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BURLINGTON — Chris Dezotelle sat near the top of Church Street, his voice cracking, choking back tears, as he talked about his battle with prescription drugs and heroin.

Dezotelle first went to jail when he was 16, and he has spent his adult life in and out of prison because of his addiction to opiates.

Court records show he has been charged with theft, disorderly conduct, assault, driving under the influence, possession of stolen property, and more. Crimes he says he committed to feed his addiction or under its fog.

Now, at 33, Dezotelle said he wants to change. Badly.

“I’ll lay down in a mud puddle so an old lady won’t get her shoes wet, but if I’m using heroin, I’m liable to do anything to support my habit,” he said.

“I don’t want to be that person anymore,” he said, his deep-set eyes filling with tears.

Dezotelle has spent nearly a decade on a treadmill that’s taken him back and forth between prison and drug treatment. His first attempt to go sober was in 2008. He’s tried at least a half dozen times since. Dezotelle has three kids and said he would like to find the stability that would allow him to consistently be part of their lives.

Four days before Christmas, Dezotelle was released from prison. Since then, he’s been unable to get into a treatment program. He said he spends most of his day, every day, trying to score Suboxone on the street.

Suboxone is a brand name for buprenorphine, a drug used to treat opiate addiction. It prevents withdrawal symptoms, but it doesn’t give the patient a high.

Dezotelle is on the waiting list for treatment at the Chittenden Clinic in South Burlington. The staff has told him it could be months before a slot opens up. In the past, he said, he’s looked for doctors to help him, but in the last five years he’s come up empty.

“That was consistent. I mean I went through the phone book,” he said.

Previously when Dezotelle couldn’t find Suboxone on the street, he bought heroin to avoid getting sick. He’s adamant that won’t happen this time, but it’s hard to fight the cravings — and nearly impossible when he can’t get Suboxone.

Heroin is much cheaper and more readily available, he said. An 8 milligram dose of Suboxone sells for $20 to $25 on the street. Heroin is $8 to $10 a bag.

Dezotelle estimated he could find five people who would sell him heroin within a one-block radius of where he sat in an empty room at the Safe Recovery needle exchange on Clarke Street, in the city’s Old North End. Finding someone to sell him Suboxone is harder, he said.

TJ Donovan, the Chittenden County state’s attorney, has been active in fighting the opiate epidemic. He said many addicts in the criminal justice system are stuck.

“I don’t think anyone wants to wake up and be a heroin addict,” Donovan said. “They want to get into treatment, but many can’t, so when they’re struggling between getting heroin and getting something on the street they view as medication, they’re trying to pick the lesser of two evils.”

For a period of time in 2014, Dezotelle was living in a halfway house and receiving Suboxone and counseling at the Chittenden Clinic. It was the furthest he’s progressed in recovery, and he was briefly able to be a part of his children’s lives, he said.

That fell apart when Dezotelle failed a home urinalysis test for cocaine at the halfway house, though he said he was not doing coke. When he was booked at the jail the next day, he said, he was given another urinalysis test that came back clean for cocaine but showed the Suboxone he was being prescribed.

That’s proof in his mind that the home urinalysis, which treatment providers say is unreliable, was wrong. How could he have flushed the cocaine from his system, without also flushing out the Suboxone?

Dezotelle said that when the jail’s test came back clean, the halfway house offered him a chance to return, but he felt betrayed and didn’t want to go back.

That version of events could not be verified, but what is known for sure is that Dezotelle went to jail in July 2014 because his lack of housing violated the terms of his parole.

Frustrating cycle

The cycle between prison, the outside and treatment can be complicated.

When Dezotelle was released from prison in January 2015, he found out he no longer had a spot in the clinic. No one had told him he would lose his spot, or that he could reapply from jail.

“The whole time I was in jail, I counted on being back in the clinic. I didn’t think I’d done anything to lose my spot,” he said.

He was in jail for seven months, Department of Corrections records show. When he got out, clinic staff told him he could reapply but that it might be more than a year before a slot opened up for him at the clinic.

Dezotelle said he was so discouraged, he didn’t even ask to be put on the waiting list. In two months, he was back in jail.

“The fact that you’re cycling in and out of jail shouldn’t mean you don’t have access to treatment,” said Tom Dalton, with Safe Recovery, a program that provides addicts clean needles and basic health services and tries to connect them with treatment.

Drug users like Dezotelle who are cycling through treatment and prison aren’t getting the help they need while they are incarcerated and find it difficult to get treatment after they are released, Dalton said.

People receiving medication-assisted treatment are typically not allowed to continue taking Suboxone when they go to prison. That puts them at greater risk of relapse, overdose or reoffense when they’re released, according to treatment providers, social workers and public officials.

“Anytime somebody who is fighting an addiction suffers a relapse in the context of coming out of prison, it’s pretty basic: How are you going to get your drugs?” Donovan said. “That’s what’s driving crime. That’s why people are breaking into homes and businesses.”