(Publisher’s Note: Anyone who wants to talk about being thankful this Thanksgiving should have a conversation with B.J. Salem, a Wheeling native who has battled addiction and has made a better life with his wife since leaving his prison cell for the very last time.)
He didn’t like going back, but he knew he had to return to the Kennedy Center in Morgantown earlier this year.
“The last thing I ever wanted to do was go back there,” said Wheeling Island native B.J. Salem. “I hated it there. I couldn’t wait to leave. Sure, I was a free man when I went back, and there were a lot of things that happened in there that changed my life for the better, but I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t go back. I said to myself, ‘When you leave here, you’re never coming back.’
“But after talking with a few different people, I decided it was the final chapter that needed to be written so I could put it all to rest. That wrote the last chapter in that book, and it’s over,” the 37-year-old explained. “It made sense to go back.”
Salem was one of many indicted by a Northern District federal grand jury in 2014, and was convicted in January 2015 of aiding and abetting and of possession with the intent to distribute. He was sentenced to 30 months in prison by U.S. District Frederick Stamp for his involvement in what was described by investigators as a “pill ring,” and he was sent to the Morgantown facility.
“I made the best of what I could while I was in there, but you do cry more than you laugh when you’re in prison. I can say, though, when I got out of that place, I was spiritually, mentally, and physically better off than when I went in,” said Salem, an employee of pipeline-related Otis Eastern out of Moundsville. “That was my goal when first walking into that place, and I accomplished that for sure. But it’s been what’s happened since I got home that’s the most incredible part of my story.”
He Admits It
Salem grew up on Wheeling Island, played Little League Baseball and middle school football, and was a child who always seemed to be smiling during his four years at Wheeling Park High School. His family has been in the greyhound industry for decades, and he, too, worked with the dogs instead of attending college.
Several years after his high school commencement, one of his friends let him know that he had some pain opioid pills and that they made a beer buzz a better buzz.
“The very first time I took a Percocet, it was recreational. Someone said this and that about how it feels when you’re having a few beers, so I said what the hell. I admit that,” Salem said. “And it was a good feeling, too. I liked it, but then I started taking them without drinking, and it took off from there.
“But then I recognized the problem, and so did my friends and family members, so I got off them. I was sick for almost a week, but I got off them,” he said. “I was using but I wasn’t dealing, but after my brother-in-law came to me one night and told me that he knew what I was doing and that if I continued with the pills, he was tossing me out of their house. He didn’t scream, and he didn’t yell. He sat down and we talked, and that’s when he said that if I continued taking the pills, I was out.”
His bottle of Percocet’s was hidden away in the front pocket of a flannel long- sleeve shirt and as soon as his brother-in-law left the room, Salem found his decision an easy one.
“After he went upstairs, I grabbed my pills and flushed them immediately. It hit me hard what he said,” recalled Salem. “And I’m telling you the withdrawal hurt like nothing I had experienced before. Not the flu or anything else, and the worst part was that I didn’t know what to expect.
“I had heard some stories from some of the other users about coming down off of them, but I guess I thought I was tougher than them,” he said. “Nope. It was worse than what they told me, and I wouldn’t wish it on an enemy.”
Year and a Day
Clean and sober once again, Salem continued working at the family kennel, and he and a co-worker had a system worked out as far as transportation. But as the opioid epidemic spread across the Upper Ohio Valley, it stretched to that co-worker.
Instead of gas money, the man offered an alternative.
“But it was one year and one day later when I went back to the pills, but at the time I was living with the mother of my daughter in Elm Grove,” Salem recounted. “At that time, I was working with a guy at the kennels that I used to pick up in the mornings. He had 10-miligram Vicodin’s, and each morning he would ask me if I wanted one. For a few days, I told him I was OK, but then I said yes, and I took one.
“So, I was using a little but not much, but then I got into an accident in a parking lot and hurt my back in the crash,” he reported. “Because it wasn’t my fault, people started saying I needed a lawyer, and the doctors said they needed an MRI, and they also told me that I would have to go on pain management medication.
“When I went to the pain doctor, he prescribed me pills, and I got addicted again and even started selling,” he admitted. “It went south from there. It got worse and worse.”
When first receiving the opioid pills, Salem would sell a few, but because his dependence increased over the following year, his needs outgrew his prescribed supply. To the black-market street he traveled, and one thing led to another once Salem became a new member of a much different crowd. He was involved in drug trafficking for about five years, from 2009 until his arrest in 2014, and although his family and his friends expressed their concerns to him, he chose to ignore their worry and their love.
“That’s because I didn’t care because I was so far gone at that point. That’s how I felt when my relationship with my daughter’s mother went south, and it was because of what I was doing. I allowed them to walk away from me,” Salem said. “It’s because I didn’t care. All I cared about was my supply of pills for me and the supply I was selling.
“It didn’t matter what anyone said to me except when they were telling me they had pills for me or they needed pills from me,” he continued. “I’ve heard it’s the same for a lot of addicts, but I know that’s how it was for me. I avoided my family and friends and concentrated on the people who were doing what I was doing. That about sums it up.”
The Pill Bust and a Better Life
Members of the Ohio Valley Drug Force kicked down his door, took his opioid pills and all the cash they found while ransacking his apartment, cuffed him, took his mug shot, and locked Salem’s jail cell.
“I was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison. I ended up serving 18 months because I completed a program in prison that allowed me to shave nine months off it. After that, it was six months in a halfway house,” he recounted. “The halfway house was in downtown Wheeling, so I wasn’t too far from family, and I was allowed to work during the day after being there a short bit.
“But while I was in prison and the halfway house, it was the people I stayed away from who were my biggest supporters. My sister, her husband, my mom and my aunts, and a lot of friends. They didn’t stop loving and caring about me even though I stayed away from them at all costs for a long time,” Salem said. “I didn’t want to hear what they had to say because I didn’t want to hear the truth. But while I was in prison, they were on my side, and I sure didn’t hear from a single person from that other world — that drug world.”
Salem has been free since June 2016, and he returned to his sister and brother-in-law’s house, and in the three years that have passed, many changes have been realized.
“I have a great job. I’m a member of Laborers Local 621, and I have no use for any pill of any kind,” Salem said proudly. “And life is good. It’s beautiful. I got married to my wife, Kristin, and God bless her. I was home for three days when I met up with her again when she stopped at my sister’s because they were all friends. And she actually asked me for my cell number.
“One day when we were walking on Wheeling Island, I told her she needed to go and that she needed to run from me. It wasn’t because I didn’t want to be with her, but I was trying to look out for her because I didn’t know what I was going to do,” he continued. “I had no job, I didn’t know what I was going to do for a living, and I was in my mid-30s and a felon. But she looked at me and told me she wasn’t going anywhere. Despite my flaws and all of the mistakes I had made, she wanted to be with me. That told me a lot about her, and I knew I didn’t want her to run away.”
His daughter did the same, too. Layla is 10 years old now, and her 11th birthday arrives on Dec. 23. She missed her daddy even though she was told his bad deeds and was aware he was locked away.
“Hands down, my wife and the fact that I can be a father to my daughter again is why life is so good right now,” Salem said. “It’s complicated, of course, because Layla lives with her mom in South Carolina, so there are airplanes and the drives to her, but those visits are what makes it good right now. It’s not making money or having a vehicle like I was so worried about when I was in prison, but instead it’s my wife and being able to be my daughter’s father again.
“I text her every morning while I’m on my way to work because I know she’s up and getting for school. She’s told me that I’m the best daddy in the world, and that means everything to me. That’s what make me go,” he said. “That’s what lets me love my life after hating it every day in that damn drug world.”
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