Prosecutor turned addict turned bankrobber speaks at Duquesne
When someone asks him why users don’t just tough it out and quit heroin, Andrew J. McKenna sometimes tells them about the week after his sixth bank robbery, when he endured full-blown withdrawal in a jail cell in upstate New York.
He’d been through the sweating, cramping, vomiting, loss of bowel control, periods of semi-consciousness, sleeplessness and hypersensitivity before. This time, the former Marine and federal prosecutor was “hoping to die, wanting it to end, asking God to take me.” But he held on, because he didn’t want his young sons to blame themselves for his death.
If he had not been in jail, what would he have done? Easy. “You’re that sick, and it’s $3 not to feel sick anymore,” he said Friday afternoon, referring to the discount price of a stamp bag of heroin.
Mr. McKenna closed out a two-day Duquesne University School of Nursing symposium called “The Face of the Person with an Addiction.”And his addiction story was unusual in some ways, but utterly typical in others.
Son of a professor and a teacher, he said he grew up insecure, and found by age 13 that marijuana and alcohol could help. After a stint in the Air Force and then completion of law school, he joined the Marines as an attorney. He went on to become a Department of Justice special prosecutor working international drug cases, then went into private practice.
While he was working as a prosecutor, a doctor prescribed Percocet for nagging back pain. “And I love Percocet!” he told scores of nurses, social workers and advocates in Duquesne’s Power Center. “It makes all of my body warm. It makes all of those in securities go away .”
He progressed to OxyContin. When he couldn’t get that anymore and entered withdrawal, a friend introduced him to heroin. The habit didn’t abate until he had lost his job, his marriage and contact with his two young children — plus robbed a half-dozen banks. He was chased down, caught and arrested following a $1,660 heist in 2005.
After a lengthy prosecution, the robberies got him five years in federal prison. He has been out since 2013.
Since then, he has told his story to groups, schools and drug courts. He also works for Tennessee-based Addiction Campuses. In 2015, he published “Sheer Madness: From Federal Prosecutor to Federal Prisoner.”
He spoke a day after PresidentDonald Trump declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency.
“I think he understands that addiction isn’t a moral failure: It’s a disease, and a health crisis,” Mr. McKenna said of the president. “I’m skeptical until we see some money put into it.”
Mr. McKenna has thought a lot about the reasons why so many people — from coal miners to stockbrokers — have fallen for opioids.
“The constant connectivity to devices,” starting in youth and intensifying in adulthood, he theorized. “I’m connected, there’s pressure, there’s demands put on me, I’m putting demands on other people, problem solving.” Opioids are “the no feel, no deal drug” that temporarily wipes away the connectivity, the anxieties and the problems.
“My advice to folks who are struggling is, ‘stay with it,’” even through the relapses, he said. “At some point, think of all of the people you’re hurting other than yourself. And get ready to put in some work, because [recovery] is a lot of work.”