BAD THINGS CAN HAPPEN TO GOOD PARENTS

In response to Michael Kryzanek's column on drug use on the South Shore, I
am speaking for all of us, and trust me, there are more of us than he can
imagine. Opinions like his are why the stigma of the old days stays with
people living in 2005. This is why good parents, parents who have done
everything they could do as a parent to bring their children up in a safe
and drug-free world, are judged and accused of being neglectful to their
children.

I have a room full of parents every Wednesday evening whose children
graduated from DARE, had nightly curfews, were grounded when they disobeyed
rules, who faced consequences in their homes.

We are not pill-popping, cigarette-smoking drinkers, as Kryzanek implied.

We did our jobs as parents, and some of us sent our kids to colleges like
Northeastern, Bridgewater State, Dartmouth, Boston College and UMass, only
to have to take them out and send them to rehab, if they could find one or
afford one. Many have to leave this state to get treatment.

We are heartbroken parents struggling to help our children regain control
of their lives because of a drug that is widely available and at rock
bottom prices. We spend astronomical amounts of money on detox and rehab.

We have to ride out the addiction with our children and hope and pray they
live through it. Many have not, and many will not.

There are pharmaceutical companies making huge profits and knowing at the
same time that their drug is prescribed to dental patients and chiropractic
patients when it should only be for cancer patients, and rightly so. It too
often falls into the wrong hands.

How does a parent watch a young person when they are away at college?

Most parents try their best to know where their kids are and are highly
involved in their lives and activities. When it happened to my son I was
shocked.

He was taught values, sports were a huge part of his life for a long time,
and he was warned about club drugs, alcohol abuse and marijuana, but never
heroin or OxyContin, because I had no idea of its availability and that it
was in my area. I, as many parents did, thought that he was past all that
because he had graduated high school and was on his way to a successful
life, until that one night occurred.

We were an everyday suburban family.

Kids are using this drug as young as 13 years old and the parents need to
be warned it's out there, and the kids need to see what it does to a
person's and a family's life. I never thought that bad things didn't happen
in the suburbs, but I was not prepared or warned about the current
situation, so that is why I am out there warning the public, and that is
why I started a parents' support group.

It is not the parents' fault. We are good people and our kids made a
terribly wrong choice in a split second that changed their entire future
and ours. Kids make bad decisions at times. Just like someone who makes the
decision to get in their car after drinking, or has unsafe sex and ends up
pregnant, they think it's not going to happen.

Do you think these kids say to themselves, "I want to be an addict"? They
need to know that an opiate cannot be experimented with, ever. We are
afraid of the judging public.

Yes, we all know there are parents out there who neglect or abuse drugs
themselves, but this is not who we are, and our kids are not bad kids.

We are not bad parents.

The drug companies and their greed for money and the countries that are
getting the powdered 80 percent pure heroin over our borders and
terrorizing our kids are the first to blame.

But yet, we get it in the end. How many college professors,
superintendents, police officers, social workers, bankers, lawyers and
doctors have children who abuse this? More than you will ever know about.

Joanne Peterson lives in Raynham.