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Through likes and comments, I’ve watched my hometown of Perry, Ohio, disappear into and come back from heroin addiction.
The U.S. is facing a massive heroin epidemic, and nowhere is it more evident than in Ohio, where fatal drug overdoses surpassed car crashes as the leading cause of accidental death in 2007, and increased by 60 percent from 2011 to 2012. Addicts in rehabilitation say heroin is the easiest drug to find. State legislators have called for Republican Gov. John Kasich to declare the prevalence of heroin a public-health emergency,
and in May he agreed to an Obamacare Medicaid expansion largely because
the state badly needed the federal help in funding treatment for heroin
addiction.
Perry, Ohio, is a microcosm of the epidemic, which is now infiltrating
upper-middle-class suburbs. Thirty minutes east of Cleveland, the town
of 1,500 has a median annual income $31,000 higher than that of Ohio
overall, but it also lacks opportunities for young adults to start their
lives. With the exception of the technical jobs offered by the nuclear
power plant — a definitive feature of the town — those without a college
degree travel to neighboring towns to work in retail or service
industries, and those with a degree rarely return. When I graduated high
school six years ago, most of the people in my class left Perry for
college, but many of those who stayed behind eventually turned to heroin
to cope with their anxieties about the future. Addiction to the drug is
growing most quickly
among people between the ages of 18 and 25, like the friends who fell
off my Facebook timeline as their lives became absorbed by their
addiction.
Over time, I forgot about many
of these people as I made new friends and experienced new things, and as
my Facebook feed became populated with photos of frat parties and
college football games. While I photo-bragged about crazy beer fests or
complained about all-nighters at the library, they posted less and less.
As they turned away from friends and family in real life for fear of
negative feedback, they turned away from Facebook, too. Richard Foster,
the executive vice president of treatment programs for Gateway
Rehabilitation Center in Pennsylvania, says active addicts are “not
talking to family and friends, and they’re not posting on social media
about their struggles.” In active addiction, he says, they are still in
denial, usually turning back to their friends, family, and social media
only when they are in stages of recovery and proud to share it.
Now, I’m seeing their names pop
up for the first time in years, with posts like “48 hours of sobriety
and all I’ve gotten is this lousy t-shirt,” and messages of
encouragement filling the comments. In contrast to the usual slew of
carefully choreographed photos of graduations, vacations, and weddings,
the raw honesty of these posts is striking. For heroin addicts, who must
cut ties with their communities of users as part of recovery, Facebook
is both a support system, connecting them back to relationships they had
before their addiction, and a venue that helps others understand the
fragility of the recovery process. For some in Perry who struggle with
heroin addiction, Facebook is a way to call for help and support. For
those of us who have left, their posts are stark reminders of the
reality of the problem ravaging our quaint hometown.
It was a post from a high school
class clown named Khari on Sept. 17 that alerted me that a friend had
passed away from an overdose that day. Comments like “Please get
healthy!” and “See? Don’t be messing with that stuff!” came flooding in
by the dozens. In high school, through puberty and awkward social
changes, Khari was funny, fearless, and blunt. When I called her after
seeing her post, she talked about the years since we graduated from high
school, the times she has been in and out of jail for heroin-related
crimes, and the friends and boyfriends who overdosed and died.
When I knew her at 19 years old,
Khari was against heroin; she says she was “one of those ignorant
profiling” people who chastised people who did it. But after seeing
friends leave town, she started feeling like she was missing out on life
and turned to heroin as a way to deal with the pains of the
quarter-life crisis.
She says that after the
most recent overdose death in Perry, the most difficult part for her was
seeing the online activity of old friends struggling to cope with the
pain of loss and the confusion that comes with addiction.
“I’ve been dealing with this on
and off for six years, so watching [people] I grew up with go through it
was really hard for me,” Khari says.
Emma is another Perry kid, one I
knew through mutual friends, who turned to heroin after high school.
She started smoking weed at age 12; by 15, she and her friends were
taking Oxycodone. At 17, her boyfriend taught her how to shoot up
heroin, saying that he was protecting her by showing her how to do it
safely. When her friends left for college, she moved into her
boyfriend’s grandmother’s basement, and she says that’s when things
turned for the worse. She felt like she didn’t have anything to look
forward to, that she was doing nothing with her life.
“I remember the day all my
friends left for college,” she says. “I was stuck in Perry and it just
made me want to get high even more.”
For the next six years, Emma was
in and out of relatives’ basements, friends’ couches, and rehab centers
in California and Florida for months at a time. Once, on a binge while
in treatment in California, she crashed the car of her employer into the
car of the owner of the rehab center. She was kicked out and moved back
to Perry to attempt to start her life over … again. She relapsed in 10
days, spending the next two months getting high and using up the entire
$6,000 she had saved.
Now seven months sober at a
different rehab center in California, she has been posting her progress
on Facebook routinely: “90 days sober!” received over 200 likes and
comments.
“There’s people [commenting]
that I haven’t seen in years, people that knew me from I was little,”
she says. “My mom’s friends are saying, ‘I remember when you were
little’ and saying that they are proud of me.” She says seeing people
from her childhood showing that they care helps keep her accountable for
her sobriety. The feedback confirms that a community cares about her
recovery. “It makes me feel really good, you know?”
Foster, the rehab-center
executive, says the shield of the screen may make people feel more
comfortable admitting they’ve been an addict than they would be in real
life. “It’s safer than going in to a room and saying ‘Hi, I’m Rich and
I’m an addict,’ ” he says.
But Angela, another classmate
who popped back on my timeline last year with an announcement of
newfound sobriety, is more skeptical of the role social media can play
in recovery. She says that while the encouragement from Facebook can be
uplifting, it doesn’t help people understand the intensity of addiction.
“Liking someone’s status about
clean time is a good way to remain supportive without too much risk,
especially for people you’ve been close to who have been hurt by broken
promises and relapse,” she says, but posting about her problems in the
throes of addiction would likely scare people away from reaching out.
“You can’t tell people, ‘I’m so sick, I’m dying, please give me money so
I don’t have to go … rob somebody.’ ”
At 16, Angela was smart, witty,
gorgeous, and always one step more mature than everyone else. She was
also a little harder than everyone else. She gave me my first shot of
moonshine in the stands at a football game before I knew what moonshine
was.
By senior year, she managed to
get a full academic scholarship to a private college in Ohio … and she
was shooting up heroin every other day. At high school graduation, where
she was summa cum laude, she missed walking across the stage because
she was dopesick — nauseated and vomiting from withdrawal — in the
bathroom. She tried to quit heroin before leaving for college, but ended
up going to school still addicted and dropping out before the first
quarter ended. The night she decided to quit college, she says, someone
from Perry paid her a visit and brought heroin.
“I just went to go on a dope run and I never came back,” she says. “It was always people from home.”
Ashamed of disappointing her
family, Angela says, she gave up completely on battling her addiction
after she dropped out. She became reclusive, lost friends. Her younger
sister shunned her completely. In the past six years, she has been to
rehab eight times and detox centers 20 times, and continues to struggle
with addiction while on house arrest today.
“I turn around and I think,
‘This isn’t what I planned for my life,’ ” she says, adding that she
sees posts from old friends about great life improvements, and she feels
like she missed out. “My friends have these great jobs, these great
lives, [they’re] buying houses and doing big things and I’m just
clueless,” she says. When I asked her what she sees on her Facebook
timeline from friends who do heroin, she says, “Mostly deaths.” But, she
says when she sees posts about sobriety and recovery from other
friends, it is motivating to pursue recovery and gives her hope that
it’s possible for her.
“You’ve seen that person down at
their worst, and then [when] you see them looking happy, it’s like, ‘I
can do this too,’ ” she says. “It’s like support groups, kind of, to see
that everyone is touched by it.”
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