Marianne Woessner is a North Carolina nurse and midwife who sees drug addicts with good jobs and from good families nearly every day. They occupy a hidden world that belies the stereotype of rail-thin junkies stumbling from one street corner to the next in search of a fix.
Woessner was the mother of one such drug addict. She made the discovery Sunday night, when a Baltimore police officer called to tell her that her daughter, Carrie Elisabeth John, died that evening after apparently injecting herself with buprenorphine while trying to get high with her boyfriend, Clinton Blaine McCracken, in their rented rowhouse near downtown.
The couple were postdoctoral fellows at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, working in labs on the same floor, studying the effects of drug addiction even as, police said, they grew marijuana inside their home and used narcotics purchased over the Internet from a Philippine pharmacy that shipped pills hidden inside stuffed animals.
"These are two brilliant people who made a stupid error in judgment," Woessner said in a telephone interview Wednesday, as she prepared to bury her 29-year-old daughter in the town where she grew up. Woessner said she doesn't think McCracken either injected her daughter or forced her to do drugs.
"He loved her and she loved him," she said. "I know this. They're humans, just like all of us. We all have our faults. Just because drugs is what they studied doesn't mean anything. Addiction is addiction, no matter what we do, what race we are, what occupation we have."
Baltimore police have charged McCracken, 32, with several drug violations, and a department spokesman said federal authorities have expressed interest in pursuing the case. McCracken is free on bail and declined to comment when reached at his home on Wednesday.
McCracken told police, according to court documents, that he and John "thought they could control the morphine and buprenorphine" and that he thought marijuana should be legalized.
Dr. Donald Jasinski, chief of the center for chemical dependency at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, said it should come as no shock to see doctors or other medical professionals addicted to drugs, especially those who study narcotics and are around the chemicals daily.
"Anybody who handles drugs think they know how to control it," he said. "Perhaps the highest risk group for opiate dependency is doctors."
