Compelled to choose between her family and crack, Norma, 36, sent her two children to live with friends. Now she sleeps in hallways and trashed buildings with a fellow crackhead.
Emergency rooms around the country, many of them underbudgeted and threatened with closing, are swamped with drug related traumas, accidents and overdoses. Here, a crack and PCP overdose in Denver resists the paramedics efforts to save her.
Day and night, in the heat and the cold, this mentally retarded woman earns 50 to 100 dollars a day that her husband uses for crack. Then they sleep in stairwells, eat junk food.