It happened by accident.

My son had lost his cell phone and my wife was trying to get in contact with him by texting one of his friends.

The phone rang shortly after the text was sent.

The call was not from our son or his friend. The call was from the father of my son’s friend. He explained that he had just admitted his son to a detox facility because his son was addicted to heroin. But wait, he had more news. He explained that our son was also addicted to heroin.

To this day, we are very very grateful to that father for picking up the phone and calling people he did not know – to deliver the news that our son was a heroin addict. Where we can, we try to follow his example and “pass it forward” by letting other parents know if we learn their children are using heroin.

Our son was 19 years old and away at university. So we only saw him a few times a year, and even then he had plenty of warning that we were flying in to visit.

I wish this father’s phone call was the first warning we had received that our son was using illegal drugs. Sadly it wasn’t.

A year earlier, our son got into an argument with one of his house mates. Of course, we heard our son’s side of the story over a period of time and when the crunch came, we naturally believed our son’s story. I received an angry phone call from the house mate’s father, who threw in as an after thought that he was positive our son’s girlfriend was using illegal drugs and he thought our son might be as well.

Naturally we quizzed my son about it. My wife flew up to visit my son and get him drug tested. To this day, we do not know how he passed that drug test – but he did. We spoke to his girlfriend’s mother, who had seen her daughter recently and the consensus was the kids were clean and these were just hurtful words from an angry parent having a bad day.

Meanwhile our son got deeper and deeper into the heroin lifestyle.

Lessons:

  1. Parents need to help parents. We all love our children and sometimes may feel it is not our place to bring bad news to other parents – but we need to.
  2. If you receive a warning from a parent – check it out thoroughly. Take your child to a professional drug testing facility. We wrongly used a home test kit because we felt our son would find it less offensive. Make it a surprise test, so they do not have as much opportunity to cheat the test. We have learned addicts get up to all sorts of tricks, like carrying a clean sample of urine to the test with them and substituting it for their own.
  3. Regardless of the test results, look for other signs. Both my son and his girlfriend were both very skinny. This should have been a warning to us, but when we quizzed my son about it, he said his girlfriend was a bit anorexic and he tended to eat what she ate – and hence they both lost weight. I figured it was better to be on the slim side versus the chubby side.
  4. Money is the key. The other warning signs we received were to do with money. His laptop had been stolen and he needed to buy a new one. He lost his cell phone and needed to buy another one. His girlfriend’s family were going through a divorce and could not afford to pay her share of the rent, so could we help her out. Over time, this added up to a lot of money and we now know it all went to pay for heroin.
  5. Does your child have friends who are being admitted to detox. It seems to me that heroin addicts tend to hang out with other heroin addicts. So over time, you may hear of some of them being admitted to detox. In our case, we heard of an old friend being admitted to detox that our son had not seen in some time. Plus our son’s girlfriend was admitted to detox. This sent alarm bells ringing so we contacted her mother and was told that she was admitted to get off various Attention Deficit Disorder drugs she had been on since she was a child. This is exactly what our son had told us, so it put our minds at ease. But you guessed it, out of some misguided loyalty to my son, his girlfriend’s mother lied to us. Since addicts hang around with other addicts – if friends are being admitted to detox, this should be a warning to you.
  6. Finally and most importantly, before you confront your child – hop on the web and read the articles about how good addicts are at telling lies and deception. Like most parents, we knew our son might tell us the occasional white lie, but we never imagined that he could have told blatant lies about very serious issues. We always felt if we looked him in the eye and let him know we were serious, he would tell us the truth. And the lies were not just simple lies – they were elaborate lies with lots of specific details – this made them all the more believable. If your child is a heroin addict – you need to know that they will lie to your face. Acknowledging this is probably one of the most difficult issues I have had to deal with. I cannot trust the son I love.
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