SANFORD — Miranda Gilman finished serving her sentence stemming from a 2010 drug arrest in Exeter, New Hampshire, stayed temporarily with family and then called her best friend in Maine.

“When I was at the end of my rope, with no place left, no place to go, she said I could stay with her as long as I got my act together,” said Gilman in a recent interview. “I had to get away from everyone I used with. Everyone I grew up with is addicted to drugs.”

She’s made tremendous progress – she is 22 months into recovery from her heroin addiction – and the well-spoken 26-yearold is now trying to be an encouragement to others.

Gilman said she didn’t think she was a drug addict until she walked into a women’s therapeutic addiction program at Strafford County Jail in Dover, New Hampshire back in 2010.

She and her then-boyfriend had been the target of a drug investigation at her family home in Exeter. She was arrested and charged with being an accomplice to a drug selling operation, and several counts of possession of drugs and possession with intent to distribute.

She did time at the county jail before she was convicted and sentenced. The addiction program got her started on her road to recovery; it was a beginning. But it wasn’t the last step, and there were some hard times in between.

Gilman, the mother of a 1-year-old son named Keagan, reflected back on her addiction to heroin and the road to recovery in an interview Sept. 3 in the backyard of an apartment building in Sanford, where she and her son and her boyfriend are staying with a friend.

Gilman said she’s seen too many friends die from overdoses.

“It’s hard to see people killing themselves,” she said. “It’s hard to walk down the street and see needles.”

Gilman, whose ancestors have been in Exeter since before the Revolution, said she began drinking beer and smoking marijuana in high school. After graduation, she helped her grandmother care for her ailing grandfather. She called her grandparents the most positive in influences in her life.

At the time, Gilman was dating a guy who sold drugs to feed his own addiction. She’d had a skateboarding accident when she was 17 years old, and sustained a lingering back injury. She was originally prescribed Percocet, then oxycodone, she said. Then, her health insurance ended.

“I had no money to pay (for prescriptions) and I was dating a drug dealer,” she said. “So he paid for them on the street for me.”

She said her boyfriend at the time never forced her into using heroin, but he mentioned it one day, and she recalled saying, “Sure.” His sister, whom Gilman described as an addict, taught her how to shoot it into her veins.

“I immediately went to IV drug use at 19 years old,” she said.

That first burst of euphoria brought on by heroin didn’t last for long. “I got addicted very quickly. I was doing as much as I could, every day. Some chunks of time I don’t remember,” she said.

Then came the arrest, and the nine months in jail awaiting trial and 18 months in prison. The jail program was beneficial, she said but she relapsed upon her release from prison – she said she didn’t think staying clean was going to be as difficult as it was.

“I didn’t know how to live life as a clean addict,” she said. She credits her New Hampshire probation officer with helping her over the rough patches, and her Maine friend for taking her in when, homeless and miserable, she called for help. Gilman came to Maine and stayed clean for a month “by sheer willpower,” she said. She relapsed again, and her friend gave her an ultimatum.

“She told me I had to do it,” said Gilman, who then found a medically assisted outpatient treatment program in Biddeford, where she was prescribed suboxone for a year. She has now been clean for 22 months.

Telling her story – and reaching out as she has done on social media to encourage others – is what she can do to help.

“If I can let my experience and my voice reach out to others, not only maybe it can help keep someone else’s son, daughter, brother or sister form dying, it keeps me on the right track,” she said. “If I can help one person feel like they’re not just another addict … maybe all the struggles I have been through can be used (to help).”

— Senior Staff Writer Tammy Wells can be contacted at 324-4444 (local call in Sanford) or 282- 1535, ext. 327 or [email protected].