Salon.com > Jennifer Matesa

The hospital tech who stole needles

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Last year, the health care world was rocked by the arrest of David Kwiatkowski, a Michigan native and itinerant cardiac technologist who traveled the country plying his trade. He was also a fentanyl addict. To feed his addiction, he stole IV drugs from operating rooms in 19 hospitals across the country, possibly infecting hundreds of patients with Hepatitis C. As experts rewrite the rules to try and prevent a repeat of this devastating outbreak, they may wind up turning for guidance to the demographic that arguably knows the topic best: recovering drug addicts.

Thirty-three years old, with close-cropped hair and a tidy goatee, Kwiatkowski pleaded not guilty last month in a federal indictment on seven counts of stealing drugs, and seven more of tampering with a consumer product—namely fentanyl. His case is complicated, crossing state lines, involving potentially hundreds of victims, witnesses and hospital administrators. From 2008 to 2012, Kwiatkowski worked for hospitals in seven states across the country (in Arizona he was reportedly discovered passed out in the men's room with a needle mark in his elbow and a fentanyl syringe in the toilet next to him).

Is your kid an addict?

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 21:25:00 +0000

I know a 23-year-old NYU graduate—I'll call her Sophia—who had an arrangement with her dad when she was in high school: he would buy her booze if she would buy him pot. Since many folks don’t think either pot or alcohol are “hard” drugs, some adults—including Sophia's dad—don’t have a problem with such boundary-crossing bartering. For my friend, however, it created a number of conflicts: for one thing, it meant Sophia was dealing in illegal drugs, and exposing herself to prosecution for felony crimes. For another, it meant she got a clear message from her father that teenage drinking isn’t harmful.

So began Sophia’s drinking career as a young teenager. In high school she drank hard and hung out with likeminded kids. Her grades dropped, and her parents switched her school and put her in therapy—perhaps her father couldn’t imagine what might be leading his daughter to “act out.”

Old folks: The next addicts?

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 15:46:00 +0000

Carol Aronberg’s drunkalogue is common: she grew up outside New York City in a privileged family full of drinkers; both her parents were alcoholics, and her father was a mean drunk whose verbal abuse damaged her self-esteem. Still, she went to college, got married, had kids and started a successful business. And then, eight years ago, her mother died, and Carol’s drinking blossomed, and she expanded her repertoire to include drugs. Finally, after three overdoses on booze and benzodiazepines and a pharmacopeia of other pills (“the 'Cets,” she calls them—Percocet, Fioricet, the combinations of painkiller or sedative with acetaminophen), she checked into rehab. Now she has 18 months clean and sober.

Here's the biggest difference between Aronberg's story and that of most alcoholics: She was 69 years old when she became an addict.

Aronberg is part of what some analysts have described as an approaching tidal wave of addiction in America: older adults and members of the baby-boom generation now in their late 40s to their mid-60s, who develop addiction and get sober late in life.