By Scott Brinton
Gregory Harvey started drinking at age 13. By 14, he was smoking marijuana. Then, goaded by friends at Hempstead High School, he tried heroin.
He quickly got hooked.
For more than 30 years, the burly 46-year-old snorted and shot up this most insidious of opiates. And he spent the better part of three decades in and out of prison on various charges stemming from drug addiction.
Now, there is hope for Gregory Harvey.
Upon incarceration at the Nassau County Correctional Facility in East Meadow 15 months ago, Harvey signed up for the jail's DART (Drug Alcohol Rehabilitation Treatment) program, founded by Robert Moore in 1981.
Fortunate for Harvey, he got into DART, for which there is a long waiting list. It is the only drug-treatment program licensed by the state Office of Alcohol and Substance Abuse Services that now operates in a New York State jail. Over the years, DART has treated some 7,000 inmates.
Harvey was most recently imprisoned for heroin dealing. He says he sold the drug to support his own habit. He is now being held at the Nassau County jail before being sent to a state penitentiary to complete a two- to four-year sentence.
Before Harvey arrived at the Nassau County jail, he didn't hold much hope of kicking heroin, nor giving up his other criminal activities.
However, after wearing his mind and body down with constant substance abuse -- and watching many friends die of overdoses and AIDS -- he says he was ready and willing to give up drugs.
"I'm tired of winding up in jails and institutions," says Harvey, as he is seated in a tiny, shadowy office at the jail, dressed in an inmate's orange jumpsuit. "I've been coming to jail since a teenager."
Harvey has worked in recent months to understand and overcome his addiction, he says. And, in his waning days at the Nassau County jail, he is serving as a DART leader, making sure other inmates stick with the program.
Though a heroin addict for two-thirds of his life, Harvey says he never fully comprehended the drug's dangers before DART. "I never understood what heroin could really do to you," he says. "The collapsed veins, sniffing it could collapse the veins in your nose, the elephantiasis, the swelling up of your arms from shooting up."
Harvey swears he has given up heroin. Only time will tell if he has once out of prison.
Because of DART, however, he knows what he must do when he leaves jail -- immediately get to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting.
Find a meeting
"Go directly to a meeting. It's one thing they teach you [in DART]. If they get one thing into you, it's go to a meeting," says Harvey.
If prisoners find an Alcoholics or Narcotics Anonymous meeting on the day they walk out of prison, they stand "half a chance" of beating their addictions, says Moore, a recovering alcoholic who is now coordinator of substance-abuse services for the Nassau County jail. AA and NA provide the continuing support former prisoners need to stay clean. As Moore knows firsthand, alcoholics and drug addicts constantly feel the temptation to return to substance abuse.
On the outside, if former inmates don't get to AA or NA, they could very well relapse into drug abuse.
That is why Moore or another DART counselor or volunteer often meet them on their way out of jail and shuttle them straight to an AA or NA meeting. Moore has pledged to meet Harvey when he leaves prison.
DART also works closely with 56 social-service agencies, such as the Five Towns Community Center in Inwood and Peninsula Counseling Center in Woodmere, to provide after-care for DART "clients" once out of jail.
Ensuring that former inmates receive treatment on the outside, though, is only the final step in DART's 90-day program.
'Round-the-clock counseling
DART is a drug-treatment boot camp, if you will. Clients meet for three group-therapy sessions daily, in addition to an Alcoholics or Narcotics Anonymous meeting in the evening. They also receive individual therapy from drug-treatment counselors.
Their journey to sobriety begins at Nassau University Medical Center, which looms 19 stories high just south of the jail. There, inmates are detoxified of the drugs that control their minds and bodies. They are either given anti-drugs, like methadone for opiate addictions, or they must wait and go cold turkey.
Those first days are the hardest for inmates as they battle with the physical demons of drug abuse. "It's a downer," says Harvey. "You might not want to use it. It's a physical need. So, you get up and your body be craving for it. It could be rain, sleet or snow. It's not a psychological thing. It's a physical thing."
Indeed, today's drugs are highly potent, often causing immediate addiction.
James Salamino, 32, of Williston Park, is another current DART participant. He got hooked on crack at age 19 as a senior in high school. At the time, he suffered from low self-esteem, which was only worsened by his parents' divorce, he says. Prodded by friends, he turned to crack. Before that, he had never done drugs except drink once in a while, he says.
"The crack was so powerful, I became an instant addict overnight," says Salamino timidly. "I didn't even want to go to the prom because of this [crack]." He used his prom money to buy drugs.
"Within a month of using, my life became unmanageable," says Salamino. And, for the most part, it remained that way until he entered the Nassau County jail this last year.
In all, he was arrested four times -- once for allegedly assaulting two police officers after he violated an order of protection against his girlfriend (he claims the officers assaulted him when he ran from them and he only defended himself in the scuffle); for drug possession; for reckless endangerment; and for driving under the influence.
"All my arrests were drug related," says Salamino.
Throughout, "I wanted to get help," he says. That is why he requested DART when he was imprisoned most recently.
For Salamino, DART's regular meetings have provided the "structure and stability" he has lacked much of his adult life. Now, he says, his life is devoted to defeating his addiction.
A higher power
DART is based on principles of the 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous program, says Moore. The first and most-important step for DART clients is that they "accept they're powerless over alcohol or drugs" and that only a "power greater than themselves can restore them to sanity," he says.
That power is God, no matter the name, says Moore, quickly adding that DART is entirely non-denominational.
Addicts must decide "to turn their lives over to the care of God," Moore says. Otherwise, they stand little chance for recovery. Substance abuse is too consuming to beat it without divine intervention.
DART counselors encourage clients to find a spiritual-mental-physical balance in their lives.
Moore says he felt enormous guilt for the string of mostly petty crimes he committed to support his own drinking, and he believes many prisoners who have abused drugs feel that same sense of remorse. "Most alcoholics and addicts have a lot, a lot of guilt," says Moore. They often drink or get high to hide from that guilt.
Belief in an "all-loving and all-forgiving God" releases them from the tortuous addiction-guilt-addition cycle, allowing them to free themselves of drugs, according to Moore. He himself found God during a Catholic retreat at St. Ingnatius House in Manhasset in 1978.
Moore recognizes that many prisoners enter DART so they can obtain a graduation letter, which might get them a lighter sentence from a judge. And he acknowledges that DART cannot save every participant from drugs.
But there are those who come truly seeking help, and they often succeed in making better lives for themselves.
Once off drugs, many prisoners display high intelligence and often an aptitude for art. A handful of inmates' colorful paintings and drawings are displayed in Moore's office at the correctional facility.
"There's really a lot of talent in jail," says Moore. He tells prisoners: "Use a quarter of your street smarts for something positive and constructive, and you can do anything."
Over the years, DART has helped hundreds, if not thousands, of inmates. Sean, a DART graduate who did not want his surname revealed, wrote to Moore in January this year: "I spent six months in the DART program, and in that time learned about my disease of alcoholism. I have been battling with alcoholism since I was 12 years old. I was in deep denial that I had a problem with drinking.
"I thought it was just bad luck that I kept getting arrested, never admitting that alcohol was the problem." Now sober, Sean wants to speak with current inmates about fighting alcohol abuse.
And Michael, also a DART graduate, wrote to Moore: "I will never forget what you said to me about, 'What are you, a victim?' I was so angry I wanted to blast you. You have been able to show me things in myself I may have known were there all along, but you just have a way of enforcing those beliefs in me."
Ed Reilly, Nassau County sheriff in charge of the correctional facility, says of the DART program: "For me, it's an issue of support...It needs to be seen as an integral part of the jail program."
The county hasn't the money to expand DART right now, as Moore would like. Reilly, however, has increased Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous meetings for prisoners throughout the jail's general population, for a total of 40 meetings.
Taking responsibility
In the end, DART can't save prisoners from addiction. They must save themselves. Ultimately, says Moore, inmates must learn to "accept responsibility for their actions."
Harvey says that he will feel a desire for heroin indefinitely. "I probably would always like to do it, but I know the consequences," he says. "The urge can always come, so long as I don't act on it."
Both Harvey and Salamino offered advice to high-school students contemplating trying drugs. "It's all right to be the one who's laughed at and called a punk" for refusing drugs, says Harvey. "It's all right to say to them 'no.' As corny as that might sound, all you have to do is say 'no.'"
Salamino says, "You need to listen to what people are telling you. It is going to get worse. You don't need to go through all that pain."
For those already on drugs, he says, "Get yourself into some type of program and sit down and listen."
