Family Values

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Family Values

I didn’t understand. It’s hard, when you’re ten years old, to see something practically invisible tearing your family apart. The substance obviously exists, and at 12 years old my mother actually confided in me the affliction that had taken over my brother. The form it most often takes is a clear fluid. The drug-user, or addict, or junkie, puts the liquid (which is actually, at first, typically melted on a spoon) into a syringe. They have a belt, or some sort of other tightening device, wrapped around an arm. This is where it starts. At least, where the drug starts to run its course.

It is not long after this point when the drug starts to take action and the user is put into slow-motion. Their eyes are constantly on the verge of closing, the cigarettes they smoke droop from their immobile fingers, and they begin to nod. It’s not long after the user has been doing this on a regular basis that the drug actually starts to replace the serotonin in the brain, leading to an actual physical need for the narcotic. It’s not long after this that the user becomes an abuser and then a junkie; their need for this drug that will bring them “peace” in their own mental hell becomes the priority. Or they turn things around.

The person who turns their life around is always an addict; they will forever live with that monkey on their back. One of my best friends is ten months clean of heroin but still considers herself an addict because she dreams about the peace that drug will give her and knows she is not scourged of it’s bad-doing. She went through the withdrawal, and detoxes, as heroin addicts do when they stop using the drugs. The body convulses, screams with pain, and leads to hours without sleep due to the insistent vomiting and aches.

What happens to the person who doesn’t do this? They feed the addiction. They will do anything to get that high; ostracize themselves, lie, steal, swindle, manipulate, coerce, and multitudes of others things. They live in the squalor of their affliction, and cannot overcome the disease.

I have seen this firsthand. This visual atrocity lived in my house for nights on six years. I am now 18 years old, and my brother is incarcerated. His addiction led him to his desperate robberies of over six banks and his eventual $200 a day habit. If we consider the fact that one high can costs about $7 dollars, then that’s about 28.6 highs a day.

I am sad to say that my life is more at peace with him in jail. He stole my laptop. He stole my ring a boyfriend had given me. He’s stolen money from me. He’s begged for money for me, and when I wouldn’t give it — ran to my mother with some random dirt he had on me or made something up that would send her into a flurrying rage.
His addiction led him to the contraction of Hepatitis C, leaving him ill and my parents practically broke paying for the expensive medication that he couldn’t pay for because his addiction left him unmotivated and thus jobless.

I watched him tearing apart my family from the inside out. He was verbally abusive; never was there a moment that he would go without criticizing any of my family members for our short comings. However, were we to say anything about him during a time when he was desperately craving his drug, he would fly off the handle. I would have to step in the middle of him and my brother, my sister, and my parents on numerous occasions. I’ve gotten thrown, pushed, and slapped across the room. I’ve seen my mother’s face plastered in the tears of the pain of failure; wondering what she did wrong to make my brother like that.

She did nothing wrong. She raised four kids, and the three of us that aren’t drug addicts have our problems but know they do not stem from our parents. It is sad to see the one woman who gave up everything and gave in her whole heart to keep my family together through hard times quake beneath my oldest brother’s disease.

Twenty-six years old, incarcerated, one son, and no life. That is what heroin did to my brother, and what heroin did to his family.

It is not merely a clear liquid.