addiction - Down in Valley

I won't pretend that I'm fascinated by my work with junkies and alcoholics. It's part of my job as a nurse and I'm called upon to work with those in the struggle on a weekly basis. Here in the Pojoaque/Espanola Valley drinking and drugging starts early, elementary school children start smoking and drinking as a means to cope with family and school pressure and at times a pervasive despair that colors everything. It's not uncommon to find teenage alcoholics and heroin addicts, equally prevalent are senior citizens overdosing on prescription painkillers. (What I consider the new face of drug addiction)

Cheap black-tar heroin poured into the Espanola Valley from the Mexican state of Sinaloa in the years following World War II. The heroin epidemic has become an inter-generational problem, with children often following the example set by addicted parents rather than steering clear of the misery to which they've been exposed. Addiction almost always begins with a traumatized childhood. Life is difficult and impossible to face, punctuated with violence, poverty and dependence. So one strategy is to be out of yourself. Addiction is the road that takes my patients into failure over and over again.

While heroin sullies the Espanola community in unwelcome media attention,(Espanola is the black tar heroin capital of the USA), crack cocaine, crystal meth, and prescription painkillers have also made major inroads among young drug users. Forty years ago addicts gradually developed their addictions over decades, young people today are taking heroin in higher quantities, and in deadly combination with prescription drugs such as Oxycontin and Lortab.

Additionally, drug addiction is a family thing. Families that get high together get by together.In other cases the addiction of family members brings great shame and paralysis of other members to say anything about it. Family relationships are the web of familiarity that enforces the code of silence. Family ties are strong in Northern New Mexico. If you talk, you risk incriminating a niece or a cousin. Or one of your family members might be harmed in retaliation for your candor. The scandal that someone in your family is mixed up in drugs also reinforces the silence. Parents often state they can't understand how the addiction has happened, and they don't know how to help the son or brother who is caught in the trap of addiction. So it's easier pretend it's not happening.

That's until they come to me. Though denial has a stronghold even in the hospital, it tends to lose its grip rather rapidly there. A few eventually find their way out of addiction's labyrinth and into lives of sobriety, but every year those I zip into body bags get younger and younger. Last summer I sent someone home on pass to have a birthday party so they could come back and die in hospital at age 30.

As my zen nurse friend says: "Better luck next lifetime."