Before the pandemic began to seriously affect the East Coast, I had plans to move to New Jersey, where my uncle lives. The virus meant I had to put my plans on hold and continue crashing with my immediate family in Washington, DC.

I had been staying with my family to save money. I had moved back in with them late last year after some health problems. After recovering, I went back to working in clubs and cashiered at a local gardening store during the Christmas rush—jobs that had evaporated by the time the lockdown began.

I knew I wouldn’t be able to handle staying with my parents—who reacted to first learning of my heroin use, three years ago, by invading my privacy and subjecting me to searches—if I didn’t have something to take. So in early April, I stocked up on enough of the opioid Dilaudid to last a few months.

I’d gotten the pills from a trusted friend who had, in turn, gotten them from a doctor. So they were all-but-guaranteed to be safer than the fentanyl-filled “heroin” available on the street.

Unfortunately, I was unable to acquire more than a small stash of needles. Ordering more online would be impossible, because my parents search my mail.

I would normally never reuse works; I’m well aware of the health issues this can cause. But it seemed that I had no choice.

Going to the local needle exchange wouldn’t work either. For one thing, the hours were far more restricted than usual. My parents also track me via my phone. If they saw that I was anywhere near Union Station (and, therefore, near HIPS), they’d search my bags and force me to throw out any harm reduction supplies. This has happened numerous times before. Then my mother would make me take a humiliating urine test, and when it came back positive, she’d force me to detox again by keeping me confined to my bedroom.

I would normally never reuse works; I’m well aware of the health issues this can cause. But it seemed that I had no choice. I figured that if I cleaned my supplies with boiling water and rubbing alcohol, I’d be okay. Of course, I wasn’t.

In the past, I’d always been able to access clean injecting supplies, as well as naloxone and fentanyl test strips. I’ve always been meticulous about hygiene and harm reduction, taking all available measures to avoid risk or contamination. Usually, I put used works in an old soda can to keep anyone from accidentally touching them before I dispose of them properly.

My sometimes-obsessive caution is partly why I’ve never overdosed or previously developed an infection. (I’ve been fortunate, too—for example in not experiencing dangerous adulterants that fentanyl strips wouldn’t pick up.)

So I really didn’t like the idea of reusing. I didn’t want to have to rely on frequent hand-washing, rubbing alcohol and covering my track marks in Neosporin. But that’s what I was left with to avoid going through sobriety at this already-awful time.

At this point, you’re probably wondering why I didn’t smoke or snort instead of injecting. The reason not to smoke was simple. My mother often smells my room to see if I’ve been smoking. She often claims to smell drugs even when everyone else agrees that it just smells like laundry and my perfume. I don’t know if she’s imagining things or pretending, but the end result is usually that she’ll use the alleged smell as an excuse to search for anything drug-related.

As for snorting, I can’t stand the way it feels. I also find that it doesn’t work very well. Most of the powder ends up in my throat, so I can’t measure the dose as carefully. If I take more to compensate for the stuff I swallow, I might OD; if I don’t, I’ll get dopesick. Injecting is far more precise. Plus, it’s cheaper because nothing is wasted.

At first my stash of Dilaudid really helped. Unlike street “heroin,” the feeling was consistent. It stayed in my system for quite a while, so I was able to deal with the strife in my family. I could sleep normal hours, something that’s virtually impossible when I’m sober. I made a fair amount of progress on my latest book. For once, things were actually going well. I spent my time working, reading and dancing.

But soon I began to feel strange. I’d been plagued by headaches since coming home from a writers conference a few weeks before. This hadn’t worried me; I often get headaches. My feet hurt almost constantly as well, due to my tendency to overexercise (I almost never take days off from dancing). So I’m quite used to ignoring pain.

And I did… until I began feeling weak and confused as well. I said odd things at dinner. I felt dazed all the time. One day, I awoke to find I no longer had the strength to perform my usual barre exercises. Suddenly I couldn’t even stand en pointe. Things only went downhill from there.

My lips were a bit blueish. I was struggling to breathe, though I hadn’t even realized it.

Shocked by my newfound weakness and confusion, my parents persuaded me to let them take my temperature. I had a fever of 103. A few days later, at dinner, my parents noticed that my lips were a bit blueish. I was struggling to breathe, though I hadn’t even realized it.

Then I woke up in the middle of the night, fighting for breath. My whole body shook from fever. That’s when my parents took me to the emergency room. I didn’t want to go—partly because it was almost time for my next dose of Dilaudid, partly because I didn’t have the energy—but I agreed anyway.

At the hospital I was immediately tested for COVID and came up negative. Despite this, the doctor concluded that I had a less serious case and sent me home with an inhaler and antibiotics. The former was to help me breathe, the latter to keep me from developing pneumonia. By the time I left the hospital I was already getting mild opioid withdrawal symptoms, though as usual I was able to conceal them. I’ve had lots of practice.

A few days later, I began to recover. I spent more time walking around and worked on my novel.

But then the weakness worsened. I continued to have fevers, ranging from 103 to 105. When the fever was at its worst I couldn’t stand. I felt horribly nauseous and dazed, and had to lean against something to stay upright. Simple things like reading, talking and typing took up much of my energy. It didn’t help that I rarely felt like eating.

For my 21st birthday, in May, my parents set up a video call with my relatives. I barely had the energy to sit at the table. Halfway through the call I had to return to my room, exhausted.

By then my stash of pills was starting to run low, but I continued taking them daily. They made the weariness and fever more bearable. However, my weakness and confusion made it harder for me to remember to clean my supplies.

I didn’t have the energy to boil water, so I just used cold tap water and alcohol. I also stopped washing the towel I used to stem the bleeding. I knew this wasn’t safe, but suspected it didn’t matter. I figured I was going to die of the fever anyway.

When I failed to recover after that trip to the emergency room, my family took me to see various specialists. For about a month, the doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong. They took a lot of blood—not fun, because my tracks make me a hard stick—and ran all sorts of tests.

I became weaker still. Before long, I couldn’t even sit up unassisted. My fever and nausea continued. My body shook from the chills, and my bed was drenched in sweat.

Mercifully, the doctors eventually figured it out. I had MRSA—a staph infection in my blood—and would need six weeks of IV antibiotics. The doctor said something about how lucky it was that they’d caught it when they did, given how dangerous this could be. If I’d been sick for much longer, the infection might’ve reached my heart. They told me to come to the hospital immediately.

Since I didn’t want the doctor to know what had caused the infection, I claimed I had been picking at a “cat scratch” I showed them on my wrist. It was really an injection site, but helpfully to my story, one of my family’s cats does bite and scratch whenever anyone tries to pick her up. Since the infection was caused by bacteria present both in most houses and on people’s skin, the doctors believed me. They did send a psychiatrist in to chat with me, because scab-picking is apparently a form of self-harm. But I managed to convince her that I hadn’t been trying to hurt myself.

As it happened, I had just run out of Dilaudid the previous day. So I went through withdrawal during my first week in the hospital in May. Again, I was able to hide my symptoms. I took twice the usual dose of my sleeping meds, having smuggled in a bottle. I forced myself to ignore the mental and physical anguish. Some of the associated symptoms could also be caused by the infection, so the doctors didn’t suspect anything.

If someone you care about is using drugs, offering the help they may need to secure these supplies could very well save their life.  

After six boring, lonely weeks in the hospital, I finally got to go home on June 26. My fever had gone and I was getting stronger. My tracks had healed, leaving just thin purplish lines on my hands and arms.

I was still too traumatized to sleep in my old bedroom, where I’d spent those agonizing feverish months. My parents were kind enough to let me move into the library. I began dancing again. I continued working on my novel. Life went back to normal, thankfully.

I’m grateful to the people who took care of me as I got better. But all of this could easily have been prevented. I didn’t have to spend months shivering with fever, too weak to sit up. If I’d been able to order sterile syringes and other supplies for myself, I would’ve been able to stay healthy.

Even during a pandemic—in fact, especially during a pandemic—clean supplies need to be accessible. If someone you care about is using drugs, offering the help they may need to secure these supplies could very well save their life. Remember, I almost died at the age of 21 because my family refuses to believe in harm reduction.

Photograph courtesy of the author

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That’s why I didn’t tell her about my heroin use for nearly six months. I began using around my 18th birthday in spring 2017, and finally told her that fall. I knew she’d be furious—maybe even violent. Still, I couldn’t keep something like that a secret forever.

I was too frightened to tell her myself. So I told the nurse practitioner instead. Even when I asked her not to, she would always repeat everything to my mother. Of course my mother was enraged, and swiftly made an appointment with my psychiatrist.

Both she and the shrink, believing that all drug use is addiction, insisted that I enter rehab as soon as possible. When I explained that my use hadn’t caused me any problems and I could stop whenever I wanted, they ignored me. To them, my careful reasoning was just drug-addled “justifying.”

In fact, everyone I talked to believed that I needed to quit and “get help.” On some level I began to agree with them. After all, how could all the adults in my life be wrong in the same way?

I only went to the rehab for about two days. After that my father became convinced I was “having too much fun”—which never made sense to me, considering that I hated it and had trouble taking all the AA-based nonsense seriously—and forced me to quit.

About a year later, I started using again to deal with a bout of depression. I’d been sexually assaulted. When my parents found out, they attempted to stop me by refusing to let me leave the house without supervision and banning all my friends from visiting. This only made me feel powerless and pushed around, like a pinball protagonist. The worsened depression that resulted eventually led me to move away… and to begin using again. I didn’t know how else to cope. Before I left home, I was on the verge of killing myself. I couldn’t handle how alone I was or how strict they were being.

My family decided that I couldn’t be trusted to look after myself. For a few months they considered establishing a conservatorship—something usually reserved for people who are severely impaired by old age or mental illness. Luckily, this absurd plan never actually went anywhere.

I’ve often imagined what it would have been like if my parents had responded with kindness and understanding.

But it shouldn’t have surprised me. My father is a well-off Catholic Republican who attended military school and grew up on drug-war propaganda. To this day, he still believes that only “poor people” take illicit drugs (and generally blames them for their lot in life). I’m also slightly afraid of him; when angry, he occasionally uses his terrifying “drill sergeant” voice.

Though he, like virtually all my adult relatives, considers wine to be a part of his culture (we’re of Italo-Albanian or Arbëreshë blood), the use of illegal drugs disgusts and horrifies him. For years he warned me never to smoke weed, fearing I’d lose all my intelligence and ambition. To this day I’m still afraid to try the stuff—even though a number of my friends smoke or use edibles for various reasons. He never mentioned heroin, though, which made it slightly easier for me to take it.

My drug use, to be clear, wasn’t a problem, for me or for others. I hadn’t hurt anyone or stolen anything. When I injected I always used new, sterile equipment. I always used testing strips or reagents to check for fentanyl and other adulterants. As a result, I never once overdosed or became ill. The pros of using—for me, it mitigated my depression and insomnia—outweighed the cons. Plus, I made enough money from freelance writing and odd jobs (from stripping to busking to cashiering) to look after myself.

I’ve often imagined what it would have been like if my parents had responded with kindness and understanding, rather than anger and attempts at control. Because their reaction actually brought about the opposite of what they wished. The scolding, insults and nastiness only made me feel worse… and when I feel awful I’m more likely to use more.

Like the family of Sebastian from Brideshead Revisited, their controlling attempts to cure me of my drug use only made me more hopeless and likely to indulge. A habit that began because of an abusive relationship slowly became a way for me to deal with all kinds of pain and suffering.

Shaming people just won’t stop them from taking drugs, as the US government has failed to learn in the past half-century. It’ll only make it harder for them to trust you.

How Things Could Have Gone Better

If you’d like to actually help your loved one who uses drugs, start by asking them what they need. Listen to what they have to say. Support them. Take non-judgemental steps to help keep them safe. Keep naloxone on hand if they use opioids—and, in the current fentanyl-adulterated era, if they use other drugs. Avoid using stigmatizing language. And don’t assume that their use is problematic, especially if you haven’t got any evidence.

Drugs, like children, are an emotive topic. But it’s important to take a breath and not let your emotions control you. Instead of getting angry, my parents should’ve looked at the situation logically, as I tried to encourage them to do.

First, I was voluntarily telling them about my heroin use because I felt it was something they ought to know—they didn’t find out because I overdosed or was having some kind of crisis. That ought to have shown them that I wanted to be open with them, to include them in what was really happening in my life—the feelings and circumstances that had brought me to use heroin in the first place.

Children don’t have to be totally honest with their parents. Many of my friends snuck out to attend parties or go on dates. Yet I didn’t. I tried to keep everything above board, to keep my parents from worrying. I didn’t even try dating or drug use until I was 18, to make things less stressful for my parents. But they took all this for granted.

On a wider level, the evidence would have shown them that drug use isn’t inherently problematic. That’s why drug tests mean so little. Most people consume substances at some point. The majority aren’t suffering from addiction. If a person is able to study, work, maintain relationships and pay their bills, they don’t necessarily need help.

My parents wouldn’t accept this, and ended up sending me to rehab over and over again. It was an absurd waste of money.

AA, which they also pressured me to attend, didn’t help either. I wasn’t ever powerless over my use. Quite the contrary. When I wanted to, I could cut back or stop without much effort. The meetings only succeeded in irritating and offending me. I spent most of my time there getting into theological or philosophical arguments with people out of frustration.

However hard it seems, you should always let the person themselves decide what treatment, if any, they want to undergo.

Of course, even if I had been suffering from addiction, it still wouldn’t have done much good. Twelve-step programs have been estimated to work for only 5-8 percent of people. The associated unscientific belief system and stigmatizing language are incredibly harmful. Nobody should be forced to identify as an “addict” forever. Addiction isn’t a lifelong brain disease, and avoiding all drugs forever won’t cure anything. In the right circumstances and with help if they want it, most people can regain control over their use and return to moderation. While many find these groups comforting, they’re not a solution—and the harms often outweigh the benefits.

Forcing someone into treatment—even the best-evidenced kind—is always counterproductive and unjustifiable. However hard it seems, you should always let the person themselves decide what treatment, if any, they want to undergo.

I tried explaining all this to my parents, but they refused to listen. They always assumed I was lying or manipulating them. They subscribed—especially my father—to the widespread belief that drug users never tell the truth.

While it is true that some people who use drugs lie about their use sometimes, that’s a rational behavior. We live in a world that treats drug users as subhuman. People who use drugs don’t lie because they’re incapable of honesty, thanks to the magical properties of addiction or the drugs themselves—they do so to avoid social or legal consequences. You too would lie, I’m certain, to avoid being horrifically mistreated.

But I really can’t stand lying. Because of my Asperger’s syndrome I have an almost pathological aversion to falseness and often over-share to avoid “lies of omission.” I try to always tell the truth, even when doing so might hurt me. My parents ought to have known this, given the information I volunteered about my heroin use. Yet they were blinded by stereotypes and propaganda.

Invasions of Privacy and Broken Trust

While I was still living with them, they also began searching my purses and bedroom. Whenever they found needles or naloxone, they’d throw ‘em away. The same went for drugs themselves.

While I can understand, to a degree, why they’d do this, it didn’t help me. If my parents actually wanted to keep me safe, they would have ensured I always had sterile supplies and never used alone.

Plus, the new lack of privacy made me feel violated. I felt as if I couldn’t trust my own family because of how they treated me. The humiliating searches traumatized me. I’ve become absurdly protective of my bedroom ever since. Even now, I panic whenever someone opens the door. I can’t stand to let anyone come inside.

As if this weren’t distressing enough, for a while Dad was convinced that I must be stealing electronics to “fund my habit.” Why would I steal when I could just use the money I’d earned? I’ve never had much of a tolerance, so don’t need to afford large quantities of drugs. I alternate between using and not. Contrary to the stereotype, most people who use drugs pay for them by working.

Like the searches, drug tests hurt more than they help. They also fail to tell the testers (my parents) anything useful. Sometimes I tested positive for drugs I’d never taken, such as marajuana. Occasionally I’d test negative when I wasn’t, or positive for heroin during one of my bouts of abstinence.

But the sheer unreliability of drug tests isn’t their only flaw. Drug test results, even if accurate, mean very little because drug use and drug addiction are totally different. If my parents really wanted to see if I had a drug problem, they should’ve looked at my ability to function.

The dos—listen, love, support, obtain practical safety tools, help to the extent it’s welcome—are so easily summarized, if hard to follow.

Testing someone is also inherently invasive. By imposing testing, you’re basically saying that you don’t trust the person, further eroding any mutual respect. The humiliation of being forced to piss in a cup by my furious mother—as if the status of my urine said anything about my value as a human being or my ability to function—still bothers me today. By forcibly drug testing me, my parents made it even harder for me to trust them and failed to learn anything useful. Just don’t do it.

It seems that my recommendations are more of a list of don’ts than dos, because the dos—listen, love, support, obtain practical safety tools, help to the extent it’s welcome—are so easily summarized, if hard to follow.

But here’s a final don’t: You shouldn’t ever make someone detox. Doing so won’t help them. In fact, by lowering a person’s tolerance, quitting increases their risk of fatally overdosing when they resume use, as most will.

Recovery, if that’s what’s needed, isn’t about how many days someone’s been abstinent. It’s not about being able to pass drug tests or avoiding all substances. That’s a dangerous myth. Instead, it’s about whether a person is living a positive, fulfilling life.

When I’m not using heroin, I’m often too depressed to work or study. I can’t get anything done. Sometimes I won’t eat for days. When I’m using, on the other hand, I’m perfectly functional. I consider quitting to be a step backwards because of how useless I become. Safe supply, therefore—and hard as it is to obtain in this time and country—is probably the best option for me.

Of course, everyone’s different. Some quit and are happy to do so. Others do best when they’re able to take substances in moderation, perhaps using for a weekend here or there. Medications like methadone or buprenorphine also help many.

When it comes to chaotic or dysfunctional substance use, the drugs themselves aren’t the problem. Eliminating, say, heroin or alcohol from a person’s life won’t “cure” them. Substances serve a purpose, and problematic drug use is best understood as a coping strategy.

Understanding what drugs do for someone can help you figure out how to help them—if they need and want help. Encouraging them to address whatever issues they’re trying to solve in a safer, healthier manner makes far more sense than an abstinence über alles approach that only exacerbates and fails to fix what might really be wrong.

Photo via NeedPix/Public Domain

The post How I Wish My Parents Had Reacted to My Heroin Use appeared first on Filter.