Once consumed by heroin, the ex-addict helps others Nancy Eshelman

These days I often need a smile. I found one on my computer screen the other day. It was a picture that made me smile.

To tell you why, I have to go back, to 2011. Back then I wrote a column about someone I called Brian. That wasn’t his name, but his name didn’t really matter. He was a suburban boy, handsome, drove a nice car, came from a great family.

He was a heroin addict.

That year more than 41,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses. By the end of my interview with Brian, I hoped he would become one of them.

I wrote this about him: “He looked awful; haggard is a good word to describe him. His brain seemed scrambled and he was in so much debt that I wondered how he was going to get out of the hole he had dug to feed his addiction.”

But it surprised me. When I spoke to him two years later, he was clean. His family had made an intervention. He committed to his desires. He moved We found clean friends. He attended the meetings, seven a week. Recovery, he told me then, must be “the most important thing in your life.”

I watched him from afar over the years. On social media I saw him fall in love, get married, spend time with his very happy parents. He was a new parent, once, then twice. There he was starting a business, succeeding, smiling.

I was surprised when he got a pilot’s license. Recently, along with a nonprofit organization called Operation Airdrop, he and his wife flew to Tennessee to airlift supplies to hurricane victims.

He wrote: “People are lined up out the door to get the basic essentials we take for granted every day. It really puts life into perspective.”

Back in 2011, people left terrible comments on articles I wrote about Brian and other addicts. Some still do to this day.

Last year, the number of deaths from opioids exceeded 81,000. Mean people describe addicts as weak, say they don’t deserve ambulances or Narcan, suggest we could be doing society a favor by just letting them die.

I hate these answers. always have

Brian said of addiction in 2013: “I feel like it’s almost impossible for another person to understand. It’s naive when people think you make a conscious decision to throw your life down the drain. That’s ridiculous.”

I think it’s cruel and cruel. I know my life would be much happier today if someone, anyone, had rescued my granddaughter before she died of a methadone overdose in 2020.

Who knows what it could have become? Who knows what good deeds he might have done? We must always maintain hope because every day we live begins with a blank page.

On the last day of September, addiction recovery month, I saw the photo of Brian flying a plane. She looked so incredibly happy as she completed a wonderful act of charity for strangers whose lives were uprooted by a weather disaster.

Thanks, Brian. They needed what you delivered. And I, I needed to smile.

NANCY ESHELMAN: [email protected]