Heroin reaches into typical suburban home, ends life of 'a great kid'

[slimvictor]

Desperate to end the nightmare tearing at his family, an anguished Pete Stenger pulled his son aside to describe in graphic detail what lay ahead if the young man continued using heroin.

“I laid it out for him. I told him he’d be zipped into a body bag, taken to the medical examiner for an autopsy and then to the funeral home where his friends would stand over his casket, crying,” Stenger recalls.

On Dec. 4, the horrific prophecy unfolded exactly as envisioned.

An accomplished guitarist, Mitch Stenger was 23 when he became one of the estimated 2,300 St. Louis area residents who have died from a heroin overdose in the past seven years.


(...)

Mitch Stenger’s path to addiction followed a familiar trajectory.

“It starts in medicine cabinets,” says Casey Lambert, a St. Louis County Bureau of Drug Enforcement detective assigned to a heroin education and prevention program.

In Mitch’s case, according to his parents, the contents of medicine cabinets found their way to “pill parties” frequented by a “risk taker” son and a handful of high school classmates.

The Stengers say Mitch’s progression from opioid pain medication to heroin took place at some point after his graduation from Francis Howell Central.

Mitch told his parents the substance originally supplied to him and two friends was identified to them as the opioid Fentanyl.

“They liked it and went back for more,” said Pete Stenger. “The third time the (supplier) told them it’s heroin.”

cont at

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/...cle_0b912e64-4db5-5812-982b-7352a063f9b5.html

 

[slimvictor]

If you want to have a "War on Drugs", you need to personify drugs, because war on inanimate objects sounds impossible (imagine a "War on Chopsticks" if you doubt this).

This is what you are doing when you write a headline saying that heroin "reaches into a home and ends a kid's life".

Pure propaganda.

Instead, if they would write the truth - that he chose to use drugs, but was unable to find pure heroin and bought and used impure street heroin instead, and that this is why he died - then we could see clearly that the reason for his death was not "the killer heroin" but the war on drugs, which prevented him from having access to pharmaceutical quality heroin, which he would most likely have been able to take without dying, since the purity would be the same every time.

Another tragic story, but again it is being used in the service of the drug war.

 

[FuckWithRaw]

Don't get me wrong death is sad but this is bs. Too bad this is only a problem now that it's reaching 'typical suburban homes and great kids'. We're all human....
But to blame the drugs instead of the big wigs who try so hard to make harm reduction impossible is plain stupid.

 

[Carl Landrover]

This is the same thing that's been happening for well over a decade. I was using the internet to find out what's recreational in the medicine cabinet back in 2004 and heroin was already hitting the suburbs and had been for years before that. The percentage of people using or who have used is going up.

With opiates being so hard to quit it almost seems like for every one person that is able to actually stop using and to stay away there are ten new addicts to take their place. In October it'll be 10 years since I first tried heroin and I'm still struggling to this day. Ten years ago when I was starting to get into oxy (back when we had the pink 20's, yellow 40's, and green 80's...those were the days) I never thought a decade later I'd still be doing this and struggling so much with heroin.

 

[herbavore]

^I can take it a lot farther back than that. In the 1970's I went to a little hippie school in Pennsylvania that was in between two little towns. Due to some pretty heavy LSD use coupled with the condition of my mind at the time, I was hospitalized in one of the small towns. Heroin was a huge problem in this homogeneous little berg of white middleclassness. Every other person my age in the hospital had a heroin habit. The amusing part was that these towns were extremely fearful of my school as they saw it as a bastion of drug use. Their own kids? They apparently just kept up the denial amongst themselves and hid them away in psyche wards when things got bad.