Please read this article linked below. It’s sad and dark and depressing….and necessary. It’s about heroin and the modern epidemic which swirls around it. Don’t read this and think the setting is such a world away because if you read the article, the junkies and addicts are from all over.

And I realized this weekend that if I am counting the years correctly, this coming Valentine’s weekend it will have been 19 years since I lost a childhood friend to addiction so powerful that it eventually overtook his life.

My childhood friend became so scary the final time he fell back into old habits (after being in recovery for a few years) that the last time I saw him (which was a week before he died and another mutual friend met him with me) I told him that I was afraid if he did not get back into rehab or a program or get some kind of help the next time I saw him he would be dead. He looked at me with drug fueled and glazed eyes and told me I did not know what I was talking about.

Unfortunately truer words were never spoken. He died somewhere around the following weekend, Valentine’s Day weekend. I never knew what exactly was in his system that got him other than what I was told which was a lethal combination of drugs and alcohol. He was never married and had a bunch of siblings and parents he left behind. I don’t think anyone in his family has ever been quite exactly the same since. How could they be?

Since then, I have known others who have had their lives tainted and marred by addiction tragedy. A friend of mine became a widow because of it. And now some people I grew up with and went to high school with basically wait and wonder if it will happen again because another person we know from those growing up years just basically is pickling themselves on cheap wine and booze.

So I am very familiar on how this goes. It is so awful and so tragic.

Addiction can strike anyone from any level of society. It doesn’t discriminate. All ages, races, creeds, societal levels.

Anyway, this is a very powerful article. Please read it.

On Kensington Avenue, parents try to pull their children from the drug world
BARBARA LAKER, Daily News Staff Writer lakerb@phillynews.com, 215-854-5933
Posted: Friday, February 6, 2015, 12:16 AM

IN A BEAT-UP maroon Toyota Corolla, Carol Rostucher drives slowly up Kensington Avenue, the street of tortured souls lost in heroin’s handgrip.

She scans the young faces, the ones with the faraway eyes of self-disgust. One of them might be her son, Drew, a handsome 25-year-old. He was her first-born, once an athletic, artistic “social butterfly.” She knows he is out here.

“As long as he’s breathing, there is hope,” ……..On a recent frigid Sunday afternoon, Rostucher doesn’t know if she’ll see Drew, or worse, if she can help him save himself.

But she, along with other moms and dads from various corners of Philadelphia and the suburbs, wants to help the dozens on the street, mostly heroin sick, teetering on the thin, fragile line between life and death.

“They all could be my son,” says Rostucher, 51, sweeping the bright blond hair from her face. “We are losing way too many of our kids to this disease. It’s everywhere and it does not discriminate.”