Tone Prada, in his early 40s, was recently released from prison after a 25-year sentence. While there, he’d developed an opioid habit. He was shocked when the prison started offering Suboxone, but he decided to take the leap, and he’s glad he did. “My life is just so much better,” he told me. He started on Suboxone, and eventually transitioned to the Sublocade injection, which allowed him to avoid stigmatizing dosing rituals. Listen to his experience or read the transcript of our conversation below. If you’d like to hear more from Tone about his experience in prison and release, check out his Substack. Emma You started on Suboxone while already incarcerated, right? So can you tell me a little bit about your opioid use before that moment, before you started Suboxone? To the extent that you’re comfortable. Tone So just a quick backstory that leads into that. In January of 2001, I was arrested and charged with a homicide offense, and a couple years later, I was sentenced to 25 years to life. So as an 18 year old getting that amount of time, that’s life, right? It’s death by incarceration. I had to mentally cope with that and deal with that in prison. In prison culture—I think people who have never been in prison don’t understand the extent of how much drugs and money, the drug trade, is involved in prison—there’s a lot of drugs and a lot of money made. Aome people stay away from it. Some people indulge in it. It’s dangerous, but it’s a culture, though. So when I first was incarcerated, I didn’t do nothing. I just was focused on doing my time and surviving. Sometime later, years later, you meet people, you grow, you network. This is my life. And I had somebody who was an early mentor. I was smoking a lot of weed. That was my normal habit. There came a time where I just, I had this super like anxiety attack or panic attack when I tried to smoke weed and I couldn’t do it no more. I wouldn’t get high. I would just get super paranoid. So I was sober for about 2005 to 2006 and somebody who was really influential in my life, like a mentor... I found out that he was using heroin. He was snorting heroin in prison, and I didn’t know how prevalent that was. It opened my eyes to that in there. And, you know, he kind of introduced me to that world. And once I had seen it, I couldn’t unsee it. The high looked really appealing, and it looked like it would treat what was going on with me as far as my anxiety and depression, right? So I took to it immediately. Went through my ups and downs with it, and tried to leave it alone. And I did. I was pretty successful leaving it alone. It’s expensive. It was dangerous in prison, and I had a pretty good head on my shoulders to leave it alone. But once you get a taste of that, there’s nothing like it. It never leaves you. So years later, I was introduced to this orange pill that people were crushing up and snorting. I didn’t know anything about it. This is 2008-2009 ish. And, yeah, they’re telling me it’s this stuff called Suboxone. I was snorting the pill. They called it “stop sign.” I didn’t like it. It was too strong. It was making me throw up. It just wasn’t worth the high at the time. Years later, the strip came out—the film, and that took over the prison. It got to a point where people didn’t want the heroin. They wanted the Suboxone, because the Suboxone was guaranteed to work. There was no such thing as “bad Suboxone.” There is such thing as bad dope. It would do the trick every time, and it was just prevalent. And it got to the point where it was very cheap, and you get a bunch of it, and people are severely addicted to snorting it. And for guys like me, it’s considered contraband in prison. If the officers or administration finds that you have it, they’re treating it just like if you have weed or dope. You’re going to the box. But it worked its way into the prison system, and slowly, slowly took over. So by the time 2015, 2016, 2017 comes around, it’s everywhere. And, you know, people who like are addicted to opiates...we all gravitated towards the Suboxone. I ended up going to the box over my addiction. And the moment I get into the box, this is March of 2022, and we have tablets in the prison system. Emma When you say you have tablets in the prison system, you mean that those are, you know, official Suboxone tablets. They’re coming from the doctor in the prison? Tone I mean iPad-type things. So we have a law library, we have podcasts, we have everything. So we get this alert [on the tablets] that Suboxone is being introduced into the prison system now. And now I’m in the box reading this— imagine my frame of mind at this time— I’m in the box because of addiction-related issues. And then I get this alert on my tablet, like, “hold on, so if you have this addiction or this disease, you can apply to get on this?” And I couldn’t believe what I was reading. I’m like, “No, there’s no way they’re doing this. Kathy Hochul, the governor and commissioners, they’re allowing this. There’s no way.” And when I get out the box, I go to another facility, and sure enough, they’re doing these medication runs where guys are going to get their Suboxone. And I was scared to sign up because, you know, I’ve been trying to break free from this addiction, right? I’m trying to break free. Emma That’s already what you were using. You weren’t using heroin and switching to Suboxone. You were already on Suboxone. Tone Right. And again, there was nobody selling heroin in prison no more. It just didn’t exist. Everybody was on Suboxone who had the opiate use disorder. I want to say this too, because this is important. So there’s another drug that is the number one drug in prison is K2. Guys smoke K2 and guys who are signing up on the MAT program getting the Suboxone, what most of them were doing was they were taking the Suboxone...Sometimes they take it... but most time they’re trying to sell it, so they could get K2. So this is what I mean by the gift and a curse. It depends where you’re at in your addiction or trying to be sober. So if you don’t care about being sober, you’re going to the medication line, getting your Suboxone, trying to cheek it so you could take it back and sell it—and you might keep a little bit for yourself—but you’re trying to sell it so you could trade it and get some K2. For somebody like me, Suboxone was a godsend, because I’m really taking it and going about my life. Emma What made you decide to take it? You described being so shocked and you were already taking it. Tone I was taking it like illegally. I was buying it off the street. And I didn’t want to sign up and get it. Because I said to myself, “if I sign up for this, I’m really all-in getting this every day, and I just might as well accept that I have this and take this, because it’s like, the more you take it, the more you’re addicted?” I didn’t want to have withdrawal, so I battled with it on and off, on and off. And you know, if you’re buying it off the street in prison, it takes money. You’ve got to spend commissary money and that can lead to trouble. It can lead to drug debts. So I’m like, “I have to make a decision.” So I ended up signing up for it, and I got on it. Actually, I think the first of April in 2023 is when I officially got on a program. That day changed my my life, my time in prison, because I’m no longer worried about getting money to pay for it. I don’t have debts or to use my own money for this. My mental health is 100% better. I always told people that Suboxone is like a mental health drug, if that makes sense. Emma It is for a lot of people, for sure. Tone It took care of just everything I was dealing with, no anxiety, no depression. I could just go do my time in prison. I was working in the print shop in the prison, then I would go work out at night and my well being was just so good when I got on that program. Every day at four or five o’clock in the afternoon, I go up there, get my Suboxone, and I’m just... I’m good. My life is just so much better. Maybe a year and a half after I got on the program, I got transferred to another facility, a lower security facility, and in this facility, the the staff, they made it like a spectacle of it. So in the first facility I was at where you could get Suboxone, it’s just, you get in line, they give it to you. They couldn’t care less if you cheek it, if you take it, whatever. They didn’t care. They just gave it to you. The facility I went to after, it was awful, you know, it makes you think of the old Seinfeld episode with the soup Nazi. That’s what it was like. They really ridiculed us. It was awful. You know, they made us really feel like straight up addicts in there. And everybody complained about it, and I said to myself, like, “I got too much time in. I’m of a different mind frame and I’m mature. I carry myself like a man. I’m not gonna let these people treat me like this because I’m on this medication.” So they started giving people this option of getting the shot. Now most people don’t want the shot, the Sublocade, because you can’t cheek it, you can’t hide it, you can’t bring it back. People want the oral Suboxone so they can hide it on their tongue, to take it like I said, sell it, whatever, trade it. But I’m not into it. I’m taking it just to really take it. So I’m like, “you know what? Sign me up for the shots. I’m not going through this every day. The way they’re treating us going to get it...They’re really treating us, really bad.” And so, I started getting the injections. And to me, that was even better, because now it’s like, it’s private. Because there’s a stigma in prison around it. Emma I mean, that’s something even I hear people who are not in prison say. One of the reasons that they choose the shot is that there
