G'd Up 24/7

By JAN HOLLINGSWORTH The Tampa Tribune

Published: Nov 12, 2006

When police served a search warrant at James Chaney's Port Richey home, they found 3 gallons of GHB and a 28-year-old addict more terrified of withdrawal than the prospect of being arrested for the first time in his life.

"After he died, I found an article at his house, next to his computer, that indicated he was trying to quit," said his mother, Carol Chaney. "The article talked about what he would go through."

The Pasco County case inspired Trinka Porrata, the founder of Project GHB, to complete writing the first comprehensive guide to dealing with GHB addiction.

"G'd Up 24/7: GHB Addiction for Medical, Corrections and Law Enforcement Professionals" is expected to be published next year- too late for James Chaney, who died in November 2002 from GHB withdrawal a week after being booked into the Pasco County Jail.

This summer, the Pasco County Sheriff's Office settled a lawsuit filed by Chaney's family for $1.75 million. The money will go to a trust for Chaney's two preteenage sons.

According to the suit, Chaney told deputies, jail guards and a jail nurse that he had taken the drug just before he was arrested and would need medical attention.

Instead, the young bodybuilder and car buff was put in with the general population.

By the next day, "Chaney did not have a clear grasp of reality and acted in an agitated manner and had to be warned several times for waving his arms around wildly," according to one jail report.

Four days later, he was dead.

But not before breaking his hand beating on a jail wall, being sprayed with pepper spray, isolated and restrained in a chair for nearly 23 hours with a hood over his head.

Chaney lapsed into a coma and died Nov. 21, 2002.

"They did everything but give him the medical treatment he begged for," Porrata said.

The 25-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department became aware of the drug in connection with the 1993 overdose death of River Phoenix. The young actor's friends told authorities he had taken GHB before collapsing outside a nightclub, but the coroner couldn't test for it at the time.

GHB surfaced again about a year later, when Porrata was investigating a drug case involving a call girl who once worked for Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss.

The investigators paid little attention to the GHB they found during that investigation. The nutritional supplement, though banished from store shelves three years before, seemed a benign footnote at the time.

"We were much more interested in her 22 kilos of cocaine," Porrata said. "Looking back, I wish I'd known more about it."

In 1996, when half a dozen teens overdosed in the streets of Hollywood - "four kids down for the count, two brought back by paramedics" - Porrata was christened the department's resident GHB expert.

That was when she began to realize how deeply rooted the drug had become in the culture of sports and bodybuilding - and its potential to produce a fate worse than death.

"The more I looked at it, I realized how widespread it was, and yet the medical and law enforcement community didn't have a clue," she said.

Porrata retired from the department in 1999 to concentrate on Project GHB full time. She travels the county offering workshops to coaches, psychiatrists, emergency room doctors and anyone else on the front lines of the scourge.

There is an annual convention at which information is shared between a growing network of practitioners and researchers, as well as families who have lost loved ones to GHB.

The small stable of experts Porrata has assembled over the years participate in promoting public awareness of the drug's little-known hazards and have written chapters for the book.

Karen Miotto, a researcher at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, contributed information about a GHB detox protocol she developed.

Alex Stalcup, a California pediatrician certified in addiction treatment, focused his chapter on the broad spectrum of withdrawal scenarios presented by GHB.

"Our hope in publishing the spectrum is that people will recognize the milder forms of the disease before it becomes untreatable," Stalcup said. "We really are trying to get people to see that the casual GHB user is the one who eventually will be in delirium."

Porrata hopes "G'd Up 24/7" will fill an information void.

"Even in the research world, there's very little - and nothing for addicts and their families," she said. "There are chapters for them, as well, including poetry from some of the guys and insight about what they've been through and how they got out of it."

In addition to Porrata, Project GHB consists of four board members and a friend who stuffs envelopes and takes care of her cats when she's out of town.

The organization is run on a shoestring, financed mainly through donations and a charity golf tournament.

"It's me and the mouse in my pocket," she said. "It's sad."