One time when our son was camping with friends and their families in the wilderness, a friend of ours asked him why he used heroin. JL said: “Because it takes away all the pain.” Our friend shared this with us and several hundred other friends at our son’s memorial – and said he always wondered if JL was referring to physical pain, emotional pain, or both.
From my earliest memories, my knees and legs ached at random times and varying intensity. Sometimes I thought it was from running or playing too hard. At other times, it seemed like it happened when it rained. But, being in a large family growing up in the late 1950’s and 60’s, there were not many options for relieving that pain. My parents would sometimes rub my legs with witch hazel, which made my legs feel good at the time. Sometimes they would wrap my knees in an Ace bandage to help while I was at school. Yet there was one thing that never happened: I was never given any medicine to relieve my pain.
I didn’t realize when I was young that most likely even if my parents had known of a drug that would have relieved my pain, they would not have given it to me because they were not worried about me having to suffer a little pain. They knew that pain was an inevitable and bearable part of life, and an important part of forging resilience. Sadly, John and I — and many of our contemporaries — did everything we could to help our kids avoid pain. Now we are experiencing the result of those mistaken values. We found the same thoughts expressed by Sam Quinones, as he discusses this at length in Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic. (www.samquinones.com/books/dreamland/) He believes this dynamic is in large part responsible for the opiate epidemic because it is intertwined with our American culture of comfort and prosperity.
Yes, the pharmaceutical companies and their executives who shamelessly promoted drugs that they knew were highly addictive are responsible for much of what we are living with — and dying from — in America today. But we are responsible for facilitating a culture of pursuing a pain-free existence. It can be obtained, but at what price? Is it one more way we humans think we can overcome the perils of nature and living in an imperfect world?
We are not sure when our son first started using opiates, but we think that it started with prescription pills that were not his or ours. And we know that after a serious accident, when the doctor would no longer give him prescriptions, he bought Oxy on the street, then switched to BT Heroin. He just couldn’t deal with the pain and he was not motivated to do physical therapy — it was too much work.
I feel certain that JL was referring to both physical and emotional pain. What may have started as looking for relief from some physical pain when he was a young teenager, turned into a monster that was causing him shame and ruining his life — and that is painful.
Opiate Nation 