But it wasn't until I came to Plano, and looked into the eyes of parents who stared back at me with an unspeakable and bottomless grief, that the fact of the matter hit me. Heroin kills, and it is not choosy about its victims. It's sad that we need to be reminded of such a brutal truth. So many young people died of heroin overdoses in the late 1960s and early 1970s, one might have hoped the stark lesson had been learned. But every generation finds its own poison.
Every child takes a unique and solitary dare at some point in the hard process of growing up.
The estimated number of current heroin users has jumped from 68,000 in 1993 to 216,000 in 1996. I have a brother and a sister, and both of my parents, and there was a major wound in all of them. There was trust that took years to rebuild. He is frighteningly eloquent on both the pleasures and pains of heroin, and he is working to turn his insight and experience into a career in the drug-treatment field, counseling adolescents. Because there's something completely unnatural and just shattering about that.