Jerret Hooey, 22, said he usually slept in until about 1 p.m., but on one night last October he awoke at 4 a.m. by an all too familiar aching: He was fiending for a high.
Hooey made his way to the bathroom with his mind set on heroin.
As his body demanded, he opened a bag of dope and put several little pieces onto tinfoil, lit it and smoked it using a hollow ink pen.
For now, his fixation was suppressed, but the relief was short-lived.
A loud banging on the door began — it was the FBI.
Hastily, Hooey sprinted to his clothes room and grabbed as much of his stash as he could.
If he didn’t get his stuff down the toilet — fast — he would be caught red-handed.
Luckily he had enough time; right when Hooey got to the bathroom and flushed the evidence, the front door was bashed down.
He was detained and taken in for conspiracy to distribute heroin. Hooey was a part of a massive drug ring in Medford.
Hooey grew up in a lush five-bedroom house with his father. He went to a private school, had maids and gardeners, took trips around the world and was even in the Junior Olympics for snow skiing.
“I got everything I needed,” Hooey said, but he never really understood how his father, who he never had a job, was able to support this lifestyle. He didn’t figure it out until his eighth grade year, when he stumbled upon his dad’s huge stash of drugs.
“Oh, that’s what he does,” Hooey remembers thinking.
His beautiful lifestyle was all thanks to the drug trade.
Nice.
At age 15, Hooey followed his father’s footsteps by starting to smoke and distribute weed. Just a year later, Hooey moved up to selling and using cocaine. Life was then a blur, he said, “I remember things, but not time and date wise.”
Even though he was using coke frequently, Hooey said he didn’t think it was a problem because he didn’t have to rob or steal to get his fix. People he sold to often stole from strangers and parents alike, just to satisfy their needs. This was how Hooey judged an addiction. So because he was well-off financially and could afford his cravings, he created a detachment between him and his customers.
He wasn’t like them.
When Hooey turned 17, the police rushed his house and found weed and coke in his possession. He was sent to Oregon Youth Authority, a juvenile hall for people 25 years and younger.
He spent a year there, but it didn’t do him any good. Just two months after getting out and earning his diploma and working (legally), Hooey was right back in his father’s footsteps.
He learned when and how to get coke cheap — often driving out to California for it.
But to him, it was never a problem.
When Hooey began doing OxyContin, however, the addiction was clearer than it had ever been. His nostrils would scab up from all the cocaine he snorted, and his body would twitch, ache and crave for “Oxyies.”
His entire life was centered around his next high.
A friend of his introduced him to heroin. It felt good — so good, that he quickly began distributing it and became a familiar face to big names.
“I kinda worked up the ropes to the top dogs,” Hooey said.
And from there, he began living the American Dream: a nice three-bedroom house, motorcycles, a $4,000 couch, a whole room just for his clothes — anything a young man could ever want.
His life was that of a rampant party animal; he did whatever drug was in front of him, distributed to whoever had the funds and didn’t give a damn about consequences.
He was invincible — until that fateful night that he was busted by the FBI changed everything.
All of the coke, dope, pills and wild nights were gone, and Hooey only had a withdrawal-riddled body and guilty conscience to show for it. “When you get sober, so much comes out later … I should have been there for my family … I was doing drugs and wasting my life,” he said.
The court released him to rehab, where he finally was able to put an end to his drug problems. But his legal problems are just beginning. Hooey recently pled guilty to conspiracy to distribute heroin, and the plea bargain on the table was more than seven years in federal prison.
If the judge agrees to the plea bargain this July, Hooey will be 29 by the time he gets out.
Though he doesn’t know what he is going to do with himself over these next few years, he is happy that he has had the opportunity to sober up — as far as he knows, he could be dead right now if he hadn’t.
But optimism is hard to come across for Hooey. “I’m only 22 years old and drugs already ruined my life,” Hooey wrote in a journal entry.
Born into a life sponsored by drugs and diminished by his inability to escape them, we can only hope that young Jerret Hooey can learn to reverse the age-old adage that has seemed to bind him to a terrible fate: Like father, like son. 
[email protected]