had excelled as an ice skater. She was a diligent student with good grades. But at fourteen, these interests began to fade. At fifteen, she got kicked out of the all-girls school she had begged to go to, for taking stuff from other girls’ rooms and hoarding it. No one was on hand when we went to pick her up on an icy February evening except a teacher’s aide who suggested to me Kim was a kleptomaniac. And no one from the school ever contacted us after that to express any concern. We enrolled her in the local public school and got her into counseling. But Kim wouldn’t communicate with us. She stayed in her room a lot. Her therapist explained to us she had self-esteem issues and that she had felt inferior to the many wealthy girls who were at her former school. This seemed an inadequate explanation to me, but she did appear to stabilize and made some new friends. So maybe the therapist was right.
When I found out a bit later she was smoking cigarettes, I was dumbfounded. Only two years before, Kim had begged her dad to quit smoking his nightly pipe, having learned of the dangers of nicotine in middle school. Of course we forbade her to smoke, but she just kept buying them from older kids and sneaking off to smoke. I now know it was the summer after her sophomore year in high school when Kim began smoking pot in earnest, drinking, and taking pills, as well as hallucinogens—“shrooms,” or mushrooms—and Ecstasy, known as “Molly,” while on overnight stays at friends’ houses where, unbeknownst to me, the parents would cover for the kids. (In fact, she took all kinds of pills with her new buddies, sleeping pills they took from medicine cabinets or bought from other kids, such as Xanax, Ativan, what have you.) I didn’t have a clue. I made a point of meeting Kim’s new best friend’s mom, a hardworking, friendly nurse with rosy cheeks. It was fine with the mom that Kim stayed over at her house frequently that summer. I had no idea she left the girls unsupervised or else drank with them. My husband and I found a bong in Kim’s room and a half-empty bottle of vodka (we didn’t yet know about the pills). So we grounded her. We had earnest, stern talks, we tried to encourage healthy interests. Kim was defiant, raging, sly, manipulative, always at least one step ahead of us.
Statistically, my daughter’s experimenting with cigarettes, marijuana, booze, and other drugs as a mid-teen was on target. When puberty hits, besides depression, which can show up as a preoccupation with body image, girls (as well as boys) may have other issues manifest in adolescence, from bipolar disorder to ADD to other mental health problems. Kim was a late-bloomer physically and secretly agonized over her slow development. I didn’t know how depressed she was. The therapist kept telling us she was working on her issues. And—I’m not proud of this—when I found out Kim was smoking pot and drinking, although I was upset, my attitude was mixed. Because I had done it, too. I remembered my own baby boomer youthful rebellion and angst, my own experimentation with loud music, hippie clothes, and drugs. I hoped I was helping her by telling her about my own use (a much-edited version), by emphasizing the problems drugs and alcohol had led to in my young life. Experts are divided about whether it’s helpful to tell our children about our own history with substances. In Kim’s case, what she heard from me was that I’d used different stuff and now I was fine. She simply blocked out all the trouble it had caused me.
My husband and I began to have conflicts over how to deal with Kim. She’ll grow out of it, I assured him, she’s seeing the therapist every week and we just have to be firm but not punitive. He was made of sterner stuff. He got angry at her antics, while I tried to understand. But neither of us really knew what to do. We cobbled out strategies, rules to lay down and stick by. But she was so defiant and such a good liar. In her junior year, I was relieved when she got a boyfriend. Tom seemed like a nice young man. He lived in a nearby town, with good parents and a kid sister and a horse. Tom was a guitarist and they were both huge movie fans, so it made sense to both sets of parents that they spent hours in Tom’s family’s finished basement with the flat-screen TV and stereo system. None of us knew what they were doing was spending hours stoned on Oxycontin, the powerful painkiller oxycodone hydrochloride.
I was still pretty clueless. Kim was never a “big” drinker, but she and Tom and their group got drunk occasionally. As I mentioned earlier, for young women, binge drinking, often coupled with eating disorders, is a serious, under-recognized problem that has increased in recent years. As for the pills, I had no idea kids in suburban, urban, and rural communities all around the country were finding prescription pain pills by the cartload in family medicine cabinets, or that they were sold illegally and easily available. At Kim’s nice suburban high school, there was a thriving market in the parking lot. There probably still is.
We didn’t know how quickly kids or anyone—there is a growing problem of addiction in older people, too, who are prescribed pain medication and become dependent on it—get addicted to opioids, especially Oxycontin, or “oxies.” The abuse of oxycodone and other opioids like Percocet and Vicodin, which has frequently led to heroin addiction, killed more young people from overdoses than crack cocaine in the 1980s and heroin in the 1970s combined.
Kim was kicked out of Tom’s house when his father discovered they were using oxies, and he was sent away to rehab, but we didn’t know this for some time because we weren’t told. Now she spent time with other artistic, bored, alienated kids, including older kids who’d already graduated, which I now consider to be a red flag. Sometime before her senior year, I now know, Kim began sniffing crushed painkillers and then heroin. Our sense that something was wrong was now chronic. She had endless excuses about where she was and what she was doing, which is what addicts do. When I discovered what she was doing I went numb with shock—I was shattered. In the ’70s and ’80s heroin use was looked upon with horror by baby boomers like me. It was and still is a strong taboo. Some of us didn’t think twice about “experimenting” with pot and psychedelics when we were young, but the stigma attached to heroin was huge. It was for outlaws, gritty urbanites, and “minorities.” Well, those days are over. A few years ago, drug companies were pressured, after many deaths from overdoses, to change the formulation of Oxycontin so it couldn’t be tampered with to be crushed to snort or inject. Among women, deaths from prescription pill overdoses such as Oxycontin quintupled since 1999, to about eighteen women every day.3 But once oxies were made tamper-proof, voilà, heroin became the alternative. In the immortal words of one high school student, “It’s cheaper than a six-pack!” And this terrible epidemic has continued, an epidemic that so far mostly impacts young Caucasians, rich, middle-class, and working-class alike.
Let me tell you a bit about me. I’m an alcoholic who has been sober nearly forty years. I come from a loving, large family with a kind and hard-working father who hid his alcoholism for years, helped (endlessly) by my mother who was determined to keep that fact hidden, in order, as she explained to me years later, “to protect you children.” (It didn’t work, Mom, but I get it.) As a young teenager, I was ambitious in school, had a lot of friends, a boyfriend, and participated in lots of extracurricular and church activities, but underneath I felt more and more lonely, unsupported, and depressed—and increasingly “different.” I drank along with the crowd in senior year at parties and dances, but it wasn’t until I went away to college and discovered the “alternative” lifestyle of the ’70s that I felt the thick fog of depression lift, some of the time at least. Because now there was cheap wine along with beer, marijuana, psychedelics, then a raft of drugs including cocaine, Dexedrine to study for finals, and other substances I’ve since forgotten. For a while, my new lifestyle of mostly pot and cocaine and drinking in bars made me feel smart, sexy, empowered. But addiction is a progressive disease. Although I was ambitious and loved to travel and had friends, within a few years I was isolated and drinking as much as I could, as often as I could, because I had to. Then the momentary easing of anxiety and heavy self-criticism didn’t work anymore. I felt worse than ever. As many women addicts do, I rapidly became a blackout drinker. But I still didn’t connect the trouble in my life with my using: the bewildering and complicated phenomenon of denial is a hallmark symptom of the disease.
The turning point came gradually for me. The final straw was a visit from my sister with whom I was very close. She told me lovingly, tearfully, but firmly just how my addiction was affecting her and my family. After a bit more of the paralyzing sense of aimlessness and fear I had gotten so used to and that
