At the beginning of Memorial Day weekend, Angel swiped the bank card she carries at an ATM and tapped into a junkie’s dream. She had noticed a $1,000 disability check had been deposited into fiancé Joe’s account, while he sat in prison awaiting a sentence. She had a choice. She could use the money for a ticket home to Wisconsin. But instead, she sent $400 to Joe in prison and then spent a week shooting the rest up her arm.

Angel’s high tolerance for the dope saved her from overdosing during the binge, but just barely. She skipped flying her panhandler sign during afternoons over Memorial Day weekend and shot up her bonanza, dozing in between at the loading dock where she sleeps.

Overdose is a constant threat for Denver addicts, with heroin cheaper and more potent than it used to be. Angel’s own family has suffered overdoses. The junkies who cross paths with her in the streets and alleys of Denver all have their own stories.

Alice, 21, has no plans of giving up heroin and doesn’t see why she should. Three years ago, she and her street companion, Iris, found out she was pregnant. She continued using throughout. Their daughter was born with a form of dwarfism, with high medical needs.

On Alice’s 19th birthday, Iris went to the grocery store for treats. When he got back, Alice was holding the baby and unconscious from an overdose. Iris called 911 and tried to get her breathing again. The paramedics revived Alice, then made sure social services took the baby away. A big-hearted woman with other damaged babies took theirs in. They visited a few times.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Even though Alice, 21, already has a room for the week - provided by a woman who saw her on a corner at West Seventh Avenue and Kalamath Street - she still flies her sign in the rain elsewhere to make enough money for heroin. Alice, who's not pregnant either, said she's sorry for lying, but, she adds, "This is survival."

Joe Amon, The Denver Post After her court date, Alice and Iris find an empty alley to shoot up.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Alice shows off the bag of heroin she bought.



Joe Amon, The Denver Post Iris takes a break from flying his sign.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Alice smokes a cigarette while flying her sign.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Alice and Iris share a rare playful moment while flying their sign.



Joe Amon, The Denver Post The day after getting busted, Alice and Iris couldn't bring themselves to fly their signs. Instead, they patrolled the neighborhood where they were staying to cut grass and do yard work for money to buy their daily doses of heroin.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Angel and Iris do some gardening for someone who agreed to pay for their work.The day after getting busted, Alice and Iris couldn't bring themselves to fly their signs. Instead, they patrolled the neighborhood where they were staying to cut grass and do yard work for money to buy their daily doses of heroin.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Alice and Iris shoot up in a bathroom. Iris has resorted to shooting up in the veins in his hands because most of the others are collapsed. He must hold his hands under hot water to help find a vein.



Joe Amon, The Denver Post Alice stops to eat on the side of the road after flying her sign.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Alice holds her sign on the streets of Denver. She is not pregnant but lies in the hopes that someone will feel bad and give her money. While she flies the sign, she pushes her belly out to help fool people.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Alice and Iris shoot up in a room where they are staying.



Joe Amon, The Denver Post Alice and Iris lay side-by-side after shooting up.

“Eventually, we lost our condo and he lost his job and we lost everything, so we stopped going to see her, and we haven’t seen her in a really long time,” Alice said. “We took really good care of her, for a little while.”

She now begs with a sign saying she’s pregnant and needs help. People respond to her serene blondness and take the couple in for months at a time. Until they see them for hustlers and kick them out again.

National and local drug experts are so worried about the quadrupling of painkiller and other opiate overdoses — now at 15,000 deaths a year — they want an emergency overdose-blocker called Narcan to be available over the counter to any addict.

Angel managed to avoid an overdose through the Memorial Day weekend but took no steps back toward Wisconsin. By June 4, when she was due at Denver night court for a panhandling ticket, the $1,000 had dwindled to $10.

Court for Angel is just part of life as an addict. At one point in Wisconsin, she said, three members of her family were being held by authorities on the same day. A panhandling ticket, or an RTD fine, or a violation for carrying syringes — it’s just another job-related tax in her current career of asking people for money all over town.

She quietly listened to the judge, having shot up just before arriving at city hall, and accepted a $106 fine. She won’t pay it. If she gets picked up and they discover her failure to pay, she’ll do community-service work at $5 an hour to erase it.

And then, with her account back at zero, she’ll fly the sign.

Angel’s community is a few dozen addicts, whose drug of choice might be Oxycontin, malt liquor, crystal meth or the brown-tar heroin whose high is cheaper than all of them.

They beg, shoot and sleep under the noses of commuters. They are known to police who mostly ignore them, and known to social workers whose offers of help they in turn ignore. They can camp under West Colfax and go upstairs to work the morning traffic. At a small office frequently mistaken for a bank lobby in the Santa Fe arts district, they get clean needles from the city’s needle-exchange center and a kind word from volunteers. Light rail runs by their tattered sleeping bags, the clatter dampened in a haze of opium.

This gathering of addicts is a form of immigration no city wants but none can stop. Addicts flock to the low prices created by heavy traffic.

Alice, who sometimes begs for money on the same corners Angel has used, remembers the day about three years back when suddenly the price of a pill just seemed too high.

“I made a joke, like, don’t we live in Denver? Isn’t there heroin everywhere here? And we laughed, and my friend left and came back 20 minutes later and had four balloons of heroin,” Alice said. “And it was a never-ending cycle from that day on.”

Opium-based drugs give a user euphoria, at first, by boosting natural dopamine in the “happy” receptors of the brain. They quickly invade and knock out the natural dopamine factory, though.

That creates tolerance, the need for higher doses, all the while making the brain forget how to be happy on its own. Things that used to give pleasure — eating, sex, exercise, the daily rewards of family or a career — simply no longer can.

The weeks-long gap between cessation of drugs and the brain retraining itself for pleasure is the grand canyon of withdrawal.

Going cold off drugs is one way. Joe, forced to do so after his extradition to Wisconsin for his robbery case, did it. Now he wants Angel to do it. But outside of lockdown, most addicts can’t face the horrendous symptoms and hallucinations on their own.

Methadone maintenance is another crude tool, employing a government-sanctioned form of opiate addiction to fight a worse form of opiate addiction. Heroin’s effect is a peak and then a cliff dive; methadone smooths out the dose over a higher-functioning 24 hours.

Angel has tried methadone, but it makes her sick to her stomach. Like many addicts, she rails against the “fee-toxing” and other rules of Denver Health and the handful of methadone clinics in the West. If you don’t come up with your $57 a week in Denver, they will reduce your dose. Addicts argue this simply forces them back to heroin to avoid withdrawal.

The clinics, in return, say they need some kind of commitment. People such as Angel are raising $90 to $100 a day on the street — why not put some of that toward saving themselves?

Also left unsaid is that addicts lie.

They come in desperate, with no ID, no cash and no history of sticking to anything. Some will take the pills to get high and never come back. Or they sell them to other junkies. Denver psychiatrist Dr. Carl Clark often has to ask his street clients, “Did you use today?” He hesitates to call their answers lies. “People tell you what they wish were true,” he finally said.

Suboxone, a cousin of methadone, shows recent promise by offering more take-home prescriptions and gentler withdrawal in some patients. Researchers are also experimenting with a monthly shot of a drug that blocks opium’s euphoria, reducing the heroin craving. But the newer treatments can cost $1,000 a month in some settings.

The philosophy of “harm reduction” dominates the handling of heroin. Keep addicts alive to make a better choice tomorrow.

Angel and many other Denver street addicts find some comfort in a needle exchange on Santa Fe Drive made possible by a 2010 law. Now, addicts can come inside a clean, safe office, get a banana, use the sink for a sponge bath and trade 40 contaminated syringes for sterile ones that everyone knows they will use to shoot up again.

Advocates say reducing chances that drug users will share needles is a public-health imperative.

Opponents of legalizing clean-needle trades say the government should not condone addiction.

When Colorado legalized needle exchanges in 2010, supporters from the hundreds of other cities with legal exchanges congratulated Denver allies. They wrote: “Welcome to the 1980s.”

Angel doesn’t share her paraphernalia, even when she splits a dose with her street friends. She uses her own needles and keeps a red, plastic safety container in her backpack at all times. People who share with strangers are fools, she says.

“One guy tried to give me back one saying he hadn’t used it,” Angel said. “No, thanks. Keep it.”

The legal exchange doesn’t stop the cat-and-mouse game with police, though.

The exchange can now legally possess the warehouse supply of clean needles and trade them for addicts’ dirty ones without violating the law. But the minute Angel walks out the door to resume begging, she can be arrested for possession of the syringes. Different cops in District 6, which covers much of the more intense street-drug trafficking in central Denver, have different reputations for handling junkies and their ever-present needles.

The police still go after the trade in the drug itself.

Much of the heroin trade takes place in the open, on the Cherry Creek bike path downtown, in Civic Center, along the South Platte River, in nearby parks and on residential streets, said Denver police Cmdr. Mark Fleecs.

Investigators link the trade to small cartels in Mexico, which set up new “franchises” in cities and rotate primary dealers through for about a year at a time, Fleecs said. The cellphone is the key — an existing dealer looking to get out will sell his phone and number for $10,000. The new dealer will spend a year making $300,000 to $500,000 in cash, then retire to Mexico.

Police pursue the drug with different levels of “buy-bust” operations and longer-term surveillance of buyers in hope of reaching the dealers.

Two days after Angel’s June court appearance for panhandling, she sat in a car near Federal and Alameda. She had just bought a 1 and 1 — a pea-size balloon of heroin and the same size of cocaine wrapped in wax paper and foil. Denver police surrounded the car at gunpoint. Angel swallowed her dope.

The female driver had nearly convinced the cops both she and Angel were buyers, pitching in to share a small amount. But her notebook of sales was visible in her lap, and a search found cash and a bag of multicolored balloons like party favors inside the stick-shift well. The driver took the fall, and the police let Angel off.

She headed on her way, anxious for when the swallowed balloon would pass through her system so she could use the heroin.

What will get an addict off this trench-deep path? Addiction, abuse and social-services experts ask themselves that question dozens of times a day. It appears to be a horrific, deathly repetitive life.

Yet success is possible, argues University of Colorado Denver anthropologist Steve Koester. He has interviewed Denver street addicts for decades, watching how they live, asking how they think. You get up, you fend for yourself, you make the money you need to get what you must have, and then you do it again. Creativity, problem-solving, adrenaline, reward. It’s a job, and some people are good at it.

“People on the street don’t get enough credit for survival,” Koester said.

Half of untreated injection-drug addicts will die within 10 years, said Dr. Carol Traut, director of Denver Health’s methadone clinic. “It’s grim.”

Angel’s turnaround came in a goading order from her fiancé, in a letter from jail.

Come back to Wisconsin and get clean, Joe Kaiser wrote her, or I’m breaking up with you.

Her family, her friends, her Denver acquaintances might wonder about the persuasive power of a breakup threat from a man serving eight years in prison.

But Angel flew her sign with new purpose. “Need help to get bus ticket to Wisconsin.” Once again, Denver drivers gave, hoping she would use it well.

This time, she would prove them right.