A family fighting heroin

Imogen Clark tells of her horror at learning that her daughter was an
addict and the seemingly neverending battle to help her recover.

Kate Carnell is to be admired for trying to deal with the heroin problem in
an innovative way. The addicts it may keep alive are all someone's sons and
daughters.

I discovered that my daughter was a heroin addict at 7.25pm on Tuesday,
February 13, 1996. Nothing could have prepared me for the shock and horror
of that moment. She was 18, beautiful, talented and intelligent.

There may be some who could have dealt with this knowledge about their
youngest, cherished child with a measure of calmness and sensitivity. But
at that moment I was not one of them. I was enraged. How could she have
done this? She was not stupid. How could she have turned out a drug addict
when she came from a loving, caring family?

Over the next 30 minutes I behaved in the most appalling way. I screamed
and yelled, conscious even in my rage that this was her flat and it was not
my neighbours that could overhear. We both cried, she I imagine mostly out
of fear at my outofcontrol anger, and me quite hysterically. I started to
dismantle her flat as she begged me to stop, emptying her belongings on to
the floor in an attempt to make her come home with me straight away. When
she finally showed me the track marks on her arm which I demanded to see as
if she had somehow been mistaken, I hit her whenever I could connect until
I had no strength left.

While I am ashamed of my initial reaction now, I have never felt angry at
her since. Desperately worried, inexpressibly sad, and bewildered by the
minefield that is a recovering addict's lot, but not angry.

She booked herself into Arcadia House the next day to detoxify and we tried
to resume our normal lives. We told her brother and sister and supported
them as best we could. And I started what turned out to be months of waking
in the night, crying and crying.

The recriminations were endless. Where had I gone wrong? I had sacrificed
the major career, though I had worked fulltime since she had been five
years old, as we had both regarded parenting of three children to be
serious business, and one of us had needed to be freer of responsibilities.
I was pleased for it to be me. We could not have loved her more. I had put
all the wisdom I had gained from my two older children into raising her.
But it hadn't worked.

We had known that she had experimented with drugs. In fact in March of the
previous year she had told us that she needed to go into a detox centre
because her involvement was out of hand. We had supported her decision and
when she reassured us that it wasn't heroin that she was using, we breathed
a sigh of relief. Nothing was as bad as heroin.

Soon after that she told us she needed to leave Canberra and wanted to move
to Melbourne to live with a friend. I was devastated, she was not yet 18
and in Year 12. Certainly not ready to leave school and home and Canberra.

We discussed this endlessly, mindful of the fact that she would probably go
anyway, gave her our reluctant support. What little we then knew about drug
rehabilitation told us that nothing else was as important as staying clean.
She was the only judge of what she had to do. Everything else would follow.

What I now know, but at that time simply did not realise, and if I am
honest did not want to realise, was that she was terrified of the number of
recent heroinrelated deaths. She was still at this time a recreational
user, feeling that she was in control. It was not until the following year
that she was completely consumed by her addiction.

So this was her second time in Arcadia House. In a moment of bitterness we
wondered if she would get a discount for being a regular. My husband rang
each evening. I could never do it without breaking down. No contact at all
for the two week period, but we could send our love and she could pass
messages through the workers if she needed anything. We both felt we had a
twoweek respite before we had to start dealing with the reality.

Friday evening's phone call revealed that she had left that afternoon. We
frantically rang her flat, imagining immediately that she would be using
again. She assured us she was OK but was going to a friend's place out of
Canberra to continue to detox in the morning. She refused to return to
Arcadia House or to come home for the night. I spent a sleepless night.

The next day when I saw her she was obviously really ill. The friend's idea
had fallen through. She didn't know what to do and neither did we. Finally
it was decided that I would take her to our friend's isolated farm, six
hours drive away, and look after her there.

Few parents would imagine they would have to help their child through
detoxing from heroin. She was unable to sleep and as she watched videos
through the night, I would cry silently in the next room, not wanting her
to know of my grief. I was overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problem.

The next 12 months were just that, a struggle. We spent a week at the farm
and then a further two weeks at the coast, all the time trying to figure
out the next thing to do. Then her brother, who was working interstate,
offered her to live with him.

They were very close and she was very pleased with the suggestion, but it
seemed such a big responsibility to hand over to a 22 yearold. We consoled
ourselves that in other cultures it was commonplace to care for younger
siblings, and there was nowhere else for her to go. Canberra was not safe,
with the inevitable contact with other acquaintances.

She involved herself with Narcotics Anonymous and began the process of
recovery. She was in and out of various rehabs, only to relapse soon after
leaving. We began to realise that relapses were an almost inevitable part
of recovery, but each one was more devastating for us than the last.

She has now been drugfree for nine months, has returned to make her life
in Canberra after more than a year away. Recently she began full time
work. Quite honestly, I could not have felt more pleased if she had won the
Nobel Prize.

But her fight against drug addiction is far from over. She fights it daily,
"day at a time". Nothing could have brought this home to me more clearly
than when I attended an NA meeting with her. An attractive woman in her
mid30s got up to share her experiences. "My friends still don't understand
that I need to spend the first hour of my Saturday night at a meeting, but
I missed last week as I just kept working on my doctorate as it is due in
six weeks time," she said. "So I knew I had to come this week. I'm 11 years
clean now."

So for our daughter and us and the 100,000 families like ours, it never
really stops. Had we been told that our daughter had an illness with only a
10 per cent chance of full recovery, we would expect the worst. Instead we
continue to hope, to convince ourselves that our child will be one of the
few who makes it. The alternative is unbearable to think about.

My real fear about the heroin trial is not that the Canberra community will
suffer, but that the Canberra community will sit back and think it has done
enough, that one radical, but small program is sufficient.

It would not have helped my daughter. She wants to be drugfree. It comes
too late for the friend who was going to help her detox. She attended his
memorial service three weeks ago. Someone else's son.

There are no simple answers to so complex a social problem. But if we are
serious, we must put many measures in place, including the option of Rapid
Opioid Detoxification, and the availability of Naltrexone for recovering
addicts to ease their craving. For my daughter Naltrexone sounds like a
miracle.

Meanwhile we can only wonder when we will stop feeling anxious every time
she doesn't answer the phone, when we will stop checking out her flat when
we visit to see if the guitar, the television are still there, and when we
will stop feeling relief that for today, at least, she is all right.

[This is a true story but Imogen Clark is not the writer's real name.]