America’s deadly cult of abstinence
An impossible ideal costs lives, prevents recovery & promotes teen pregnancies
On the morning of May 23rd, 2019 I went to wake my son, Aaron, who had surprised me by traveling from Charlotte, North Carolina to visit with his mother and me while I underwent treatment for cancer. He lay supine on our living room couch, still wearing jeans and a tee-shirt. Typical. His face was covered with mucus; bubbles of saliva formed around his mouth. I thought he must have been experiencing allergies from the change of locale. I paused, awaiting the reassuring rise and fall of his chest. When it didn’t come, I touched his jean-clad leg.
And I knew. He was dead. Had been for several hours.
There is so much horror in the world, but I can imagine nothing worse than finding my beautiful only child, my son, dead.
It was heroin.
The high-quality China white that permeated our neighborhood’s drug scene, and which he himself had sold to fund his habit while living with his mother and me a few years prior. After we confronted him, he made the transition to suboxone. Suboxone is buprenorphine, a potent narcotic agonist that works much like methadone—but is even more stable—in combination with naloxone.
