodge Durango, on the Palmer-Wasilla Highway,” Samples-Niesen said. “I ended up getting partial permanent amnesia, got hit in the head, had sever whiplash, had a fracture of my pelvic bone and ended up on pain meds.”
That began 12 years of addiction to pain pills, until the doctors wouldn’t write any more prescriptions for her. “I was searching for pills on the street, and I couldn’t find them. But I found heroin,” Samples-Niesen said. “I was desperate. It was desperation, really. I mean I was just cut off.”
Samples-Niesen said she began shooting up heroin immediately. “I didn’t even try any other way,” she said. “I just shot up, and before I knew it, I was totally hooked, willing to do anything to get that drug that I felt that I needed so incredibly bad.”
That included choosing her addiction over her daughter. “I willingly put her into O.C.S [Office of Children’s Services], partially because I felt like I wasn’t good enough for her, but it was mostly because I wanted to continue my addiction,” Samples-Niesen said.
Her addiction lead to self-destructive behavior. “I sold myself. I mean, you know, for sexual favors,” Samples-Niesen said. “I had to have it no matter what, and I was willing to do anything to get what I needed.”
To feed her four year long heroin addiction, Samples-Niesen says she forged checks. She was arrested, and she was sent to the Hiland Correctional Center. Samples-Niesen says two things happened there that changed her life.
The first, and most important, she says, was that she found God. “I felt the holy spirit. I felt it through my body, and it was better than any shot I ever took, any drug I ever took,” Samples-Niesen said.
The second was that a judge let her leave jail to go to Knik House, a transitional living program in the Mat Su that offers addiction support. Samples-Niesen says being there helped her fight back against heroin.
She says she’s been off heroin for almost two years, and she wants to give hope to others who are still hooked.
“I was one of the worst junkies ever – what people would consider the low of the low,” Samples-Niesen said. “I committed horrible, awful sins against the world to get the drug, and if I can change, anybody can change. Anybody can do it.”
Andrea Moore, the co-founder of Knik House, said of Samples-Niesen recovery, “It is remarkable. She’s one of the many people that we’re very proud of, and we look up to her progress.”
Samples-Niesen said, “Because of that [her recovery], I’m getting my daughter back, and I have a job, and I have a good life, and I graduated from the Kinik House and I’m on my own now.”
Samples-Niesen is now a woman with a mission to help convince others that they can escape from heroin, too.
“You can be successful,” she said. “You can be free of addiction. You can be free of the constant desperation – the need to get high all the time. And if I can do it, you can do it.” She added, “I can’t believe I did still to this day, but if I can do it, anybody can do it.”
Samples-Niesen is on the board of a non-profit club in the Mat Su that supports people going through 12-step addiction recovery programs.
Reprinted with permission from KTUU. See the original story at: http://www.ktuu.com/content/news/Hope-against-heroin-a-recovering-addict-tells-her-story-411924015.html
