Well-meaning and facing terrible choices, but I can’t help thinking it was the wrong one. Enabling her just avoids consequences and ensures that nothing will change. Is he going to drive her down there every time, and shell out what she needs?
That’s always going to be true, though. He didn’t know where she was while he was sitting in jail, for instance.
Or by melting the flesh off their bones trying to make their own inferior heroin knock-off.
(The following is posted assuming that the father is actually trying to help his daughter)
And what do you do when the daughter runs instead of going to the hospital?
Addiction is a nasty thing and it is impossible to get an addict to quit unless the addict wants to quit. Even if the addict does want to quit the success rates for beating addiction are very low.
Parents, family and friends of addicts have some very hard choices to make and those choices aren’t always clear. Lets say you have the choice either of buying your daughter heroin, in an effort to hopefully find some way to get her clean, or not buy the heroin and have her run and end up on the street prostituting for money to buy the heroin. Which do you choose?
Slee
Those are not the only choices, though.
I choose:
Offer to take her to the hospital for medical withdrawl and to get her into a methadone clinic. Pay for the methadone.
If she won’t take that - I call the cops anonymously to get her arrested when I know she’s holding. She won’t be dying from an overdose on the street and who knows, she may even get clean in prison. It happens.
But I wouldn’t help her kill herself, which is what heroin is all about. She’ll have to do that on her own.
Where are you guys getting that the Dad bought heroine? The article says he drove her somewhere where she could buy it.
I don’t see this as a parent issue. The “girl” is 28-years-old. His parenting is done. This was one adult facilitating another adult to commit a crime.
I can think of very few times when facilitating someone to continue self-destructive behavior is good. Especially when said behavior is also illegal. This is not ine of those few times.
except in the admittedly technical sense of “person who commits a crime.”
I have a friend who adopted a baby born addicted to opioids. The baby was also premature. It spent the first weeks of its like in a NICU. when the realized it was suffering from withdrawal, they put it on methadone, and they slowly reduced the dose of methadone to wean it off.
I assume something similar can be done with adults. Qadgop, can you speak to that?
Now, whether there was a hospital WILLING to do that is a different question.
I remember a *House *episode when they had a heroin addict to deal with. They put her in a coma while they flushed the drugs out of her system, blocked the opioid receptors with Naltrexone and basically had the patient go through all of the gnarly physical withdrawal while asleep. Apparently it is a thing that is done for real (though Naltrexone isn’t quite the magic bullet portrayed in the show).
The mental part of addiction, however, cannot be dealt with that way.
Hoo boy. Complex topic.
In the US, it is ILLEGAL for a physician to prescribe opioids to maintain an addiction/treat opioid withdrawal symptoms, unless said physician is specially certified to prescribe methadone or buprenorphine to do so. No other drugs can be used for that purpose.
Now, any Doc with a DEA certificate can prescribe methadone and buprenorphine for pain. But not for addiction. And most docs are not willing to give opioids to treat someone in withdrawal, because that’s treating the addiction/withdrawal.
So, to get on such a detox/maintenance program, the addict must find a methadone/buprenorphine clinic, get converted over from heroin/oxycodone/dilaudid/morphine/whatever opioid onto one of those two legit drugs, at a certified clinic, where a certified prescriber can dose them appropriately for their addiction.
Most hospitals do not have such certification. Though most NICU teams do have certification to treat addicted newborns, who absolutely must be eased off the opioid, lest it thoroughly fuck up their future development.
So most hospitals turf a withdrawing addict to the street with a referral to the local opioid clinic, since it’s rare that opioid withdrawal poses a legit health risk. Some bold/well-meaning/daring docs will prescribe something like codeine ‘for pain’ and tell the patient how to use it as a taper, but the addict usually won’t follow such directions and just ends up in withdrawal. AND the doc who does that puts himself at risk with the DEA for maintaining an addiction.
That last bit, giving codeine, etc is getting done less and less with the authorities cracking down further on opioid prescribing. We docs are daily faced with new statistics showing how much of what we think we’re legitimately prescribing for pain is getting diverted, often fatally, for other purposes.
I’ve got 4 pregnant opioid addicts under my care now, whom I’ve converted to buprenorphine to keep baby safe for delivery. They’ll be weaned off after, as will the moms. One of the moms is a woman I had on buprenorphine a year ago, for an earlier pregnancy. She was discharged into a good maintenance program for her addiction, but ended up going back to heroin and getting pregnant instead.
I feel as if I’m fighting the long defeat, but at least a few little cats have their odds improved by having their moms properly maintained on opioids during the pregnancy.
Buprenorphine and methadone both give much less euphoria than heroin, morphine, oxycodone, hydrocodone etc. do. They’re also less sedating. And these drugs do tend to block the euphoria given by the heroin, etc IF an addict on the drug relapses to heroin. And while on the buprenorphine or methadone, many addicts are able to hold down a job, do goal-oriented activities, take care of themselves, and others, go to school, and learn and retain knowledge. It’s a harm reduction strategy to maintain a heroin addict on those meds. Sometimes it works wonderfully. Sometimes outcomes are not so good.
(emphasis mine)
Join Daddies against Nancy Drew and help keep your daughters off literacy.
Thanks! I’ve always wondered why addicts tended to go to special “Methadone clinics” for daily doses rather than just get a prescription for methadone from their friendly neighborhood doctor and fill it at the corner pharmacy. I had suspected that it was mostly a social thing and that the kinds of people who get hooked on opiates either prefer the clinics (e.g. due to especially well trained doctors or useful ancillary supports), or are the kinds of people (e.g. badly behaved, criminal, homeless) that upscale neighborhood doctors won’t touch with a ten foot stethoscope. “Get that guy out of my office and dump him in front of the nearest methadone clinic! Next!”
Is it possible (legally and practically) for especially well-behaved, smart, or wealthy addicts to get a bottle of methadone to take home, or is it daily clinic visits for everyone?
Practically, I’d say no. If you can be trusted to self-medicate unsupervised when your doctor hands you a bottle of methadone, why do you need it?
No, it would not always be true. I mean, I’m sure his arrest came as a surprise to him, he obviously wasn’t expecting it.
So in a situation not involving jail time, he could take her to get the drugs and take her back home to use. I’m sure that this dad already has tried all other options (including arrest and detox). This strikes me as a desperate parent doing anything they could to keep their child alive and as safe as possible while using. I wouldn’t judge this guy until I’ve been in a similar spot myself.
thanks. That’s very depressing to read. It would seem very hard for an addict to seek help, unless such certification is more common than you imply.
What about Suboxone?
20/20 recently had a show about heroin addiction and how common it is now. Many people get hooked using their legally-prescribed oxycontin and then turn to heroin when their prescription runs out. Getting off of it seems to almost impossible without treatment. Getting treatment can be almost impossible to try and find a center which you can afford and has beds. Many of these addicts have already lost their jobs and any assets by this time.
In the 20/20 episode, they followed one guy who was addicted and wanted to get clean for his wife and young son. He eventually found a treatment center with space, but 2 weeks in he left the center to get heroin and died from an overdose.
We definitely need to view this type of addiction as a serious medical issue and come up with viable treatment plans. This dad could have been any of us struggling to figure out how to help our child.
I wonder if there’s a co-dependency issue going on?
[QUOTE=watchwolf49]
my own kids knew I would call the police and report them
[/quote]
Calling the police on your drug addicted children for the crime of being addicted to drugs is about the very worst thing you could possibly do. I don’t even…
Without knowing more about the situation, those are valid ideas. But there is a possible downside and that downside if the forced method fails there is a high likelihood that the addict will just disappear. I know a lot of recovering addicts and alcoholics, being a recovering alkie myself, and I know lots of people who haven’t seen or heard from addicted family members in years due to situations like this.
Not all people are ready to risk that.
The really nasty thing about addiction and addicts is that it hurts the family and friends as much as the addict. Family, out of love for the addict, will do all sorts of odd shit trying to help the addict. If the situation is bad enough, having the addict use in the safety of a home instead of out on the street may be a perfectly valid response until a better option is available. Obviously that wouldn’t be a good long term solution but in the short term it might be the best option available.
Also note, getting into a detox unit isn’t always easy or fast. On one of my attempts at sobriety I checked into getting in to detox, the wait was over two weeks. Hospitals aren’t treatment centers and are unlikely to do much, as Qadgop noted.
So sometimes there just aren’t any easy, quick and clear options.
Slee
Damn spellcheck. It’s enough to drive a person to heroin!