To Tough Love or Not?

Day 906.

I picked up a copy of Money magazine at the doctor's surgery. The cover was a photograph of an everyday couple and the headline was “Their Opioid Crisis - How much more can we take of this? Are we being too selfish? What if they die?”

The article was about a couple who’s children suffered from opioid dependency.

As I expected, the article was about the financial side of a life with kids in substance use disorder, the cost of which can be astronomical.

The figures were often in six figures, their houses remortgaged to pay for treatments, lawyers, bailing out unpaid debts to drug dealers.

Some of this was us.

Some of it we hadn’t reached... yet.

It told of the organization PAL, Parents of Addicted Loved Ones.

PAL organized interventions to encourage parents to stop “paying to keep their kids sick.”

It’s common sense, and yet when you are in the midst of it yourself, it is hard to know when to stop.

Luke was just starting out in his career.

He was high functioning and had a promising career in film, which was going well and he was seldom without work.

His wages at the start were low, and we helped him in the way one would help a child in college.

But he paid rent, for his car, and for his social life, and we’d pick up the luxuries and his food.

Everything seemed to be going well.

Till he died.

His phone (yes we had his password) gave a clearer picture of the reality of a lot of drugs, and yes, he was clearly supplying others, I surmise to supplement his drug use.

To this day, I have no idea how much he was using or indeed if he took drugs all the time, but the documentation in his phone was a shock. We were clueless.

So at what point does one cut him off?

Dealing is a way to supplement the parent’s financial support, but the support doesn’t appear to stop the dealing.

The gangster lifestyle of acquiring and selling and using, is, I have heard, a big part of the dopamine inducing risk-taking rush.

I watched the movie Ben is Back.

Brutally accurate in relaying the blurred lines of life, loving someone caught in drugs.

Would you cast a loved one suffering from cancer into the street, because the cost was becoming prohibitive?

And the bad behavior? Many illnesses come with out of control, abhorrent behavior - dementia, alzheimers, bipolar disorder - “Out of the house with you! Into the streets!” - no.

And this is what makes drug dependency so hard. The lines blur fast.

Whenever I threw Luke out of the house, it was in fury and in truth, it wasn’t to protect myself. My motive was that I was told it was the only way to stop the cycle. I was doing it in the hope it would all stop. The action may have been right, but maybe my motive was not.

Luke would not last long before he came back. 

He couldn’t sustain me turning my back on him, but in truth, I sat here in agonizing anguish, far from back turned.

It was always awful.

The GRASP pages are full of people who turned their kids out, and in equal measure, those who had not. 

Yet their kids are all dead.

I know I’m looking at it from the wrong angle - detaching with love - is not an action for a cure for our addicted love ones, but for us.

But the outcome still turns out to be a crapshoot, the odds of which, in the current climate, are stacked against us.

A game of chance for those we love deeply.

The torture of loving someone who, however casually, fucks about with drugs.