A new high: Prior Lake woman starts Heroin Anonymous meetings in Shakopee

Prior Lake American

At 12 years old, Prior Lake resident Jennifer Jensen became addicted to alcohol.

At 16, she tried opioid pills for the first time.

At 17, she became addicted to heroin.

At 25, Jensen is a recovering addict, a wife and mother and the founder of the only two Heroin Anonymous meetings in Minnesota — one of which started Oct. 18 in Shakopee.

The group allows participants to acknowledge their addiction and share stories from their journeys. It meets in Shakopee’s River Valley Church every Thursday from 6:30-8 p.m.

Jensen started a Heroin Anonymous meeting in Minneapolis in 2016, but she said she knew she also wanted to have a meeting in the southwest metro.

“I went online to Heroin Anonymous and I saw there were no meetings in Minnesota,” Jensen said. “I was like, ‘How are there no meetings?’ That made me have a stronger need to do it. The heroin problem is bad around here. Because I’m a heroin addict, and this is where I did it all, I knew there was a need for it.”

ROAD TO RECOVERY

Jensen said she began to drink and use drugs in order to cope with undiagnosed depression and anxiety. She did whatever drug was available — alcohol, marijuana, ecstasy, cocaine, methamphetamine, and morphine and heroin, which are among several painkilling substances called opioids.

“I was on a path to destruction,” Jensen said.

Jensen entered treatment when she was 18 and left after five days. While she was waiting for a bed in another treatment program to open up, she relapsed and was arrested.

Once she was out of jail, she went into the other treatment and was in the program for 21 days. A week after she left, Jensen relapsed again, which was a violation of her probation. She was given three weeks of jail time and mandated to go to another treatment program. After Jensen left treatment, she went to live in a sober house in St. Paul in 2013.

At the sober house, she found out she was pregnant.

For the health of the baby, Jensen then went off her mental health medications and Vivitrol, a medication which blocks opioid molecules from opioid receptors in order to block the effects of the drugs, according to the Vivitrol website.

Jensen said although she was pregnant, she did not stop being an addict — the stressors and mental illness were still there with the addition of heightened emotions and hormones.

“A lot of things kind of happened in a short amount of time, and I was off my mental meds, so I ended up relapsing when I was seven months pregnant,” Jensen said. “Right away, I asked for help.”

In 2014 and on her third or fourth probation violation, Jensen appeared before First Judicial District Judge Christian Wilton in the Scott County District Court.

“The first time I saw her, she was eight months pregnant,” Wilton said. “She walked up to the podium, and I was surprised because you don’t get a lot of people in court that are pregnant.”

Wilton sent her to jail and then transferred her to St. Joseph’s Hospital in St. Paul, where Jensen gave birth to her son, Jaxson. Jaxson had to be put on medication and go through withdrawal because of his own heroin addiction.

“He didn’t experience withdrawal until the second day,” Jensen said. “All of a sudden, he started shaking uncontrollably. It was the worst scene of my life — I can still picture it.”

Over the next few years, Wilton ran an unofficial drug treatment court with Jensen, having her appear before him in court every few weeks and sanctioning her when she relapsed.

“Each time she slipped up, there were jail consequences, and she would bring that little baby into court, and I’d tell her to give Jaxson a kiss and she’d go to jail,” Wilton said. “My hope was that she missed him so much that we could get her on the road to recovery.”

Jensen said she doesn’t know why Wilton gave her so many chances, but Wilton said he saw a determination in her.

“A lot of it was just a gut feeling,” Wilton said. “She has a spark in her eye. She had drive. There were no excuses — she took responsibility for her actions. She was looking at me saying, ‘I want help.’ What I saw in her was someone who needed the opportunity.”

In 2016, Jensen was let off her probation a few months earlier than expected. At her final probation hearing, she asked Wilton if he would officiate her wedding to Bill Jensen, a recovering heroin addict who had been a childhood nemesis of Jensen.

“He was the very last person I would expect to marry,” Jensen said. “I was like, ‘Oh, if you are going to be with me, you’re going to go through hell.’ No matter what, he was always there and supporting me — he would help me with school and always have random gifts. He treated me like how a woman should be treated, and I didn’t know that.”

The couple was married, with Wilton officiating, in October 2017. Jensen has been sober since 2015.

Starting Heroin Anonymous

With the cacophony of Shakopee candidate debates in the background, a group of about 20 people met in a small room at the River Valley Church on Oct. 25 for the city’s second Heroin Anonymous meeting.

One woman, with her hands clasped in front of her on the table, recounted a moment earlier in the week when she had walked through an alley and saw a woman throwing up from withdrawal.

“I don’t want to go back,” the woman said. “I don’t want to. I didn’t feel triggered to use, but it feels like it was just yesterday.”

In 2016, 395 people in Minnesota died from an opioid overdose, 150 of which involved heroin, according to the Minnesota Department of Health.

Scott County, in particular, has an issue with heroin. Statewide, about eight percent of patients in substance abuse treatment in 2014 primarily abused heroin, according to the Drug and Alcohol Abuse Normative Evaluation System. In Scott County, the percentage was nearly 24 percent.

Despite the statistics, there were no Heroin Anonymous meetings in Minnesota when Jensen became sober. She attended other anonymous meetings, but found that the problems weren’t the same as what heroin addicts face.

“It just feels like we’re judged more,” Jensen said. “There’s a stigma on addiction, and there’s a bigger one on heroin, because people think of us as being under the bridge, shooting up and being homeless. We’re normal people still.”

Wilton said he has seen a rise in heroin use in Scott County during his time on the bench.

“It affects so many of our young people, and it’s so nondiscriminatory,” Wilton said. “It picks rich people and poor people and white people and black people, males and females, doesn’t matter what your religion is. ... You have people that have lost their way, and if I or we can do anything to get them back on the road, we should do it.”

Earlier in the year, Jensen had floated the idea of starting a Heroin Anonymous meeting in the southwest metro to Wilton, who agreed to help get it up and running. Not long after, Wilton received an email from the Shakopee River Valley Church campus pastor, Chris Bechtel, which said the church was looking for new ways to help the community.

“We ended up meeting in (Wilton’s) office, and he shared what he was doing, “Bechtel said. “This is about the church being the church, which is about meeting the needs of the community and the world.”

Bechtel, Wilton and Jensen met about five times and decided that the River Valley Church in Shakopee would be the host of the Heroin Anonymous meetings.

“It’s a unique opportunity for us to partner with a judge who is doing something like this,” Bechtel said. “I feel like he has God’s heart, and it comes through in how he handles addiction, in how he leads his courtroom.”

The meetings will bring in speakers from the church who will talk about lessons of the self — such as integrity or honesty — and professionals will visit once a month to talk about various topics such as how to build a resume, how to expunge a record and how to recognize and treat depression.

Markers are also presented during the meetings to people who reach certain milestones in sobriety, which Jensen said is more for the people who are still in the throes of addiction.

“It could be 30 days or five years, but it gives people hope that they can do it, it can be done,” Jensen said. “You don’t find a lot of heroin addicts that are in long-term recovery. It’s sad to say, but it’s true.”

Jensen is three years sober and pregnant with her second child. She works two jobs and leads both the Thursday Heroin Anonymous meetings in Shakopee and the Friday meetings in Minneapolis with her husband. She and Wilton hope to expand Heroin Anonymous to the rest of the state.

She has also found a new addiction — helping others.

“It’s just like my new high,” Jensen said. “There’s a really awesome feeling I get from it.”