"I want to go to detox." It was the text message the case worker had been hoping for. But when it came, she couldn't help.
With her round cheeks and wide blue eyes, Jessica Weatherley looks as though she stepped from a Norman Rockwell painting, and for the first months of her marriage, she was about that white picket fence life.
Then Weatherley caught her husband cheating with a 16-year-old girl. A deep depression enveloped her. She threatened to kill herself, and her children were taken away.
Crushed by those losses, 25-year-old Weatherley reached for something to numb her emotions.
“I didn’t want to feel anymore,” she said.
And so she joined the ranks of opioid-addicted prostitutes walking U.S. 41 in Fort Myers, pleasuring men for $40 to $60 a trick to support a $150 to $200-a-day fentanyl habit.
