In interviewing attorneys and consumers for Real World Divorce, we heard a lot of tragic personal stories of children who’d lost a parent (almost always the father) and parents (almost always the father) who’d lost children in the family courts of America’s winner-take-all states. Dreamland describes parents losing children even when neither parent sued the other:
When it was her turn, Roberts told the gathering that her daughter was a pill addict who had stolen from her blind. Lisa had forced her daughter out of the house. “My daughter,” her colleague said, “is in jail accused of executing three people for their pills.” Half of their coworkers’ kids were addicted. They followed with a description of the pill mills, of the OxyContin barter economy, of the constant overdose deaths. The room was silent. “I remember coming home and being real mad,” Roberts said. “It’s not right that our kids are having their futures and freedom taken from them because they’ve fallen prey to this horrible chemical that steals their soul. Our kids shouldn’t be going to the grave. We sent our kids into the military. After she got clean, my daughter had a better chance of surviving a war than she did of surviving the pill epidemic.”
As the opiate epidemic mangled the middle class, these kids doped up and dropped out. Earlier generations of opiate addicts became self-employed construction workers or painters, because that was all they could manage with heroin, and often jail, in their lives. With the new generation, time would tell how they would do, but it wasn’t looking good. A large subset of these new young addicts had criminal records now. Many were on probation; a good number went to prison. Either way, their parents were realizing that life with a record was as stunted as life with an opiate addiction. Any dreams these kids’ parents once had for them were now improbable. Even qualifying to rent an apartment was hard. With a criminal record, finding a job in the teeth of the great recession was almost impossible.
“For 6 long years I’ve begged, pleaded, screamed, yelled, cried, grounded, took things away, called the police, kicked him out & not to mention the countless hrs feeling guilty & terrified for him,” one woman wrote about her heroin-addicted son who’d just been thrown out of rehab again for a dirty drug test. “And the thousands of dollars spent on rehab, hospital bills & therapist as well as bailing him out of jail. I have prayed prayed prayed & prayed . . . ”
The above-referenced children are the comparatively lucky ones. The unlucky children died from overdoses, sometimes shortly after being declared cured by a rehab clinic. One thing that I learned from the book is that there is no reliable way to cure a person from opiate addiction.
That raises the question of what should parents do upon discovering that a child is addicted to opiates? There does not seem to be any realistic hope that heroin supply will be restricted in the U.S.:
As happened after Operation Tar Pit, the Sánchez heroin cells quickly reconstituted. His networks, and those of his family, are believed to encompass most of the state of South Carolina, including Myrtle Beach, where police have six times dismantled the Sánchez heroin cell, only to see it return each time.
I asked if [an Anglo who collaborated with the Xalisco boys] ever wondered what became of the boss called Enrique and the drivers who gave him all his dope. Not really, he said. It seemed so long ago. But he felt no rancor. They were nice guys, clean-cut, not killers, just working-class boys trying to get ahead and were probably living back in Mexico somewhere. He marveled that they were the only dealers he’d encountered in forty years doing heroin who didn’t use their product. He was still startled at how organized they were. After Tar Pit, he remembered, there was no dope on Santa Fe streets for exactly one day. That’s how organized they were.
The Scioto County [Ohio] pill mills illustrated how generalized opiate prescribing had become in America. In their last year of operation, 9.7 million pills were legally prescribed in the county of eighty thousand. But even two years after the pill mills were done, 7 million pills were still prescribed there.
What about simply moving the family or at least the child to a place where opiates are not available? Other than a research station in Antarctica, does that exist? If so, where? (Of course I am hoping that none of us reading or writing on this blog will ever need this answer.)
More: read Dreamland.
Related:
Wikipedia provides a helpful list of countries that have the death penalty for drug dealing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_for_drug_trafficking
I assume that (if the penalty is consistently enforced) this cuts down on drug dealing in those countries, both by thinning their ranks and also by discouraging others from taking up the profession.
I’m guessing that it would be pretty hard to score any heroin in North Korea but that might be going a little too far. Singapore is probably the one that provides the highest standard of living.
Theodore Dalrymple has written extensively on opiates (he’s a doctor from the U.K.); He describes Chairman Mao as “The greatest drug-addiction therapist in history” (his book reviewed here https://spectator.org/44741_draining-romance-out-drugs/) and here’s an op-ed http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-476208/Heroin-addiction-isnt-illness–stop-spending-millions-treating-it.html
From Midnight Express, Turkey looked pretty strict on drug smuggling.
> To what country could one send an opiate-addicted child?
Anywhere LSD or DMT is legal. A single dose can cure addiction.
Fun fact: the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous has cured from his alcohol addition by taking a single dose of LSD, not by following the cult-like AA protocol:
There is an epidemic of guns also. The middle class is dying from bullet wounds.
(not very smart) Scientist: The middle class is dying from bullet wounds.
LOL!
@superMike: Interesting links, and it sounds like this Dalrymple guy has a valid and informed opinion. I’m going to disagree anyway. The heart of his argument is that withdrawal symptoms aren’t that bad really, therefore addiction is a lazy choice, a moral and spiritual failing.
But consider the closest natural analog to opiate use: falling in love. People do crazy and stupid things all the time when that natural cascade of neurochemicals gets going. The physical withdrawal symptoms of romance are insignificant compared to the compulsion it provokes. It’s not just a choice, it’s the activation of a primal instinct that overrides inhibition. The difference: an opiate user experiences a much higher dose.
If I was designing a drug rehabilitation program I would consider the ways in which people naturally fall out of love: (a) avoid the other person completely (and hope you never bump into them again because it will set your heart pounding), (b) find someone
else to take their place, or (c) be with them long enough that romance turns to disgust (which seems to be an in-built mechanism for some people). Treat the opiate addiction as a love interest and use one of these strategies.
I suppose it depends on whether the addict is willing to rehab or not first of all, but remote places like the Falklands might do the trick. Or go far out in the African bush with the Peace Corps (MA approved). Or perhaps the Phillipines, where Duterte is busy killing off drug dealers. Or get a job on a container ship or the like. There’s probably not a lot of heroin on a container ship.
Smartest Woman,
Just pointing out the possibility that drug addiction may not be as big a problem as some attempt to make it. It was sarcasm.
The media seems to portray gun violence as out of control and the large number of gun owners as problematic. This, despite the per capita violent crime rate going down for 30 years…while gun ownership went up.
I suspect at times our drug “epidemic” is mostly trumped up. We would be better off letting nature take its course.
I’ve read that for some people, the U.S. insistence on abstinence only addiction recovery is part of the problem. The argument is that some people can learn to manage their addiction much easier than they can completely abstain. For these people, insisting on abstinence results in the cycling between the extremes (clean, then temptation, then “failure”, then bender). Helping them with coping skills (along with a safe supply) enables them to lead productive lives while remaining addicted.
@Scientist: Good points.
I suspect at times our drug “epidemic” is mostly trumped up.
I agree. The “War on Drugs” has become a 40-year taxpayer-funded jobs program with no end in sight.
“Trumped up” Tee hee!
There is an epidemic of guns
I’d say there is an epidemic of bad guys using guns – bad guys that should be locked away from decent society.
Smartest Woman,
I always think about how low our gun death rate would be without the 40+ year drug war Nixon started.
Considering that it took that long to get it back down to pre-drug war levels, I am guessing maybe 50-60% reduction from the current level?
@billg: I knew 2 people who did lots of LSD, were addicted to opiates and died in their late 20s. What did they do wrong?