important. She’s had big problems since she was a little girl, going to extremes sometimes. My younger daughter is not like that.”
Pam and Neal started finding pot in her room when Samantha was around twelve or thirteen. “We’d find glass pipes, paraphernalia. The third time we found pot, she started going to a therapist once a week—someone I knew who worked at a recovery center. She was negative about it at first, but ended up enjoying speaking to her. And I didn’t see more evidence of pot use. But then, at fifteen, she was arrested for shoplifting in Manhattan. She had to sit in a jail cell at a local precinct until we showed up. My husband wanted to hire an attorney so she’d get off, but I wanted her to face the judge and tell the truth. Well, she was given community service and had to work at a local library and at an arts program there on Saturdays, which was very good for her. She also went to an adolescent outpatient group program—where she was drug-tested—with a family group that met once a week. And she did well. After the group program, she continued to meet with a therapist one-on-one, then graduated to group peer counseling with a social worker and other adolescents—all of this for about eighteen months. In her senior year in high school, she went to an alternative program and got into the college she wanted at eighteen—a studio arts program.
“In college, she was in a dorm her first semester and did great. In the spring, she met a guy at a party who was about five years older than her and fell in love. First love. By the summer they decided he’d live with her in a student house at college. I always wanted to have an open relationship with her, so I was glad she was open with me about it. And he did keep her on point, academically. But as they started living together, I noticed Samantha was becoming very thin. I was worried about her, and I asked if she was eating enough. Looking back, she was probably doing heroin then. The boyfriend was smart, but I knew he’d had a tough childhood. And then I found out he used to have a heroin problem, which he’d kicked. Well, that’s what he said. It was probably BS. Meanwhile, he was buying her beautiful things: clothes, jewelry, and so on; I would see her modeling them on Facebook. And he didn’t have a job. But she had been doing well in school, so . . .
“She stayed at the college after her sophomore year for summer school. But she wasn’t answering my phone calls. When there was no bill from the college, I confronted her and she made some illogical excuse about why she wasn’t going to school. In my gut, I knew something was wrong. Her dad was angry because she lied. We told her, ‘You’ll have to get a job for the summer if you are not going to school,’ and she went and got one at a yogurt store. She would come home occasionally and she’d sleep in late, way into the afternoon. I didn’t realize why: she was using heroin. My misconception about heroin was that you could not function because you would shoot up, go on the nod, then shoot up again, and continue the cycle. But, she was probably using it all the time just to be normal. I don’t know if she shot up or snorted it because she still won’t talk about that, but I found syringes in her room and in a car she and her boyfriend borrowed. They made excuses about it. I found three syringes in the spare bedroom from when Samantha, her boyfriend, and another friend visited. Again, there were the excuses. So I knew there was something wrong but I didn’t know what it was.
“Samantha went back to her apartment at college in late August and one morning she calls me, absolutely hysterical: the police had come and taken her boyfriend away. He had become weird and paranoid—I later found out he had been doing all kinds of drugs. He started yelling at her, throwing stuff, and then he threw her against a wall and started choking her. Her roommate called the police. It was an automatic domestic violence charge. As the police were taking him away he assaults them. They took him to the ER, he was hospitalized, and then released to his mother.
“Now she’s on the phone with me, out of her mind, so I stay on the phone with her and talk her down while Dad makes the three-hour drive to get her and bring her home. On the phone, she only raves about being assaulted. Nothing about the drugs. She keeps playing the part of the abused woman who needs help. We arrange for her to see a counselor and she gives the counselor permission to say only that ‘Samantha’s in over her head and needs support to open up to you.’ We go with her to the next session and Samantha tells us: ‘I’ve been using heroin and I need help.’ She said later, ‘If the assault hadn’t happened, I would have gone on using.’
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