Paul and Cheryl Vanacore thought they were living a nightmare when they discovered that their 20-year-old son was a drug addict.

And that nightmare deepened when he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for robberies he committed to get money to buy heroin.

“You don’t realize how many layers of rock bottom there are, until you’re dragged through it. Trust me on that,” Paul Vanacore said. “Just when you think you’ve hit rock bottom, there’s another layer.”

The Vanacores have dealt with their problems out of the limelight, but they decided to tell their story after reading a recent article in The Buffalo News about the attempted suicide of a man and a woman in their 20s who were addicted to heroin.

The Lancaster couple had been living in California and moved back to Western New York when their son Joshua was in third grade. They wanted a simpler, better life for their children, and living in the village suited them and Josh and his younger brother, Gabriel. Josh loved playing soccer, and he graduated from Lancaster Central High School in 2003.

The Vanacores took pains to instill traditional family values, whether it was making sure they ate dinner together or taking their children camping, fishing and skiing.

If they had stopped to think about it, they may have said they were living the American Dream.

“He was a good boy. He came home every night for dinner, he came home every night for curfew. We never had any issue like that — never, ever in his whole life,” Cheryl Vanacore said. “I just can’t even believe what happened.”

Joshua started partying with the prescription painkillers Lortab and OxyContin after graduating from high school. Eventually he started needing more and more pills to get high. And one of his friends told him about heroin,

which provides a similar high at a much lower cost.

It’s a story familiar to Richard J. Gallagher, executive director of Alcohol and Drug Dependency Services.

“It’s happened for years, but never to the extent it’s happening the past two years,” he said. “It’s just a vicious cycle that has tremendous negative consequences.”

If an addict does not get into rehab, there are few positive alternatives.

“Many today are winding up in a cemetery,” Gallagher said.

The Vanacores tell Joshua, now 25, that he is one of the lucky ones, because he is still alive.

But Joshua, who had never been in trouble before, is spending his 20s behind bars, including 18 months in the maximum-security prison in Elmira. His son was born two weeks after he was arrested, and he sees him when his parents bring the child on visiting days.

Over-the-counter hook

Joshua Vanacore underwent detoxification by himself in the Erie County Holding Center, punching the walls and banging his head to end his agony.

He spent six months in solitary confinement after smoking marijuana in Collins Correctional Facility and now is in the medium-security Washington Correctional Facility near the Vermont border.

And it all started with a prescription painkiller.

“I wasn’t aware of the addiction it carried,” he said in a recent telephone interview from prison. “When the kids start getting into it, they don’t understand the physical addiction it carries.”

He’s not sure how his downward spiral could have been averted.

“Probably nobody could have told me,” Joshua acknowledged.

But his parents want others to know that the danger is not just from an overdose and that the pain is not limited to the addict. “I did 18 months in Vietnam,” Paul Vanacore said. “I was never so afraid as I was of him doing 18 months in Elmira.”

There were signs of a problem in May 2005, when Joshua stopped paying his car loan on time. That’s when he told his father he was experimenting with painkillers and heroin. The Vanacores took him to their family physician, who said he did not appear to be addicted.

Believing all the lies

But there were more indications of addiction, such as money missing from the house and a bank account. By September, Joshua was acting strange, and his father gave him an over-the-counter drug test. To his parents’ relief, it was clean. What they didn’t know is that the drugs had already cleared his system when he took the test.

“He said, ‘I swear to God.’ That phrase will resonate in my head forever,” Paul Vanacore said. “ ‘I swear to God, I’m not doing anything. I swear to God I didn’t take any money.’ Every time he opened his mouth, he started with ‘I swear to God.’ ”

They believed him for a long time. It was the glimmer of hope that they needed, but it was a false hope.

A couple of weeks after he passed the drug test, Joshua was wearing a hoodie on a hot day. His father asked him to roll up his sleeves and found needle marks on his arm. Joshua admitted he was shooting heroin. Vanacore took him to Erie County Medical Center, where he was accepted into a five-day drug-rehabilitation program.

“Within two weeks, he went back on it, and this time with a vengeance,” Paul Vanacore said. “From the end of September to the end of November, he was a full-on—full-on—heroin addict.”

Drug dealers beat him and threatened his pregnant girlfriend when he didn’t pay them. His family stopped giving him money, although Paul Vanacore went with Joshua to pay what he owed to his dealer, so the threats would stop. But once he was paid up, the dealer gave him credit.

“I hate the term enabler. To this day, I cringe, because I was one,” Paul Vanacore said.

But one day he said no.

“I said, ‘I can’t give you any more money,’ and he says, ‘Well, I guess I’m just going to have to go rob it,’ ” Paul Vanacore recalled.

The next time Vanacore saw Joshua was when a photo of him taken at a holdup was flashed on a television news report. His father called police minutes later and told them the man they wanted for robberies of a bank, gas station and restaurant in Cheektowaga, Lancaster and Amherst was his son.

Joshua’s lawyer worked out a plea deal of five years in prison, but the judge gave him 10 years, plus five years’ probation.

The hurt for his parents never goes away, particularly when corrections officers and a prison counselor tell them the sentence is unusually harsh. When they hear of others convicted of more serious crimes, and getting less time than Joshua, their pain is raw.

Mother cries every day

“You think it gets easier, but it doesn’t,” Cheryl Vanacore said. “It gets harder because that’s more time lost.”

She cries every day. The parents vowed to support Joshua and, in the process, almost neglected the toll on his younger brother, who was 13 when Joshua was arrested.

While he did not hurt anyone, and walked away from two stores without money, Joshua Vanacore was convicted of three violent felonies.

“Our bottom line to hold onto: He’s alive. God spared him for a reason, I’m not sure whether to go through this and make him a better person, hopefully,” Paul Vanacore said. “When he gets out, he still has five years’ probation—a 15-year sentence because he got hooked on drugs and spiraled out of control.”

Today, Joshua Vanacore is taking college courses. And he looks forward to getting out of prison in the middle of 2014. By then, his son will be almost 10. “I want nothing more than to be a father,” he said.

He also wants others to know what he has lost, and what they are risking.

“Once they get addicted, that’s a whole lifetime they have to fight it. It’s not a life you could choose willingly,” he said. “I don’t think they know.”