Maybe the kids in the Abington Heights School District are snorting their heroin after school. Maybe the kids are smoking it in the school parking lot. Maybe the kids are shooting their dope into young veins with dirty needles that might kill them or give them AIDS.
However they’re using their smack in and around Clarks Summit, we need to act to help them stop.
Notice that I said help them stop, not make them stop. You can’t make a junkie or a potential junkie stop using heroin. You can only help.
Even then, assistance might not work.
I worked with heroin addicts for three years in a state prison and saw more return to the needle than stay away.
Expect some of your kids to die. Prepare for their funerals. Fatalities are a fact of life when it comes to using heroin. It’s that ghastly simple.
But can’t we do more to curtail heroin use?
Sure we can.
But while holding a mock funeral might sound like a nice deterrent, it’s merely a dramatic device that will likely not help. We need to do more, do better, and do it now.
Good kids and bad get trapped in the sometimes endless cycle of heroin addiction.
Good kids shoot dope, too.
Good kids want to get high as much as anybody. Using drugs often feels good. The urge is the same for people who like an apple martini or a nice wine. But this edge is raw and deep. Heroin dealers are far more dangerous. The consequences can be worse.
But the reason to imbibe is often similar.
People like to get high. People would rather feel good than bad.
But good times can turn particularly ugly with heroin. Alcoholism destroys, but heroin is unique in its nastiness. The addiction creeps up and one day captures you before you know what hit you.
You have to hide your urge. You need to feed the wild beast that rides your back and sinks sharp filthy claws into your neck, drawing blood the way blood appears in the stopper of a syringe when you prepare to shoot that dope into your vein.
The news about heroin use in the Abington Heights School District is like a bad dream that comes back to haunt us night after night, a reoccurring nightmare that seems to never go away.
This school year more than 18 students in the school district have entered treatment for substance abuse, many of them for heroin addiction.
In February, a recent school district graduate overdosed and died.
Any mind-altering substance can pose problems.
Abuse of prescription drugs, pot, meth, amphetamines, barbiturates, hallucinogens, mushrooms and other substances – including sniffing cleaning fluid or drinking cough medicine – can cause problems and even death.
Smoke a joint, lose focus driving and run your car into a tree. Trip and kill brain cells. Slip into a coma. Or simply OD from a heroin overdose. Trouble can come that easily.
That nice, soft cushion suddenly lasts forever.
Getting high becomes an escape that never ends.
You just die.
We’ll talk about heroin today.
You didn’t know you could smoke heroin, did you? Didn’t know you could snort it, either, did you?
Sue Henry
