With New Baby Coming, A N.J. Mother Heals After Heroin

Stephanie Fowler, 30, was adopted and raised in a nice Eatontown home. Her mother, Pat, was a Holmdel teacher, and father, Rich, was a computer programmer. They all worked locally, and loved her more than anything.

But even with all that, and growing up in one of the peaceful neighborhoods she could ever have, Fowler never found peace. Instead, as she told The Asbury Park Press, she found crack, and then heroin.

Now, she’s healing, with the help of her family, a boyfriend, a new child on the way and baking cakes, according to the report. She’s also opening up about her life, hoping to prevent others from following a similar path, telling The Asbury Park Press:

“It has to be a shift within yourself ... It doesn’t matter how much jail, rehab or counselors — the desire inside of you has to shift. You have to not want to do it, more than you want to do it. For some it takes an actual event. For others, it just happens inside of us.”

Instead of finding hope, she could have become a statistic. She was swept into a heroin epidemic that has plagued New Jersey in recent years, particularly in the Jersey Shore.

>>Related: 20 N.J. Towns With The Most Heroin And Opiate Abuse

More than 600 people died of heroin-related overdoses in New Jersey in 2014 - doubling the amount of deaths from the drug since 2011, according to the state Medical Examiner’s Office.

Camden, Middlesex, Ocean and Monmouth had the highest number of overdose deaths in 2014, while Bergen, Camden, Cumberland, Gloucester, Middlesex, Monmouth and Warren had the percentage highest increases from 2013.

The data comes as state lawmakers and law enforcement try to come up with solutions to the problem that’s no longer a problem of the cities. Ocean and Monmouth Counties have routinely had among the highest number of heroin-related deaths in New Jersey in recent years.

Indeed, towns such as Toms River, Brick, Woodbridge and Fowler’s hometown of Eatontown have also found themselves rivaling larger cities in the number of people seeking heroin-abuse treatment, according to state statistics.

For Fowler, things first got bad at Monmouth Regional High School in Tinton Falls, when her close group of girlfriends split up, she quit cheerleading and horseback riding, ditched school to hang at the mall with her new group and then was offered crack for the first time, according to the report.

After that, she told The Asbury Park Press, things just got worse:

• She quit school, almost never went home and took a road trip that led to her first arrest.
• She ran away to Asbury Park, with her growing crack addiction requiring more money.
• She soon became pregnant with her son Michael, now ll, and kept clean throughout the pregnancy and shortly thereafter. But Stephanie started socializing again and met some new people.
• During the late stages of her addiction, Stephanie was shooting up to $200 a day in heroin. Her body starting shutting down; finally, she got help in 2012 after she had a ”moment of clarity” while lying in an Asbury Park field.

Before that fateful moment, you could, perhaps, sense some of that pain she was experiencing when she opened a Twitter account in 2011.

In the biographical section, she wrote: “I am 27. I am a single mother with 1 son, Michael, who is 7. I hate the fact that in order to anything or get anywhere in this world you need money.”

But she also said in one tweet: “I am a single, unemployed mother. So I know how hard it is to give them all they want and deserve.”