Ryan told me he was 12-years-old when he started smoking pot, sneaking away from his upscale family home in Connecticut. He was a teenager when he started drinking. Then a friend’s grandmother died and she left behind a full prescription bottle of the popular and widely-used painkiller OxyContin.
The two friends were only too happy to experiment with the drug. When that ran out, Ryan started buying them from his pot dealer, but that became too expensive. So, he was turned on to a new kind of high, injecting heroin into his veins. “At my worst, I was spending $300 a day for an okay high. I found heroin and it was a lot cheaper. Until you’ve done it you’ve never felt anything like it.” We were talking in the comfortable living room of a house doubling as a rehab center in the mountains called ”Inspire Malibu”.
Ryan, we could say, is representative of the ”new face of heroin”. According to a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Psychiatry, “heroin use has changed from an inner-city, minority-centered problem to one that has a more widespread geographical distribution, involving primarily white men and women in their late 20s living outside of large urban areas.
Outgoing U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder called this an ”urgent public health crisis.” The growth of heroin use among basically white suburban young men, in a sense, makes sense, it you want to forget the fact that it’s illegal and can kill you. If you look at the numbers, why would you spend $300 for a pill that’s hard to get versus say $30 for a hit of heroin from your corner dealer? It’s another example of the, shall we say, controversial aspects of our ongoing war on drugs. Though no one would argue for the legalization of heroin, addicts point out the difference in price. And to them, it seems obvious why they made the choice they did. One ”good thing” though, if you want to call it that, is that a lot of these ”new” heroin addicts have insurance, either through their jobs or if they’re under 26 like Ryan, through their parents’ insurance plans. But insurance won’t help, treatment won’t help, unless, as Ryan put it, you’re ready to end that “phase” of your life. He says he is and we hope he’s successful because when I spoke to him at the rehab center it was his third try. At the age of 23 he’s lived a long life.
