On 1 November 2002, my beautiful 20-year-old son Kristian died from a suspected Heroin overdose. There is no such thing as taking a test drive with Heroin. It's a one-way ticket. Don't let it happen to your child.
On 1 November 2002, my beautiful 20-year-old son Kristian died. Whilst the Post-Mortem results were inconclusive and we now have to await the results of the blood toxicology tests, the police are convinced that they will show that he had a lethal dose of Heroin in his body. Two suicide notes and a syringe were found by the side of my son's favourite coat, which had been placed neatly outside the door to his girlfriend's flat. Kristian was found in the corner of the stairwell landing, a few steps down from the flat on the morning of Friday 1 November. He had been there all night and was severely hypothermic. A neighbour had walked passed him twice on Halloween night and, assuming he was drunk and ignoring his own conscience, left him there. Would my son still be alive had this neighbour not turned a blind eye? I don't know.
My son never admitted to me that he was taking Heroin. Of course, he wouldn't, would he? As with most events in his life, he only ever told me what he wanted me to know. After his death, I realised that I had known so very little about his life over the previous four years since he'd left home, much of it shrouded in secrecy. On the day of his funeral, I was surrounded by a sea of strange, nameless faces from the other world in which he lived and died.
There is no such thing as taking a test drive with Heroin. It's a one-way ticket. Many addicts continue their journey to the next station, often against their will. The next station is Death. This can be achieved through accidental overdose, intentional overdose, or by contracting other potentially fatal illnesses such as various strains of Hepatitis, sexually transmitted diseases and HIV through needle sharing.
Those offering Heroin to a newcomer will say, "Here, try this – it will make you feel good.it's the answer to all your problems." What they don't say is, "Here, try this – even though it will probably make you violently sick the first time you use it, it may still create the desire to take it again and again and again, until the needle is your best friend. After a while, you will no longer achieve the same high and will need to increase your dose until your body needs Heroin just to enable you to function with relative normality on a day-to-day basis. You will lie, steal, scrounge and cheat to fund your addiction. You won't care who you tread on and hurt en route to your next fix – even your family and closest friends. You may contract Hepatitis or HIV if you share needles and because you never know exactly with what the Heroin has been cut, you're playing Russian Roulette every time you use it."
I was ignorant in my complacency, believing that because my children had been raised in a strict, non-smoking, drug-free, middle-class home environment and had been lectured on the dangers of such, that they would become victims of smoking, alcohol and other illegal substances. I was so wrong, in the same way that many other parents are sitting at home now, confident in the false knowledge that there is no way their children will fall prey to the evil world of drug abuse. Once your children walk out your front door – and more especially when they leave home - you have absolutely no way of monitoring or influencing their thought processes and actions.
Like many other parents, I was optimistic about my son's future. At the age of 14, he won a competition to spend Christmas in the Antarctic. The competition was organised by the Swindon Evening Advertiser in conjunction with the explorer David Hempleman-Adams. It was the trip of a lifetime and after meeting Sir Ranulph Fiennes during the journey, Kristian was inspired to return to the Antarctic in the future and had plans to join Adventure Network International when he finished his education. Instead, six years later, he ended up in a grave at the local cemetery.
Although Swindon, like so many other towns, has become a Class A open drug market, I still believed that you would only find Heroin if you were actively looking for it – and only then in total secrecy behind closed doors. I had little knowledge, even at the time of my son's death, about the sinister operations to target youngsters literally outside the school gates and how you could walk through the centre of town in broad daylight and purchase a bag of Heroin as easily and openly as a bag of sweets. A friend of mine, who lives a few yards from a local secondary school, has witnessed these deals taking place a few feet from her front door and another friend who teaches at a Swindon school confirmed that children as young as 11 are being targeted by pushers.
Drug abuse penetrates every socio-economic group, political system and nation. In order to cure the current epidemic of narcotics' addiction, the Government needs to implement realistic strategies to reduce the supply of illegal drugs and disrupt the money-spinning operations of the big boy dealers, rather than setting the unachievable goal of eradicating drugs altogether. In the more deprived areas of many towns, drug addiction, the prison experience and the occasional drug-related death seems to be a normal part of everyday life. Cheap Heroin is also rife, but since many users do not hold down regular jobs, they are still forced to finance their habit through drug dealing, criminal activities and prostitution.
The physical dependency that Heroin causes overrides a user's conscience and certainly any fears of the very real risks of dying through injecting a "bad batch", or from unintentional overdose. "Curing" existing users is not an option. It has been proven that rehab programmes have a very high failure rate, because the addiction never leaves a user. Heroin use alters the physiology of the brain and proteins that accumulate in the brain remain there even after an addict has detoxified. This accounts for the cravings that persist even years after a user has stopped taking the drug.
One ex-Heroin user I spoke to said, "To say that I am 'cured' will never be true. Although I have been clean for seven years now, the craving still remains. I might do the things normal people do, but in reality I will never be normal. I alienated everyone, except those acquaintances who were in the Heroin pit with me. Heroin robbed me of everything that I had to live for – my job, my pride, my self-esteem and, most of all, all those I loved".
Some might say that drug users know the risks that they are taking and that they deserve to die. Some might say that these people don't have the right to medical attention and are taking up resources that should be used to treat those who do not have self-inflicted conditions. The same can be said of any addicts, like smokers and alcoholics who develop cancer and liver disease and yet, to a certain extent, many of us are addicts in one way or another, whether it is caffeine, chocolate or other allegedly harmless substances. However, in the eyes of the medical profession, everyone has an equal right to live and I shall be eternally grateful to the doctors and nurses who fought in vain for two-and-a-half hours to save my son's life.
We know that it is not possible to totally prevent the traffic of Heroin into this country, nor to round up all the big boy drug dealers, so what is most likely to discourage young people from taking drugs? What role can the Government play? The methods currently employed clearly fail to discourage young people from experimenting with drugs. Tackling the problem simply by preaching is not sufficient and solving the worldwide drug problem requires international co-operation.
It is evident that many young people are not influenced by the law and the possibility of jail sentences, or the even more likely probability of accidental and fatal overdose. If their attitudes are to change, they must be influenced in some other way.
As far as legalising any drug is concerned, what sort of message does this convey to youngsters? That drug use is socially acceptable. It would do little to undermine the illicit market and, more dangerously, would introduce people to drugs who would not otherwise have tried them. Although not everyone who uses Cannabis will move on to harder drugs, it is inevitable that some will – and some of these would not otherwise have tried drugs had they not been available through legal channels.
The cost to this country of treating drug users is colossal. It's like locking a very expensive stable door after the horse has bolted. Preventing drug use in the beginning is the only answer. If there were no Heroin to push, drug dealers would be out of business, innocent children would not be targeted and we would not have a drug problem. Although it is unrealistic to suggest that we could prevent Heroin from coming into the country altogether, we could certainly do something to reduce the amount crossing our borders. It would be cheaper to burn all the major white poppy crops in places like Afghanistan and to give money to the farmers to feed their families, than to pour funding into rehab programmes and waste valuable hospital and police resources.
I cannot even begin to calculate the cost of my son's death. If you attempted to determine the amount of time and money taken up in terms of the necessity for paramedics, the hospital staff, hospital resources, the police, the coroner, the autopsy, the funeral and the long process of the Inquest, it would run into many, many hours and thousands and thousands of pounds, minimum. Naturally, the emotional cost is even greater and cannot ever be quantified.
Although Kristian's death points to suicide, I still felt that there was something within his notes that my son had not revealed; names and situations and the answers to the many questions that arose, both at the time of his death and in the weeks since that tragic day. In one of the notes that was addressed "To Whom It May Concern", he wrote: "I am not a skag head who od'ed on drugs. This was just the easiest way to kill myself, so make sure it doesn't get printed in the paper, 'Junkie overdoses on Heroin". According to his girlfriend and other close friends, he had only been taking Heroin during the past week of his life after a nine-month period of being "clean".
In my opinion, my son made the ultimate sacrifice to protect those nearest and dearest to him – his own life. I cannot rule out the possibility that he killed himself before someone else did. My son was still a young, naive boy trying to play nasty big boys' games, trying to fit in with his alien peer group for whom he had deserted his decent, law-abiding circle of friends. Why else would he kill himself just ten days before his daughter Kayla's first birthday and twelve days before his youngest sister Lauren's third birthday?
Nothing can bring Kristian back and although I am walking around with a heart so badly shattered, that it will never heal completely, if I can at least do something positive to prevent just one other parent from enduring the same tragedy, then his death will not have been in vain. Personally, I would not hesitate to shop a drug dealer to the police, even if it were a child of mine, a relative or a close friend and I would appeal to the conscience of other parents to do the same.
I had never seen a dead body before and I never expected the first one I was asked to identify to be that of one of my children. I remember collapsing at the door to the room where he lay in the Accident and Emergency department at Princess Margaret Hospital. I couldn't believe that my little boy was dead, that his brain and other vital organs had ceased to function. He looked as though he was asleep and I expected to see his chest rise and fall. I remember asking the nurse whether I was allowed to touch him before I held his baby soft hand, stroked his angelic face and ran my fingers through his perfectly groomed hair. I spoke to him through my sobs and kept asking him over and over again, "Why? Why Kristian, my darling little boy, why?"
My son looked so peaceful, but I desperately wanted him to wake up. I would never have the chance to tell him how much I love him, or to tell him that everything would be alright, or for him to have the same chance to tell me all the things that he had been afraid to tell me over the last few years of his life for fear of worrying me. He would also never be able to tell me why.
When we visited Kristian at the funeral parlour following the Post-Mortem, although he still looked like my little boy, there was no doubt that he had changed. Although his lips were still so soft and his face was perfect, his neck was purple and swollen and foul-smelling fluid was seeping from the stitched incision around his neck onto the oyster-coloured satin cloth that lined his white coffin. His hands had turned pallid, waxy and wrinkled, almost as though he had taken a long bath and his body felt rigid and inhuman. At the back of his scalp there were crude stitches running up and over his head from ear-to-ear where I presume brain tissue samples were taken and his beautiful hair was matted together in stiff clumps around the slit. My beautiful son's body had been violated and treated like a slab of meat on a butcher's block, even though in life he had violated his own body with drugs.
One of the most painful sights was re-visiting him the day after family photos and unopened Christmas presents had been laid on him, together with a small, cuddly Christmas dog that I had placed in his left hand. To see the presents untouched and the dog resting in exactly position beneath his fingers was heartbreaking. His inability to see, to open, or to hold and appreciate these gestures of affection hit me with forceful and excruciating reality. He would never move again, nor laugh, nor hug those dear to him, nor watch his baby daughter grow, nor say to me as he always did when he phoned, "Love you mum". At least he would never cry again.
When my older daughter Anneliese managed to retrieve some of Kristian's belongings from a friend's flat, I remember the intense pain of removing each item, one by one, not just holding on to what I had left of him, but searching for the smallest clue about his recent life and perhaps a reason for his death. Even the smallest piece of paper was something that he had touched and something that I could never part with.
As Kristian faces his first Christmas in Heaven, we face our first Christmas in Hell. As life continues with one less person on our gift list, we now have to endure the agonising process of an Inquest, with many questions we still want to ask and many more that we and others need to answer.
Unfortunately, my son was not the first victim and will not be the last. Unless more effective measures are taken to prevent youngsters from experimenting with drugs in the first place, then other parents will be spending future Christmases with one less family member, gazing at Sympathy cards and asking that eternal question, "Why?" Whenever I see a huddle of adolescents awaiting their school bus in the mornings, I wonder how many of them will be lured towards the same grim underworld in which my son circulated. I wonder how many of their parents will experience the same agony and grief that we are currently suffering. Hopefully none, but almost certainly some. However, by uniting against the illegal drug industry, every parent could help to prevent their children from taking a one-way ticket to needle death.
Footnote:
Do You Know Someone Who is Dealing Drugs? Phone Crimestoppers (UK) anonymously on 0800 555 111
Update: On 11 January 2003, Kristian's best friend also took his own life via a Heroin overdose.
About the Author
Jan Andersen is a British freelance writer and mother of four children. Her youngest three children are aged 17, 15 and 3. Jan's eldest son, Kristian tragically died on 1 November 2002 at the age of 20, as a result of which she has just launched a new supportive website for families who have lost a child to suicide: http://childsuicide.homestead.com Jan specialises in humorous, satirical and thought-provoking articles, essays and columns on diverse topics, from relationships, parenting and women's issues, to psychology, health and social issues. She also owns and run Mothers Over 40, an inspirational and supportive site for older parents and those considering midlife pregnancy. www.mothersover40.com http://worldwriter.homestead.com

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