Welcome to Rumpel Strip, Vermont. I'm Erica Heilman.

My mother grew up on a dairy farm.

Her father was pretty, pretty quiet.

A good father, but pretty uninvolved.

And then her mother, my mother's mother, was studying at UVM to be a doctor.

And so they owned this dairy farm together and there was one day where my mother and her sister and her

mother were all out on the field working and I'm still fuzzy on how this all

works because I don't know how tractor equipment works, but something fell on my

grandmother, my mom's mom's leg and amputated her leg.

She had a really bad phantom pain. It was from her knee down. And my grandmother got really hooked on opiates.

And so my mom as a teenager and then even when her first few

years in college and then her first stint in the military or the army she didn't go near drugs but then she

moved up close to home and she started spending more time with her mother who was

addicted to opiates and her mother

was the one that introduced her to it. She was her drug dealer. For most of Jesse's early childhood, her mother was addicted to Crystal Meth.

She called this her high-functioning addict period.

Spotless House, four well-behaved kids. her high-functioning addict period.

Spotless house, four well-behaved kids, a regular job.

Then Jessie's mom started using opiates,

and everything changed.

She lost the job, lost the money, lost the car, the eviction notices started coming.

For a time, with a help of Suboxone, she got clean. Then in 2010, her youngest son died in a car accident. He was seven at the time. After

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