Let's not become the next Herointown
I read my childhood friend’s Facebook post early Saturday morning and my heart hurt for him.
In my head, I could see him in New Jersey, sitting with slumped shoulders that matched his message’s tone of despair.
His beloved 21-year-old daughter, his sunshine, was dead.
Sadly, it was not a surprise. For the last few years, Molly — a once-bright-eyed and bubbly cheerleader and drama kid — was engaged in a battle with heroin addiction.
It’s an epidemic in my native New Jersey, a crisis with staggering statistics. Heroin and opioids have killed thousands there in the last decade.
The Star-Ledger/NJ.com published a unique project on the issue last December. The paper’s journalists used 10 years of data on heroin use in the Garden State to create a fictional city: Herointown.
Its population is 128,000 — the estimated number of active heroin and opioid users statewide. It is the fourth largest city in New Jersey. There were 5,217 buried in Herointown’s cemetery by the end of 2015.
And in the real world, it’s not just affecting minority groups in urban areas. Heroin deaths in the hundreds have occurred in nearly every county in the state. Of the heroin users seeking treatment in New Jersey last year, 72.3 percent were white.
Why should we care here in North Idaho? Because, as Brian Walker reported in this paper in February, there is a “heroin tsunami” plaguing the nation, and it’s pounding our shores, too.
Statewide, the amount of heroin Idaho State Police took off the streets jumped nearly 800 percent from 2014 to 2015.
Post Falls Police Chief Scot Haug told us in February that heroin has surpassed methamphetamine as the most common drug behind marijuana in this community.
People here are dying.
We have a generation of kids that includes many who won’t touch meth thanks in large part to media campaigns like the Idaho Meth Project — a large-scale, multi-media and outreach prevention effort. The young people trying heroin and abusing prescription painkillers here today grew up seeing the Meth Project’s images of young people addicted to meth and driven to desperation, robbed of their health while they stole from others to support their habits. Those pictures drove the Meth Project’s “not even once” message home.
Heroin is just as, if not more, addictive than meth. Its effects are also frequently harder to spot because often, the first sign is death by overdose. That’s the message we must start sharing.
We can’t wait until our kids are in the grips of addiction to heroin or painkillers to start talking openly about this.
Another friend of mine shared something she read, a letter to the editor of a newspaper penned by a mother whose child had died from a heroin overdose a month earlier.
She wrote:
“1. This can happen to anyone. No socioeconomic barriers exist. Every time you smoke weed, or use what is perceived as a recreational drug, there is a chance that it is tainted with a substance that can kill.
2. The drug dealer is not always the creepy inner city guy or some bad kid from town; it could be your next door neighbor, a father of children your kids’ ages.”
This mom had no idea her boy, a 19-year-old college student, was using. He went to classes, had a part-time job, a girlfriend he adored, and ate dinner with his family every night. His mother worked from home. Her office was two feet from her son’s bedroom. Her son never took money from her purse, and they talked regularly. He told his parents he loved them every day.
This mother wrote that if she knew what her son was doing, she could have tried to get her son help.
Rehab may not have made a difference for this boy - that’s how deadly this addiction is - but it might have saved him.
My friend who shared this mother’s message has children in college herself.
She wrote: “Wow, everything this woman says about her family and her son sounds like my own. My kids have never given me a reason to worry about this either, but times have changed. It’s definitely time to get over shame and/or disappointment so we can save these kids. We are all in this together.”
People very close to me in New Jersey have lived in Herointown. Some got out alive; a few didn’t.
Just the other morning, while driving to the office here in Coeur d’Alene, the first thing I heard on a local radio station was a public service announcement with a woman, a meth addict, talking about her experience, how she never thought she’d end up in prison.
I have never heard a similar message about heroin in North Idaho. I have never seen an ad warning people of the drug’s deadliness.
We need to start talking about this before we have our own Herointown.
As a newspaper, we can continue to shine a light on the issue, but we need your help.
Share your story about how heroin has affected your life. Whether you’re an addict or a family member, a friend, co-worker or boss, you have a message. Sharing it could save a life - or a whole town full of lives.
Send your stories to me: mdolan@cdapress.com