View 18 year old, Kristen Delgado’s rehab story produced by the U.S. News and World Report
Youthful experimentation with drugs and alcohol has taken a worrisome turn with the recent surge in popularity of heroin among teens.
Early this week the Washington Post published a two part series on the devastating effects of heroin in the Virginia suburbs. The first part focuses on the death two years ago of Alicia Lannes, a 19 year-old Virginia girl. The second part follows the recent trial of her friends and boyfriend who supplied her with the drug, used it themselves and didn’t seek help for her when she fatally overdosed.
Centerville, where Lannes lived and grew up is the type of place that turns out cookie-cutter, over-achieving kids. It’s also a place where heroin use runs rampant. It’s a predominantly white, upper-middle class community close to Washington, D.C. with a median income of roughly $88,000. The median income for families is over $105,000.
Authorities, teachers and parents have considered a number of reasons why adolescents use. Some point to boredom as a contributing factor. Others imagine users look to heroin to escape the pressures of contemporary adolescent life.
Quoted in a Pittsburghlive.com article, superintendent of Jeanette City Schools, where heroin use in high schools is rising dramatically, Vince Aiello, also notes that addition is frequently more pronounced in more affluent neighborhoods where kids have cash to buy drugs.
Other suburban communities have seen a surge in petty crime accompanying the rise in popularity of heroin. Students, who have no real fixed income independent of their parents’, look instead to theft, selling stolen goods for cash or stealing money from their parents to pay for drugs as their addictions intensify. There has also been an increase in drug-related violence in some areas.
Because hard drug use is so taboo and most users do so in secret, officials really have no idea just how many students are using or have used heroin. But public health officials and health care professionals have seen a worrisome increase in the number of adolescents overdosing and entering drug rehabilitation programs due to heroin addiction.
Most tragic of all, however is that fact that the system is so overburdened by the number of kids seeking or forced into treatment, that facilities have begun to turn patients away. In other cases, addicts are placed in programs that are not comprehensive enough to handle the depth of their addictions. Frequently they relapse shortly after treatment.
One user, Jamie Greene whose story is recounted in the Pittsburgh Live article struggled with addiction for some time. At the age of 21 she entered rehab but was forced from the program before completion when her state- supplied insurance ran out. She died of an overdose a few months later.
