Addicted at 17, now six months clean
AFEW months ago, Larry Bing noticed that the quality of heroin that he was buying in the District of Columbia had become more potent. He had no complaints about the “high”, but the lows were becoming unbearable – the cravings more intense, the drug-seeking behaviour more desperate, the withdrawal symptoms more painful.
A friend recommended that he see Edwin Chapman, a physician who treats people addicted to drugs at his office in Northeast Washington. Blood tests showed that Bing had used heroin, but there were also traces of fentanyl, an increasingly lethal synthetic opioid that drug dealers often mix with heroin or cocaine to increase the quantity of their product.
Bing was 64 and had been using heroin for decades, since he was 17. And those factors put him more at risk of overdose death than he realised. In Washington, the typical overdose death involves a black man, age 40 and older, who has been using heroin for 10 years or more.
“You had a pretty stable group of heroin users in the city who lived through the heroin epidemic of the 1970s and ’80s, and then fentanyl came along,” Chapman said. “Many people who had been doing heroin over a long period thought they could handle the fentanyl. But a lot of what we are seeing is a kind of fentanyl that an amateur chemist can make in his basement. You never know what the potency is until you use it.
And then it can be too late.”
Bing showed up in the nick of time. He was prescribed a daily dose of Suboxone, a drug that blocks the effects of opioids – including relief from pain and the feelings of well-being that can lead to addiction. That was roughly 180 days ago. Bing has been clean ever since.
“I get up every morning, take my medication and that takes away the urge,” Bing said. “I had no withdrawal symptoms. The only fight I have today is getting a job and becoming productive.”
Many others are not so fortunate. In 2016, more than 60,000 people died of drug overdoses, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Fentanyl was the driving force behind a fivefold increase in overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids, from 3,105 in 2013 to about 20,000 in 2016.
In the Washington region, drug overdoses are on the rise – with the sharpest increases occurring in places with significant populations of black people living in poverty.
According to the DC Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, in the three years from January 2014 through November 2016, the office investigated 395 deaths due to use of opioids. Most of these occurred in just two wards – predominantly black wards 7 and 8.
Bing’s medication has given him a reprieve from becoming yet another statistic. But when it comes to drug addiction, there is no magic pill.
To Chapman, a key to sustaining any recovery from drug addiction is “family restoration”, treating all those who have been affected by the users’ substance abuse – not just the addict.
“For years, drug addiction was regarded as a moral failing, not as a disease, and black communities were destroyed as much by the war on drugs as the drugs themselves,” Chapman said. “That means we have to recover as a community, not as individuals.”
Chapman sees about 30 patients a day for drug addiction. About 51 percent of them also suffer from depression or anxiety. “Then it goes from there to post-traumatic stress syndrome, bipolar disorder, all the way to schizophrenia.”
Bing said he could count on support from his wife, as well as an array of social and religious organisations that form a recovery network in the city.
“I don’t want to stay in that small corner of the world where addiction limits you,” he said. “My world is bigger than a sidewalk and a street corner. I want to move forward and get on with my life.”
There’s a psychological battle ahead that can prove just as formidable.
“You go back and look at some of those [drug-using] moments in your head, and you want to believe it was great,” Bing said. “That’s why you have meetings, so you can talk about it and get a reality check,” he added, referring to 12-step programs.
Being able to go without drugs for a day, even six months, may not seem like much to some. But it’s a big step along the way out of addiction that does not involve a coffin.
For Bing, so far so good.