Pubdate: Thu, 24 Apr 2014
Source: Boston Globe (MA)
Copyright: 2014 Globe Newspaper Company
Contact: http://services.bostonglobe.com/news/opeds/letter.aspx?id=6340
Website: http://bostonglobe.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/52
Author: Kevin Cullen

CHRONICLING A HEROIN ADDICT'S LIFE

It was class presentation day in Stephen Mott's sociology class at
Massasoit Community College in Brockton, and a young woman named Jamie
was first up, standing nervously before her classmates.

Jamie told them that she decided to do a case study on heroin, because
of the recent attention paid to overdoses and because she wants to
become an addiction counselor. Her case study involved someone she
called Jonathan.

Jonathan grew up in a Boston suburb and began playing hockey as a
4-year-old after seeing "The Mighty Ducks" movie. He became a terrific
player. He hung out with a core group of 10 friends, most of them also
jocks.

At 12, Jonathan smoked his first cigarette and took his first drink.
By the time he was a sophomore, he was a star on his high school team
and was getting drunk almost every night.

His parents grounded him when they caught him drinking.

By 17, Jonathan started doing lines of cocaine. It let him stay up
later and drink more. He went to college, made the hockey team as a
freshman and started doing Percocet.

One night, Jonathan's friend emerged from a house, one where they
usually scored Percocet, with heroin. At first Jonathan castigated his
friend. Then he sniffed the heroin.

Jonathan became a functioning addict. He didn't look like a junkie.
His sister had a baby. and he couldn't wait for the boy to get old
enough so he could teach him to play hockey.

After his sophomore year in college, Jonathan left school and began
selling Percocet. He decided to enroll at a different university. Then
one from that core of 10 neighborhood buddies died from a heroin overdose.

"Everyone handles loss in different ways," Jamie told her classmates.
"Some people choose to honor those they lose by living their life
positively and being the best person they can. Addicts typically use
the loss as another excuse to use, and that is exactly what Jonathan
did."

By the end of his junior year, Jonathan was popping eight Percocet
pills a day. He flunked out and ran headlong toward the next high.

Jonathan's parents and sister convinced him to go to detox. The
withdrawal was hell, and Jonathan said he never wanted to go through
anything like that again. But he relapsed, again and again. Eventually
he started doing something he vowed he never would: inject heroin.

Of his group of 10 friends, one was dead, one was in prison, and seven
others were addicts. Eventually, Jonathan ended up on the phone,
begging his one clean friend to let him stay at his place. His friend
refused to enable him and told him to go get help.

Instead, Jonathan robbed anyone and anything for the next fix. He went
to rinks and stole wallets from the locker rooms while other guys were
playing hockey. He snuck into his sister's house and stole the piggy
bank of the nephew he taught to play hockey.

His mother got a court order to put him into treatment. He made the 30
days, then went right back to the needle. His father had him arrested
and sent back for treatment. He broke out of a facility, then called
his sister, alone and afraid. She persuaded him to turn himself in.

He's been in treatment in Texas and Nevada, and now he's
home.

As she wrapped up her paper, Jamie said, "Less than 36 hours after
this case study was completed, Jonathan, my little brother, relapsed
again."

Her classmates sat there, stunned.

"So," a classmate asked, "he's your brother?"

"Yes," Jamie replied.

Stephen Mott has been teaching for 40 years.

"In all that time," he said, "I have never read a better, sadder
paper."

He gave Jamie an A.
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