Modesto users talk about life and death with fentanyl. ‘It’s not a great experience’
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Fentanyl Crisis in Stanislaus County
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This is part of a series of stories about the fentanyl crisis in Stanislaus County.
As the community tries to comprehend the fentanyl crisis in Stanislaus County and the nation, three people getting help for fentanyl addiction at New Hope Recovery Center in Modesto agreed to share their stories last week.
The three women from Modesto, Asya Quiroz, Amy Northern and Farrell Engelbert Pauli, are in counseling at the privately owned drug treatment center on East Orangeburg Avenue.
Asya Quiroz, 23
Quiroz said she started working at a bar and soon was drinking alcohol.
Friends introduced her to Xanax and other pills, she said. Finding out she liked the downers more, she went to a 20-year-old friend who was using.
“That’s when I started with fentanyl,” Quiroz said.
The young adults got high by crushing the blue pills into powder and snorting it, she said. “It works quick when you use it that way.”
According to Quiroz, her friend said the tablets were Oxycontin pills. “It calms you down. It calms your nerves. It silences your mind, so you don’t need to deal with your emotions. You don’t have to feel anything,” she said.
Quiroz said she went deeper into substance use and eventually checked into New Hope Recovery. She said her parents pressured her to enter the center but ultimately it was her decision, as she was over 18.
“I was doing it to make them happy, but the longer I stayed here, the more my brain started to clear and I realized that what I was doing was not going to lead to anything good,” Quiroz said.
She said she did not know the drugs she had been taking contained highly potent street fentanyl, which is up to 100 times stronger than morphine. But her tests at the Modesto recovery center were positive for the synthetic opiate.
As an indication of her mental state then, Quiroz said, she wasn’t scared when staff first told her the pills had been laced with fentanyl.
“It was my first day clean and I was in a fog,” said Quiroz, who has a far healthier mental attitude after 80 days of staying clean. “I was still not wanting to get clean. I knew it could kill me, but I didn’t care.”
Amy Northern, 42
Northern said she was a long-term heroin addict and became desperate when she couldn’t find the narcotic drug anywhere for purchase in Modesto.
Heroin users, who inject multiple bags per day, are constantly seeking the drug because of physical dependence and fear of painful withdrawal symptoms.
Northern said she turned to street fentanyl as a substitute. “I really didn’t want to use fentanyl because it’s not the same kind of high,” Northern said. “You are tired all the time. I didn’t want to get strung out on fentanyl but there was no heroin left.”
Northern said she overdosed multiple times on fentanyl. Each time, she was revived by Narcan before being taken to a hospital. Upon her release from each hospital stay, she began using again, she said.
An ambulance driver once told her she was lucky that people she stayed with called 911, and she needed to make a change.
“I just didn’t feel like I could,” Northern said. “It’s scary to think about getting off fentanyl because you get so sick.”
Northern, along with another New Hope client, disclosed that the high from fentanyl was not anything special.
“It’s not a great experience really,” she said. “You sleep and you wake up and then you’re sick and you need to do more. There is no euphoric feeling. There wasn’t for me, anyway.”
Northern said the risk of overdose was off the charts, however. “I would take one hit and I would OD. You don’t know the potency of it. It is different for each batch.”
She continued: “I know plenty of people who died. There were people dying constantly. I watched people die from it.”
Northern said she has struggled to get off drugs since 2009. She was clean for three years until relapsing in 2013. She began treatment at New Hope Recovery nine months ago to reconnect with family, she said.
Health problems were another reason for going into drug treatment. She said she was 50 pounds heavier when she entered the center in January due to swelling from retaining water. Aside from that, her kidneys were failing. “It was killing me. I was going to die within a year,” she said.
Farrell Engelbert Pauli, 28
Engelbert Pauli, who has roots in Modesto, was part of the notorious fentanyl environment in San Francisco. She and her boyfriend lived in a car.
She said finding heroin became difficult and her veins were calloused from injecting the drug, which drove her to fentanyl two and a half years ago.
She smoked fentanyl off foil and later adopted a method using a torch.
“I know plenty of people here (in Modesto) that use it and I know people in San Francisco,” Engelbert said. “In San Francisco, people have the option of heroin but almost everything has fentanyl in it, including meth. I know people who died from cocaine. They did a line at a party and it had fentanyl in it.”
Engelbert Pauli also expressed the opinion that fentanyl sold on the street was not an exceptional high. Some users have reported that street fentanyl is a better high than heroin, though Engelbert Pauli disagreed and said it mostly prevented her from suffering the painful withdrawal of opioid use.
“It just kind of puts you to sleep,” she said. “It really does. With heroin, you get a euphoric experience, it makes you feel warm inside.”
Why did she keep doing fentanyl? “Because I didn’t want to get sick. I had been using opiates since I was 19, or 8 1/2 years. I didn’t want to go through withdrawals. I was scared,” she said.
Engelbert Pauli said she always carried Narcan, and still does, and saved her boyfriend’s life a couple of times. She said she administered the nasal spray in overdose emergencies involving friends, loved ones and strangers.
When her boyfriend was arrested and put in jail, he asked her to get clean. And that made her give serious thought to stop living on the streets, she said.
“I was tired. I was stealing to survive. I didn’t want to get clean and I cried the day that I came here (to the center), but I did,” she said.
After 40 days of sobriety, she said, “I love it here. They are like my sober family. There is so much support.”
The Modesto resident said she is seeing her own family members again.
“I could not dream of going back on the street. It’s so much nicer (now). I don’t have to worry about getting high. It’s exhausting, it’s scary out there,” she said.
This story was originally published October 13, 2023 at 1:56 PM.
