Heroin isn't someone else's drug anymore

"America has been struggling with this silent assassin for decades. Year after year, our children fall prey to the siren that is heroin. States all across the country are reporting skyrocketing rates of intoxication, overdoses and death."

I am missing a lot of spoons.

This fact is not new to me. It is just a cold reminder of how addiction destroyed my son.

My spoons were used to further his habit, burned with now empty lighters that were innocently purchased with nothing more than candle lighting in mind.

For the rest of my life, every time I eat a bowl of cereal or indulge in mint chip ice cream, I will be reminded of the dirty drug that took my son.

I am the bereaved mother of an addict. This is my life. Every time I open a silverware drawer I am slapped with the death of my son.

In 2011, the year that claimed the life of my son, 178,000 Americans used heroin for the first time.(The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration). 

With statistics this heinous I can’t be the only mother missing spoons.

I grew up in the 80's, in a suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of LA. Gasoline hovered around .85 cents a gallon (I remember this because my friend and I would scour the floor of her Honda CRX for loose change and always came up with enough to drive all day). Kids had to graduate high school without the luxury of the internet and the call waiting beep on your land line was sheer luxury. We didn’t have cell phones, or email or Facetime.

And we sure as hell didn’t have heroin.

The most dangerous thing I did when I was a teenager was lather myself up with baby oil and bake myself in the afternoon sun.

Sure marijuana was around and I had a couple of drunk weekends, but heroin was strictly off limits. It wasn’t even an option. Not only was it not accessible, but it was a 'junkies' drug. No suburban kid in LA in the 80's was cooking heroin and shooting up. 

It was taboo.

Of course cocaine was the drug of choice back then and I suppose that I could have found it had I looked, but heroin? No. Heroin has taken a place within suburbia that my teenage self could never have imagined. Because life was simpler when I was a teenager. There was no such thing as social media, text conversations or online video game playing.

I never imagined I would have a strong, handsome, charismatic son who would succumb to heroin and die just days after his 20^th birthday.

Heroin was not part of my life. It was a 'junkies' drug after all. An intangible darkness that I couldn’t fathom becoming a part of my life.

Yet, here I am, in upper class suburbia.

And there it is, staring me in the face every time I open my silverware drawer.