Editor’s note: This is the first story in a two-part series about Brookings County Drug Court graduate Tiffany Heyduk. The story contains explicit language and subject matter.

BROOKINGS – Tiffany Heyduk did not want to go to Drug Court, but she was tired of jails and institutions.

“It’s jails, institutions and death, they say (about addiction),” she said. “I’ve been in jails, I’ve been in institutions. The next thing left was death, and that was not an option.”

Heyduk, now 55, first took “crank,” as it was known then, when she was 18. She maintained a methamphetamine habit for about 30 years, even raising a family and working full-time.

“Nobody had any idea,” she said.

After three felony arrests and a prison stint, Heyduk was offered Drug Court as “my last hope.” Even entering the program, she wasn’t ready to quit drugs. It would take a bicycle to turn around her thinking.

She graduated from Drug Court last month, the first person to do so from the Third Judicial Court’s Drug Court in Brookings County. She knows it’s an accomplishment.

“It’s probably the third happiest day of my life,” she said, citing the births of her sons as the first two happiest.

“I’m lucky to be alive,” Heyduk said of her new life.

Starting young

Born in Texas to a military family, Heyduk moved around the country as a child, so she was “always the new kid.”

After her parents divorced, her mother married another military man who was a professor at South Dakota State University, so she moved to Brookings when she was about 14.

“I was one of those kids who always seemed to get picked on … I wasn’t real popular. I wasn’t a bad kid and I got really great grades,” she said, yet she adds, “I was a pothead.”

She refutes the idea that marijuana is a gateway drug.

“I do not believe that or agree with that at all. I think that it’s cigarettes, and I think it’s alcohol,” she said. “I think we just keep moving up the ladder. 

“I think cigarettes and alcohol get left out because it’s legal, I really do. And it really bothers me. Marijuana was not my gateway drug. We could get cigarettes in a cigarette machine,” she said.

Cigarettes were her first drug. 

“Absolutely. My parents didn’t smoke or drink, so it was never at my house, but other kids’ families had it. That’s how we always got a hold of stuff, because it was available,” Heyduk said.

Heyduk can speak from experience on the effects of different substances.

“I wouldn’t smoke pot today if it was legal. Getting drunk – I’m not a drinker because I don’t like being out of control. I don’t smoke pot because I just laugh and say stupid stuff,” she said.

“The worst things I’ve ever done is under alcohol, not under methamphetamine … alcohol was it.

“If I could take one thing away from this world, it would be alcohol. I think alcohol is a bad demon,” Heyduk said.

Her drug of choice

“I think we just keep going, looking for something that fits our personality. And it wasn’t cigarettes, it wasn’t alcohol for me, it wasn’t marijuana. Then I did cocaine. And I knew, the first time I did cocaine, I was gonna be an addict. I knew it. I was 18,” Heyduk said, adding she tried crystal meth about 10 years later.

“When I did methamphetamine, I knew. I didn’t even like coke then, it was just meth. Meth was the drug of my choice,” she said.

“Nobody called it meth because it was a bad word. So we had other names for it,” she said.

“Back then, we called it crank. The first time I did crank, that’s all I could think, I want to do some more, I want to do some more. And it would last a long time, and I could function,” Heyduk said. “And you didn’t feel like crap, like you do with alcohol.”

Heyduk was driven to keep busy, working her job and for her family, and meth helped her do that.

“I worked all the time. I worked hard,” she said. “I’m pretty busy anyway, busy person. But it just made me be able to … I have 24 hours in a day now that I can work. You didn’t need much sleep. But when your body shuts down, it shuts down.”

She said it wasn’t about being high.

“I’ve always said it just made me focus on getting something done. If I said, ‘OK, I’m gonna clean my room,’ that whole room’s done. No matter what it was I was gonna do, I got it done,” Heyduk said.

“Every addict is not the same. Some use (drugs) to get high. And I’m not saying I didn’t use to get high, or I didn’t like the feeling. I did. But it also gave me a feeling of power and (of being) Superwoman because I could be very strong. And you could go for long periods of time,” she said.

Functioning on drugs

In 1989, she moved to the Black Hills.

“I worked 15-hour days and have to come home and take care of my kids and my husband,” Heyduk said.

The marriage ended, and she needed to work even harder.

“I had to be mom and dad both. … I used in the morning and went to work. It was more to, as I say, be Superwoman,” Heyduk said. “It was hard to do on your own.”

She was doing a lot of things that require energy, including building houses, driving a shuttle bus, working with the Deadwood police and the DARE program, and the fire department.

“I worked 60 hours a week at Burger King. I was always involved in the community. I never missed a function for my kids … I was always there,” Heyduk said.

“I did all kinds of jobs; I would never have been able to do that without the meth,” she said. “I just went and went and went, constantly.”

She isn’t sure why she put so much pressure on herself to stay busy.

“People looked at you and said, ‘She’s such a good person; she works constantly,’ and to be able to give my kids stuff, what they wanted, everything they wanted,” Heyduk said. “I wanted my kids to have everything I ever wanted that I might not have had.”

Heyduk did all this while keeping her drug use a secret. 

“I’m a good manipulator … I think all addicts are,” she said at graduation.

She even hid it from her two sons.

“They told me they had no idea. They left for college and never knew anything,” she said.

Spiraling

Her sons leaving the nest started a downward spiral.

“It wasn’t until my kids left for college that everything started to change,” she said.

“I was mad. It was like, ‘you two left me,’” Heyduk said, even as she realizes the irony of saying that. “I was a such a good mom. I taught them how to live their life and then they went off to live their life and I was like (startled gasp), ‘Nobody needs me.’”

Heyduk speaks slowly when telling the next part, as if it’s hard.

“I quit my job of 30-some years and I just felt like nobody needed me and then I just really got into hanging out with a lot of wrong people,” she said.

“I didn’t do bad things – I never did bad things,” she said, adding she never stole. She traveled around, visiting several dealers. “Nobody really even knew what I did because I had so many friends, I just bounced.

“I went on a year hiatus of just doing drugs. Spent a 401k policy,” Heyduk said.

She put herself into treatment in 2005 or 2006 “because I didn’t like the things I started to do, who I was hanging out with. I didn’t like where my life was going,” she said. “I let the drug take over and I had to be in control. I don’t like to not be in control of my life, and the drug was taking over.”

She wasn’t going into treatment to get clean.

“I had to go to treatment to learn how to use (drugs) properly. And that’s exactly what I told them. And they said there’s no way to use ‘properly.’ But I was just sure there was,” Heyduk said firmly.

Treatment obviously didn’t take, but a confrontation was coming when her son came home from college and they had an intense conversation. Heyduk still resented what she saw as her sons’ desertion of her, and the argument escalated.

“He says, ‘Mom, what are you doing at night?’ I said, ‘What do you think I’m doing?’ He said, ‘I think you’re a whore,’” Heyduk recalled in a soft, hurt voice. 

“I just sat down and cried,” she said. “I said, ‘I’m not a whore. I am so far from that. I am a meth addict. I love methamphetamines.’ And then he sat down and he cried.”

Not rock bottom

Even that confession to her son wasn’t enough to get Heyduk clean. There would be arrests, time in treatment centers, even a stint in prison, but she still thought she could continue to do drugs. 

Then she entered the Drug Court program.

Contact Jodelle Greiner at jgreiner@brookingsregister.com.