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.

My wife asked my son about this last night and he said he took something to mask the heroin usage from his urine, so he could pass the test. I wondered how easy this was to do, so I did a quick search of the internet.

Did you know they sell synthetic urine to enable an addict to pass a drug test?

Learn more by reading these articles

How to pass a drug test gives a good overview of how to pass a urine, hair, saliva test for substances like opiates, heroin, cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine, ecstasy, and benzodiazepines. It even tells you how long after use you have to wait to avoid detection.

How to pass an opiate drug test gives you step by step instructions.

Need to buy some supplies – just order online. Pass the test says:

Passing your urine, saliva, hair or random drug test naturally with fast, simple, easy to use one hour products

Our Same-Day Urine Drug Testing solutions are made from the finest 100% natural ingredients. Our unique combination of vitamins, minerals, and herbal cleansers are put to the test by people just like you every day with more than successful results. Today most drug testing facilities have clamped down on the testing procedures. The most fail-safe way to prepare for your drug test, especially if you don’t know if you will be watched, is to take a Same-Day Treatment. Not only will your test be clean the first time, but if you have a retest that day, you’ll be covered. You never know when they will drop or lose your sample.

We all wanted to raise smart kids. But when it comes to heroin addiction, unless us parents do our homework first – our addicted kids are going to run rings around us.

The Recovery Helpdesk has a couple of interesting articles that I would like to highlight.

The first article is about tough love. Like Heroin Helper, Recovery Helpdesk generally recommends that we focus on safety and minimizing harm. This article asks:

What could make a parent accept advice from an expert to allow their child to suffer serious harm?  What could make them persist in this course of action or inaction, even while horrible things are happening to their child right before their eyes?

Food for thought, isn’t it.

But I think any parent who has experienced the lies and deception of a heroin addict even for a short time, could tell you the answer. We were raised in a system of consequences. Pleasant consequences if you did good, unpleasant consequences if you did bad. This is how you learn. Lies and deception are bad, so therefore unpleasant consequences are called for.

Of course these “unpleasant consequences” rarely were of the life threatening nature of overdoes, HIV, Hepatitis,  jail, homelessness, etc. Plus mental illness is often associated with addiction. Even if it isn’t, there is always the question of how much the drug is controlling the addict’s mind and driving their behavior.

The most valuable part of this article, was not the article, but the discussion between the Author and a reader called Craig who opened with the statement:

I am the parent of an 18-year-old addict. He was admitted to a 30 day residential treatment center just before Christmas 2009. He returned home with boundaries and attended IOP, AA, etc… We (parents) also attended Families Anonymous and Educational sessions at the treatment centers. We also have 3 younger children at home (ages 11-15). When he returned home we set boundaries for him and also provided support (home, food, help with car/insurance etc…). The conditions of the support were passing drugs tests and maintaining a sober life style. Things were going great (we thought) for about 5 months, but we caught him with drugs in his room. He was using a substance that was not detected on the drug test for several months (K2) and began smoking pot and taking other things a couple of weeks before.

Our agreement was he would not be given any financial support and would not allowed to live in our home if he did not want to quit using (we had a very clear written family contract). We also learned relapse can be part of recovery, but he had to commit to continuing treatment and express a desire to be sober.

He chose (emphasis on his choice) to leave our home knowing he would be on his own without any of our support…stating he did not want to quit using. He has been gone a little over a month. He is now in an apartment with a drug addict roommate. He has been able to maintain his job by car pooling and getting rides from others for the time being. We still have open lines of communication and tell him we love him, but will not support him unless he wants to get clean. There is the occasional (maybe twice a month) visit to a restaurant, a loaf of bread or a ride to work. There is also a standing offer to support him in any way that supports sobriety…paying for treatment, rides to counseling, AA, whatever. However, he only contacts us when he wants cash or needs a ride somewhere. We state we love him, but he needs to figure that out on his own…always offering support if he wants to stop using. He has been to treatment, AA, IOP and knows at least one path to sobriety but still believes he is “not that kind of addict” or “it is OK to just smoke pot”.

In my personal case, I am not sure what else to do when the addict won’t express a desire to quit and we refuse to allow our home and other children to be exposed to drug use with the surrounding chaos. We hope to still be in a situation where we can help him if or when he wants help for sobriety, but if he gets in trouble with the law, falls into major debt, suffers abuse or any other consequence it will be his choice….he has an alternate if he wants help and is willing to be held accountable for sobriety.

Craig expressed exactly what I was feeling. I encourage you to read the back and forth between the author and Craig as the interchange was both interesting and enlightening.

The second article considers housing and if a parent should pay for it. The author recommends the Housing First model and says:

I agree with NAMI (and federal housing programs for mentally ill and addicted homeless people like Shelter Plus Care which uses a “housing first” model) that withholding housing supports is not a safe or effective way to support treatment or recovery.  This is especially true for people with both major mental illness and addiction.

You might check and see if there is a Shelter Plus Care housing program in your area.  Pathways to Housing is one organization that operates this type of program in several parts of the country (there is one near me and I think they are great!).

I found this recommendation particularly helpful, because I can imagine, like Craig, there will be circumstances where I am not prepared to provide financial support. Rather then leaving my son homeless, I can point him to organizations like these where he can get assistance for himself without me. I very much like the concept of “Shelter with Care”.

Not long after I finished reading these articles, my son called (no matter what, I am always so glad to talk to him on the phone) to ask if we could meet tomorrow as he had an idea to run past me. I cannot wait to hear his plan.

We love you.

Not a moment has passed since we heard of your addiction, that we have not been thinking of you and how to help you.

We are very proud of the progress you have made in the last two months. You are now in a much better position to determine your own destiny.

You have been through the acute withdrawal. Your first injection of Vivitrol got you through the following month. These past weeks while we have been trying to get your second Vivitrol injection have been challenging for all of us.

Two months on and you are no longer physically addicted to Heroin. You may be experiencing cravings, but this will not be the only desire in life that you will need to learn how to control.

Your behavior over the past couple of days concerns me greatly. I feel you are at a tipping point. Tip one way and you will begin the slide back into the dark and dangerous life of an addict. Tip the other way and begin to enjoy the life of a smart young man who has the world at his feet.

The thing is I cannot tip you one way or the other. Nor can your mother, or brother, or sister, or aunts, or uncles, or grandparents, or friends. Even though you have so many people on your side, wanting you to succeed - it is all up to you. Lean one way towards darkness or lean the other way towards light. You need to make that decision.

At each key point in our journey together over the past two months, you have been the decider. Your mother and I have had input and opinions, but at the end of the day the decision was yours. We then helped to support your decision to the best of our ability.

It is time for you to make another decision.

Where to from here?

There are many paths one can choose in life to get to their destination and it is time for you to choose yours.

Where do you want to be in the next 5 to 10 years? What do you want to be doing?

What do you need to do in the next 3 months to give you the best chance of achieving those goals?

What are the most important things to get done this month?

What has to be done right now, this week?

Think about it. Talk it through with your counselor. Call and discuss it with me or your mother. Bounce some ideas off your friends. Do what you need to do to make a decision.

You know your mother and I want to do whatever we can to help you succeed. So once you have made the decision, sit down and write up your plan. What has to happen and when? Who has to do it? What is plan B and C if plan A does not work out.

Then, if you want our help, come and talk to us.

We love you. We want to help you. But we will only help you if:

• we believe it is in your best interests,
• it is something we are able to do, and
• it is not to the detriment of other family members.

Good luck on your journey. Choose your path wisely.

We love you.

Mum and Dad.

My wife had also called my son’s girlfriend, who was in a detox center. You will remember that we had been told that she was in the center to be taken off Attention Deficit Disorder Medication that she had been on since she was a child. Eventually she confessed she was in the detox center because she was a heroin addict and she told us that our son was also a heroin addict. Plus from what she had heard, the addiction had got worse since she left.

So we were now in no doubt that our son was addicted to heroin. The only remaining question was could he admit it and be willing to seek help.

Our son organized to meet us at a restaurant near his apartment. At first he denied he was using heroin – yes he lied to our faces – but once he realized that we were in no doubt, he admitted he had a problem.

He explained that he was glad it was finally out in the open and how he had tried to break the addiction several times himself. Including participating in drug trials at Columbia University – which set off more alarm bells. My son was not only a heroin addict – he was allowing himself to be used as a human guinea pig to test drugs.

If you go through this conversation with your child, you will discover a whole new vocabulary – where eventually all the words start to merge into one. So here is a quick vocab lesson.

When asking about how much they are using, you will hear terms like:

• bag – this seems to be the smallest domination and as its name suggests, a small bag of heroin – costs about $10
• bundle – is a bundle of 10 bags – costs about $85
• sleeve – consists of 10 bundles or 100 bags – costs about $700

To this day, I do not believe we know how much he was actually using a day. Sometimes it seemed he was low balling the amount and other times it seemed he was exaggerating the amount – it all depended what argument he was trying to make. To tell you the truth, it probably does not matter – the important thing was we all knew he had a problem with heroin addiction and he was willing to get help.

When the conversation turns to detox, you will discover your baby has obtained an advanced degree in chemistry while you were not looking. They will expertly roll off the pros and cons of a whole bunch of drugs like:

• Buprenorphine
• Subutex
• Suboxone
• Methadone
• Naltrexone
• Vivitrol (Make sure you discuss this with your doctor. It is under going trials for use with heroin addicts and is currently being used off label. The doctor prescribed it for our son.)
• Benzodiazepines
• Oxazepam
• Diazepam
• Clonidine
• Ibuprofen

And then there a bunch of recovery programs such as:

12 Step Programs (based on AA program)

Non-12 Step Programs

Smart Recovery

and on it goes.

There are more heroin chippers than addicts–five times as many by some estimates.

Is this true?

I thought once you started, you were on a steady road towards addiction. What if you have already been addicted – can you really go back to being a chipper without becoming addicted again? If you can, how many people are actually successful at this? What are the percentages?

Till now, my only exposure to heroin addiction had been the media:

• news stories about people who died from heroin overdoses, and
• tv shows and movies showing people high or shooting up or their flop houses.

There is lots of information on the internet. It is hard to know what to believe and what not to believe. Much of it is produced by commercial detox facilities who would like you to book your loved one into their facility, some is produced by the governement, much of it is out of date.

There was one site I stumbled across early on called Heroin Helper. It is a little out of date and at first I just read it quickly. But as it turned out, I kept coming back to it, over and over again during the days and weeks that followed because the language and views expressed on the site were very similar to what was coming out of my son’s mouth. The site was invaluable in helping me understand the problem from my son’s position (or at least what I think my son’s position is). It allowed me to make some sense of all the craziness and pointed us in the right direction.

There is a fair bit of information on the site – so here is a quick tour of the parts I found most valuable.

Help versus Control

Your kid is in trouble. The first thing you want to do is step in, take control of the situation, and rescue them. I know I certainly did. The thing is our son had been living away at college for a couple of years and had always been fairly independent prior to that. The last thing he wanted, was to be under our control. This fact dawned on me during the first few days, when he kept using the word “control”. To me it seemed totally out of context – which is what triggered my memory of the Worried section of Heroin Helper. The introduction says:

Most people want to help “junkie” loved ones. Unfortunately, it is the rule that such people have exactly the opposite effect as they wish. To start with, the “help” is usually just an attempt to control. Being truly helpful starts with understanding. And that means learning about heroin and heroin users. . . I think you will find that the articles found here are different, and perhaps even revolutionary. This is the place to come for information on understanding and living with a heroin user–and more commonly, a heroin addict. My intent is to make communication better; that is the beginning of everything.

I found the following pages contained within the Worried section to be helpful. Here are the links with some brief extracts:

What do you want?

Most people think that help is defined as providing assistance to stop using. For many heroin addicts, this is exactly the help they are looking for. For many others, this is not help at all; it is interference and power abuse. And even for those who want such help, none would consider all means of accomplishing this goal equally helpful.

Shelling out $10,000 for a medicated detox is also an act of control in most cases. This is not the case because the “helper” is cruel, however; it is so because the helper panicked and didn’t think through what he wanted to accomplish.

If I can impart just one bit of advice to a loved one who wants to help a heroin user, it would be this: “Determine what negative effects result from your loved one’s heroin use.” When people focus on the drug use itself, they create a window of what constitutes “help” and “success” that is so small as to be virtually useless.

It is critical to understand the effects of the loved-one’s heroin use. Caffeine addiction isn’t a big deal. Why? Because it doesn’t have a negative effect on the addict’s life. But if the addiction becomes so great that the coffee drinker is stealing his kids’ lunch money to buy extra Lattes at Starbucks, caffeine addiction is a big deal.

Most heroin addicts do not want to be addicted. Just the same, most would like to continue to use occasionally. It is very difficult to accomplish both these goals, but it is certainly done. The non-user really needs to avoid arguing that such things can’t be done–even if it’s true.

Heroin addicts often tell me that they would “like to go back to being chippers” when they are thinking about detoxing. This is my response:

This can be done, but it’s difficult. The first thing to remember is that it is virtually impossible to quit when the goal you are focusing on is using. What you need to do is decide to quit with the idea that after you are no longer an addict you will have the option to make whatever changes in your life you see fit. The first step is to get clean. The second is to stay clean for at least three months; six is better. If you use before three months, you will quickly become re-addicted. You’ve got to give your body enough time to completely normalize. At that point, if you want to try to chip, you can; maybe you’ll succeed and maybe you won’t, but you won’t be any worse off than you are now.

Note to self: As I re-read this page, I realize that this paragraph goes to the core of what we are battling 2 months into this process. Our son has made a lot of progress – but it is clear he wants to keep the option open of “chipping” in the future. Whereas we desperately want him to stop completely and stop forever. We need to come to terms with this before it derails the whole process. Could this page on Chipper Tips may help prevent re-addiction?

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.