How I Wish My Parents Had Reacted to My Heroin Use

Called Betty Ford? –

July 31, 2020 – I was too frightened to tell her myself. So I told the nurse practitioner instead. Even when I asked her not to, she would always repeat everything to my mother. Of course my mother was enraged, and swiftly made an appointment with my psychiatrist.

Both she and the shrink, believing that all drug use is addiction, insisted that I enter rehab as soon as possible. When I explained that my use hadn’t caused me any problems and I could stop whenever I wanted, they ignored me. To them, my careful reasoning was just drug-addled “justifying.”

In fact, everyone I talked to believed that I needed to quit and “get help.” On some level I began to agree with them. After all, how could all the adults in my life be wrong in the same way?

I only went to the rehab for about two days. After that my father became convinced I was “having too much fun”—which never made sense to me, considering that I hated it and had trouble taking all the AA-based nonsense seriously—and forced me to quit.