“Now Brenda has been in recovery for five years. She’s graduated from college and is going to get her master’s. She wants to work with junior high school students to educate them about the dangers of alcohol and other drug abuse. When I talk to her now, she’s loving her recovery and knows she wouldn’t be alive today without it.
“We know other parents, wonderful families, who have lost their children to addiction. What I tell other parents is: Don’t ignore it. Denial gets out of hand. Nip it early or it can be too late. Many parents aren’t holding their kids accountable. They think they are ‘protecting’ their kids. But you have to pull the trigger. Don’t be afraid of their anger. Also, parents are often divorced. But they have to be on the same page about this. You have to be uncomfortable enough to change. And it’s worth all of it.”
Notes on the Introduction
1. Andrew Kolodny, Chief Medical Officer of Phoenix House, a long-established rehabilitation center, and President of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing (PROP), in a Statement for the Record to Senator Levin and Senator Hatch titled “Buprenorphine in the Treatment of Opioid Addiction: Successes and the Impediments to Expanded Access” (June 18, 2014).
2. Center for Disease Control (CDC) statistics, cited in C. T. Arlotta, “How Obama Plans to Combat Prescription Opioid and Heroin Abuse in 2016,” www.forbes.com, February 6, 2015.
3. Hazelden, 2014, “Parents in the Dark,” http://www.hazelden.org/web/public/parents-drugs-children-survey.page (accessed October 21, 2014).
4. National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA), June 29, 2011, “Adolescent Substance Use: America’s #1 Public Health problem,” http://www.casacolumbia.org/newsroom/press-releases/national-study-reveals-teen-substance-use-americas-1-public-health-problem.
5. CASA, June 2012, “Addiction Medicine: Closing the Gap Between Science and Practice,” http://www.casacolumbia.org/addiction-research/reports/addiction-medicine.
6. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), “2013 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: Summary of National Findings,” September 4, 2014, http://store.samhsa.gov/product/Substance-Use-and-Mental-Health-Estimates-from-the-2013-National-Survey-on-Drug-Use-and-Health-Overview-of-Findings/NSDUH14-0904.
7. Laxmaiah Manchikanti, “National Drug Control Policy and Prescription Drug Abuse: Facts and Fallacies,” Pain Physician, 10 (May 2007): 403.
8. SAMHSA, “2013 National Survey on Drug Use and Health,” 3.
9. NCADD, “Drinking and Substance Abuse Among Women in the U.S. on the Rise,” http://ncadd.org/in-the-news/483-drinking-and-substance-abuse-among-women-on-the-rise (accessed 27 January 2015).
10. Rob Turrisi, Prevention Research Center at The Pennsylvania State University, A Parent Handbook for Talking with College Students About Alcohol, Tufts University, 2010, http://ase.tufts.edu/healthed/documents/parentHandbook.pdf.
11. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), Women’s Mental Health and Sex/Gender Differences Research, June 20, 2003, http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PA-03-143.html.
12. SAMHSA/Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT), Substance Abuse Treatment: Addressing the Specific Needs of Women. Treatment Improvement Protocol (TIP), Report 51 (Rockville, MD: SAMHSA, 2009): 17 and 74.
13. CASA, Women Under the Influence (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 45.
My Daughter, Myself: Kim and I
“We parents see our children with a veil over our eyes,” a top addiction research scientist shared with me over coffee. She wasn’t talking as a scientist. She was speaking as the mother of an addicted child. And she was telling my story.
“Some experimentation is normal. Not all is pathological,” the author of a well-known book about adolescent girls’ growth in identity assures us.1 (Not so reassuring is another passage where she describes how teenage girls are “going down in droves. They crash and burn in a social and developmental Bermuda Triangle.”2) Of course it is every parent’s wish that a daughter is just going through a phase, that she’ll grow out of it —that, God forbid, it’s not a drug problem. She’s becoming a young adult, and the world is filled—as never before—with temptations. So, crayon-colored hair, piercings, tattoos, wild bursts of moods . . . I could live with that.
If only it were just that. One of the greatest tools a parent has in raising her child is intuition, but, as I and other parents share in this book, it can get lost in the tumult of dealing with teenaged angst. Time after time when talking to other parents of addicted daughters (many of whom are now in recovery), I’ve heard some variation of “I just knew something was wrong.” But they didn’t know what to do about it. That’s what I told myself about my daughter Kim, at first as a whisper, later as a scream. Something was off, then way off, but what? Why? When I first noticed differences in Kim’s interests, I felt that twinge. She’d loved playing the piano and she had excelled as an ice skater. She was a diligent student with good grades. But at fourteen, these interests began to fade. At fifteen, she got kicked out of the all-girls school she had begged to go to, for taking stuff from other girls’ rooms and hoarding it. No one was on hand when we went to pick her up on an icy February evening except a teacher’s aide who suggested to me Kim was a kleptomaniac. And no one from the school ever contacted us after that to express any concern. We enrolled her in the local public school and got her into counseling. But Kim wouldn’t communicate with us. She stayed in her room a lot. Her therapist explained to us she had self-esteem issues and that she had felt inferior to the many wealthy girls who were at her former school. This seemed an inadequate explanation to me, but she did appear to stabilize and made some new friends. So maybe the therapist was right.
When I found out a bit later she was smoking cigarettes, I was dumbfounded. Only two years before, Kim had begged her dad to quit smoking his nightly pipe, having learned of the dangers of nicotine in middle school. Of course we forbade her to smoke, but she just kept buying them from older kids and sneaking off to smoke. I now know it was the summer after her sophomore year in high school when Kim began smoking pot in earnest, drinking, and taking pills, as well as hallucinogens—“shrooms,” or mushrooms—and Ecstasy, known as “Molly,” while on overnight stays at friends’ houses where, unbeknownst to me, the parents would cover for the kids. (In fact, she took all kinds of pills with her new buddies, sleeping pills they took from medicine cabinets or bought from other kids, such as Xanax, Ativan, what have you.) I didn’t have a clue. I made a point of meeting Kim’s new best friend’s mom, a hardworking, friendly nurse with rosy cheeks. It was fine with the mom that Kim stayed over at her house frequently that summer. I had no idea she left the girls unsupervised or else drank with them. My husband and I found a bong in Kim’s room and a half-empty bottle of vodka (we didn’t yet know about the pills). So we grounded