The Cost of Drugs: The other victims

LIMA — There’s a story that Tom Holmes tells about addiction and a father’s love.

In the story, a boy is driving his dad’s car when his drug dealer stops him. The dealer takes the car and tells the boy he can have it back when he pays off his drug debt.

Inevitably, the father pays the bill and retrieves the car. And just as inevitably, the boy rolls up another drug debt a week later.

After years of working with addicts and their families, the counselor and director of Covenant Ministry Services has heard that story more times than he can count. The details change with each telling, but the father’s response never does.

“I ask them, ‘Why do you do that?’ and they say — they always say — ‘because I love my child. What else can I do?’” Holmes said.

Holmes struggles almost daily with that question. Family members and friends of addicts are too often left with a choice between extremes. They can keep helping the addict no matter how much it costs, or they can walk away and hope the addict eventually works it out. The real answer, Holmes believes, is somewhere in the middle.

“It’s easier to just let them go, to stand there with the moral high ground and say they just have to find their own way,” Holmes said. “But in truth, you have to stay there, be there for them, no matter how hard it gets. And that is hard.”

Not getting involved has its costs as well, not just for the abuser and family, but for the whole community. Allen County Children Services currently has about 120 children in court-ordered custody — staying in foster homes or facilities away from their parents. Of those, 90 are there because of drugs, according to Director Scott Ferris.

  “It may not be the main factor in all case, but it’s a contributing factor, the biggest factor being the child living in a drug-infected environment,” Ferris said.

  For users, the story is almost always the same, Ferris said. It begins with some stresser — a lost job or broken relationship. The parent starts using to relieve the stress. In time, the money that once went to food or milk or medicine goes to drugs. Over time, the neglect worsens.

  “I don’t think they intentionally mean to neglect or abuse their children. The bad choices start leading to that,” Ferris said.

  That neglect can add up to monetary costs as well. Housing alone for those 90 displaced children costs the county $710,000, Ferris estimates. That does not include the cost of therapy, transportation and, in some cases, rehab for the kids themselves.

  “That’s the taxpayer paying for another house or placement and that’s just a portion of it,” Ferris said.

Family matters

In a way, the advice addiction experts offer families dealing with addicts is similar to what parenting experts advise: Be there to support them. Let them know you will help them as long as they are making good decisions. Hold them accountable for the bad choices. In other words, help but don’t enable.

“What we say is to love people enough to intervene before a crisis occurs,” Holmes said. “Hold them accountable for their actions. Love them enough to get in their face and say, ‘I’m not going to let you go.’”

In theory, helping addicts should be just that easy. Drug abuse is reality, and in the real world talking to addicts about their problems is hard and messy work, Holmes said. And when those addicts are family, it gets even messier.

“There is always a history there. Families are complicated things. There’s a history of not really knowing how to address the problem. When it really comes down to it, what keeps people from getting involved, it’s fear and denial,” Holmes said.

In denial

Barbara Ward knows something about denial. As a mother, daughter and sister, she has seen the toll drugs take in her own family and her community. In three decades working with addicts in prison ministry programs, she has seen a steady stream of parents, wives and children who refuse to acknowledge the problem in front of them.

“I think a lot of times we as parents stay in denial because our hope for our children is so great it just consumes us,” Ward said. “We tell ourselves it’s a phase, something that will pass. It’s hard to deal with things that will hurt, and this hurts.”

For many parents and children of drug abusers, that hurt is tempered by embarrassment. Eventually something happens that turns the family secret into public information. The next thing you know, you are at school or the office break room praying nobody knows but knowing they do.

“It’s an embarrassing situation. Your kid turns 18. It’s in the paper that he’s in trouble. They get the address right, and they always spell the name right. When they’re in trouble, you always spell the name right,” Ward said.

Intervention time

For some, that embarrassment is enough to finally force an intervention.

Burt Connors manages a Van Wert-based private counseling service for the children and parents of alcoholics and drug addicts. More often than not, he said, it takes a moment too embarrassing to handle — an arrest, bankruptcy or some horrible public display — before family steps in.

“It takes something big. The addict has to do something really stupid or illegal or, in the worst case, something that can hurt them or someone else,” Connors said. “When that happens, it’s the straw that starts the rest of that family to finally say, ‘Enough already,’ and get the help they need.”

Connors migrated to the profession after years of trying to deal with his own pain, remnants of growing up with a mom who spent most of his youth in a drug-induced fog courtesy of prescription amphetamines and barbiturates. He remembers cringing when his mother showed up for school, fearing she would either slur her words or ramble on from subject to subject as his teachers and other parents traded knowing glances.

Those moments stuck with Connors through adolescence and into adulthood. He was in his 30s and a professional counselor before he realized his own problems — quick temper, depression and a constant and lingering nervousness — were symptoms of the anger he carried around for decades.

“That’s how this works. They are the addict, but you, the child, the sibling, you are the victim,” Connors said. “You might deal with it for a while, but eventually it shows up again. You can only tap down anger and resentment so long. And when it comes out, it comes out in wild and unpredictable ways.”