Heroin’s Small-Town Toll, and a Mother’s Grief

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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/11/us/heroins-small-town-toll-and-a-mothers-pain.html?action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&region=Footer&module=Recommendation&src=recg&pgtype=article

HUDSON, Wis. — Karen Hale averts her eyes when she drives past the Super 8 motel in this picturesque riverfront town where her 21-year-old daughter, Alysa Ivy, died of an overdose last May. She has contemplated asking the medical examiner, now a friend, to accompany her there so she could lie on the bed in Room 223 where her child’s body was found.
But Ms. Hale, 52, is not ready, just as she is not ready to dismantle Ms. Ivy’s bedroom, where an uncapped red lipstick sits on the dresser and a teddy bear on the duvet. The jumble of belongings both comforts and unsettles her — colorful bras, bangle bracelets and childhood artwork; court summonses; a 12-step bible; and a Hawaiian lei, bloodstained, that her daughter used as a tourniquet for shooting heroin into her veins.

“My son asked me not to make a shrine for her,” Ms. Hale said. “But I don’t know what to do with her room. I guess on some level I’m still waiting for her to come home. I’d be so much more empathetic now. I used to take it personal, like she was doing this to me and I was a victim.”

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When the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman died with a needle in his arm on Feb. 2, Ms. Hale thought first about his mother, then his children. Few understand the way addiction mangles families, she said, and the rippling toll of the tens of thousands of fatal heroin and painkiller overdoses every year. Perhaps it took Mr. Hoffman’s death, she said, to “wake up America to all the no-names who passed away before him,” leaving a cross-country trail of bereavement.

In the wake of the prescription painkiller epidemic, heroin, much of it Mexican, has wormed its way into unsuspecting communities far from the Southwestern border as a cheaper and often more easily obtained alternative. Ms. Ivy’s was believed to be the seventh fatal heroin overdose in eight months in this town of 13,000 on the St. Croix River near Minneapolis. Two months after her death, and before yet another young Hudson woman died — at a “sober house” — of a heroin overdose in October, nearly 500 townspeople crowded into the First Presbyterian Church for a forum called “Heroin in Hudson: A Community in Crisis.”

The Resurgence of Heroin

The number of users of heroin has grown over the last decade.

Overdose deaths began to rise sharply in the latter half of the previous decade among young whites. Death rates since 2010 have not yet been compiled.

Heroin users

Heroin deaths among

15- to 34-year-olds

Heroin deaths by race

In thousands

Per 100,000 population, age adjusted

Per 100,000 population

700

White

600

2.0

2.0

500

1.5

1.5

400

White

Hispanic

300

1.0

1.0

Hispanic

200

Black

0.5

0.5

100

Black

’02

’07

’12

’99

’10

’99

’10

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration

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