My cousin David died from a heroin overdose in the first half of 2007. He was 34 years old. You often read about ‘troubled’ young people—that definitely described David. Red-haired and freckled, he had always been self-conscious and really didn’t know where he fitted in the world. David had always had problems, but I also knew him to be a wonderful, caring human being.
I first got to know David in 2000; when my family discovered that he was using heroin, I flew to the UK to try to help him get onto some sort of drug treatment program. We clicked immediately. He was fascinated by my work in drug and alcohol education and was always asking me questions. Like most drug users he had no desire to hurt himself through his drug use and, although his behaviour could be extremely self-destructive, he was keen to find out as much as he could about different drugs and their effects.
Naturally, my aunt was devastated when she discovered David’s heroin use. She came from a generation that simply did not understand illicit drug use. Although she had heard of heroin, it was something that characters in movies or television soap operas used—not her son. She had so many questions and didn’t know where to go for the answers. She had done all the right things—she had gone to a counsellor, she had looked for a local parent support group—but she was confused and felt terribly alone.
David was a great success story in so many ways. Despite the occasional relapse, he found real happiness in the last year or two of his life. He had met a girl he really cared about, and his life appeared to be heading in the right direction. We will never really know what went wrong, but regardless of what happened I know he is in a better place.
His death has driven me to finally put pen to paper and write the book I have been thinking of writing for many years. This book is dedicated to David and his mother, my Aunty Pat, who were both looking for answers to a whole range of questions about drugs for a long time. Perhaps if they had had access to the information contained in the following pages things would have been different. I’m not saying for one minute that it would have prevented David experimenting with drugs, but it could have helped the parent-child relationship by providing them with some ‘conversation starters’. The term ‘generation gap’ is one that is rarely used nowadays but in my experience it is alive and well when it comes to drugs. I hope with this book to bridge that chasm.