Addict’s need leads to hard jail time
By Vicki Brown
John Murphy (not his real name) shuffles into the county jail’s small conference room.
A halfhearted smile briefly flickers as he sits down on a hard, wooden chair. He adjusts the worn, orange and white striped uniform inmates are required to wear.
In jail for drug possession with intent to distribute, Murphy, now in his early 40s, may face a life sentence in the penitentiary if he is convicted as a habitual criminal.
According to Cross Timbers Drug Task Force officials, drug activity has increased steadily in Young County the past five years.
Like many addicts, Murphy was pulled into the drug world as a teenager who wanted to fit in with his friends. He admits he should never have taken that first step.
The son of a military man, Murphy says he discovered hashish in Germany.
“I started smoking hash, and then at 17, I started with speed (methamphetamine),” he explains. “Once I did that, I knew I had found my drug of choice.
“Everybody else was doing it. I just had the desire to know what everybody else was feeling.”
Although he had missed the “hippie generation” of the 1960s, Murphy was enamored by the cult figures of that era. “They were my heroes. I loved the music of Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, Arrowsmith and others. I still do. I don’t listen to anything else,” he says.
“When I grew up, heroin was popular. I saw how nasty the druggies were, but it seemed like pot (marijuana) was something everyone did. It seemed like it was not bad, regardless of what the educators and the TV ads were saying.”
Murphy hung out primarily with German students, most of whom smoked the weed regularly.
“Hash at that time was 10 times more potent as pot, and it was cheap. I could get high on my lunch money,” he says. “I ran around with Germans who could get it cheaper than the GIs could.”
When his parents discovered what he was doing, they sent Murphy to live with an uncle in California. But after a short time, the teenager decided to move in with his grandmother in Young County. Here Murphy graduated to harder drugs.
“Speed was everywhere,” he says. “Preludes were on the verge of being outlawed. But pharmaceutical speed (generally cooked in an illegal lab) was the best.”
Shortly after moving to the area, Murphy found a couple of drinking buddies, who, like him, weren’t afraid to experiment.
The inmate relates that late one night after a drinking bout, he and his friends smoked marijuana at the grave site of another friend who had been killed in a traffic accident.
One of the group suggested they “shoot up” a little speed. “I watched them and decided I wanted to try it,” he remembers. “I snorted a line (sniffed the powdered drug up one nostril). My drunk went away, and I was sharp. I loved it. It was incredible.”
The following evening, Murphy “shot up” by injecting the drug intravenously. “I knew pretty well that speed was going to be a lifetime thing,” he admits.
Although he did not consider the drug dangerous at first, the more frequently he used it, the more addicted he became. “It was something that made you feel good. It seemed my mind was sharper,” he says.
“But after a while, it starts to be a vice that covers up things naggin’ in your head. Then it became a good way to get rid of or to feel good about past shame or pain.”
Tired of attending school, Murphy dropped out and found a job on an oil rig. He stayed clear of drugs for about six months. “I really didn’t think about it until it popped up in front of me,” he claims.
A fellow roughneck, a student who worked the rig after school until 10 or 11 p.m., had started using the drug to stay awake. “So I asked him for some,” Murphy admits. “It didn’t take long ’til I was doing it all the time. I didn’t need an excuse.”
Although Murphy lays the blame for most of his criminal acts on accomplices or shrugs them off as attempts to “keep friends from getting into trouble,” he does admit drug use led to his first arrest.
“I was 18 years old. My friends and I had taken off in Grandma’s car that she had given to my mom,” he explains.
“We were going to Wichita Falls,” he pauses, then laughs, “by way of Los Angeles. We went to LA and San Francisco. We wound up in Reno.”
He explains that as one friend in the back seat “pretended” to do drugs, a police officer pulled up in the lane next to them.
“I didn’t even see him, but the cop knocked on the window for us to pull over. The car had been reported as stolen by my parents. I had their credit card, too,” he says.
After extradition to Graham, Murphy was charged only with a few misdemeanors for unauthorized credit card use. His parents dropped the auto theft charge.
A few years later, he was arrested in Lawton, Okla., for stealing from a railroad line. He was given a seven-year suspended sentence, fined $2,300 and “was told never to go back to Oklahoma.”
In Young County, he was jailed for siphoning gasoline from a county vehicle. He claims he merely gave a ride to the man who actually committed the crime.
While on probation for that charge, he was arrested again for burglary of a building. This time, Murphy was sent to the penitentiary.
“To me that was a school for criminals,” he says. “I hated everybody and everything when I came out. All I wanted to do was be high all the time.
“But a preacher talked me into going to Teen Challenge (a rehabilitation program). I was so full of obstinance and hate, and I didn’t want to change. It didn’t take long before I was out of that place, and it didn’t take long before I was back in jail.”
In 1990, Murphy found a brief respite – relief he failed to cling to at the time and a clean life he wishes he could grasp now.
Released from a second stint in the pen, Murphy moved into his wife’s apartment in Graham. “Sheriff [Carey] Pettus pulled across the street and was honking the horn,” the inmate explains. “He asked me if I wanted to do some plowing.”
Although he had never farmed, Murphy agreed to do the job. “I took a little dignity in myself because that man trusted me to work for his father.
“He trusted me more and more, and because of that trust, there was five years I didn’t touch my favorite drug. It had a changing effect on me.”
But a failed marriage triggered a slide back into the drug lifestyle. Murphy started drinking again and, in September 1995, was arrested for driving while intoxicated. The crime carried stiffer penalties because he was still on probation from the 1990 conviction.
He served nine months and garnered three more years’ probation. But shortly after returning home, he was arrested for DWI again.
Another stint in the Walker Sayles Unit and some time in a halfway house in Abilene made a short-term difference in the addict’s attitude.
“While I was there, I didn’t know anyone, and I had no desire to do drugs,” he says. “But I came back home and everyone I knew did drugs.”
Within four months, Murphy was back in jail for manufacturing methamphetamines.
In and out of jail on a variety of charges from probation revocation to traveling out of state without permission, Murphy was arrested for transport of anhydrous ammonia, one of the ingredients used to manufacture methamphetamines.
“This whole area is like a drug capitol,” the inmate says. “When it only costs about $100 for $1,000 in dope, you’re going to make it.”
His latest incarceration stems from a drug bust at his home. He claims friends were manufacturing the drug at his home without his knowledge.
He returned to his house on the day of his last arrest to find friends with methamphetamine. According to his account, everyone scattered when someone shouted that sheriff’s vehicles were approaching.
Last year, Murphy met and fell in love with another woman. He planned to marry her in July, but drug use stepped in the way.
Agitated, Murphy relates that his four youngest children either refuse to see him or are prevented from having any contact with him, and that the woman he had planned to marry left him.
The inmate admits his drug use is the primary reason. “Meth is a lifestyle, and if you’re living that lifestyle, none other fits into it.”
Murphy also becomes agitated when he talks about the system’s failure to provide adequate treatment.
“They call it [drug addiction] a sickness, but they treat it differently,” he says. “They say it [meth] has no physical addition. That’s bull. They say that just because there are no withdrawal symptoms.
“But it is addictive physically as well as mentally. When it’s the only friend or enemy you can rely on, you’re physically and mentally addicted.
“As much as I hate my drug and that I wish it never existed. I want nothing more than another…shot, and at the same time, I don’t.
“It’s going to tell you everything’s all right while it’s killing you.”
Murphy wishes he had taken advantage of treatment options offered when he was younger.
“There’s no more turning yourself into a treatment center,” he says.
“In 1984, you could use alcohol and drug use as an excuse [for crimes]. I was sent to Vernon [to a state drug treatment center] for 30 days. It had an effect on me, but I was too young to care.
“Back then, you could go up to that place and say, ‘I need help.’
“I think if I could have gone to the treatment center in 1995 after the DWI, I don’t think I would have touched the drug again.”
Murphy believes incarceration leads to greater use, rather than to rehabilitation.
“I didn’t feel like a criminal in the first place. I was told I was one,” he says. “I came out with an attitude and a plan.
“I’m not in the same category with a child molester, a murderer or a bank robber. I don’t think, because of my disease, I should have been treated the way I was the last five years.”
As a high school student, Murphy dreamed of becoming a laser technician. Now, dreams have fled as the reality of a possible life sentence hits home.