Troubled Teens Resources

Teen age drug abuse is fought on different battlegrounds with different weapons by all kinds of different warriors. By far the most passionate are those who have lost a loved one to drug abuse. Second to them are those former addicts who have beaten back their demons and want to help other addicts in their fight. When that former addict is a well known rock star, troubled teens tend to listen.

Alice Cooper is one such well known name and now comes Motley Crue bassist Nikki Sixx and his new released chronicle about the horrors of his life as a heroin addict,’The Heroin Diaries, a Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star.’

Part visceral work of art, part howl of anguish and pain, the book chronicles the life and technical death (Sixx actually overdosed and was pronounced dead twice) of a guy who supposedly had it all and did his best every day to destroy it and the talent that brought it to him.

“It was important to show it all,” Sixx said. “I was legally declared dead from an overdose and instead of learning from it I lived to do it again. That’s how sick I was. It’s not cool. It’s not being a rock star. It’s being an addict.”
[…]
“I wanted to do everything I could to get this story out to people, whether it’s to read the book or listen to the music,” Sixx said. “I was asleep and in pain for so long. Now I’m truly awake and it feels amazing and I want people to hear that through whatever medium it takes.”
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Teen age drug abuse quickly descends into addiction if the first forays into experimentation are not quickly cut short.Teens at risk for addiction are not always easily identifiable, though those who seek drugs as refuge from depression or anger are more likely to fall into addiction than those teens who are more emotionally stable.

A teen heroin addict is all the more tragic. For a troubled teen to seek the quiet stillness of heroin’s slow suicide over family, love, and life is beyond the comprehension of those who helplessly watch.

That a teen addict can destroy the lives of those who love them is dramatically demonstrated by a recent case that came before a judge in Great Britain.

“A desperate dad risked his own freedom to take drugs to his heroin addict son inside prison.

William Thompson had already re-mortgaged his home to pay for detox programmes and suffered the break-up of his marriage during his son’s decade long addiction to the deadly drug.

But the devoted father went a step further on December 2 last year when he risked his own liberty after a phone call from his son begging for help.
[…]

The court heard how taking drugs into prison is ordinarily met by an immediate jail term.

But Mr Recorder Martin Bethel today took pity on Thompson and suspended his sentence.

Defence barrister Glen Gatland had told the court: “He has done everything a father could possibly do to try and wean his son off this terrible, terrible curse he has.”

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Teens at risk sometimes give no indication that they will ultimately succumb to teen age drug abuse.

“Ralph is shaking Lauren Jolly, a 17-year-old with a pretty face and light, shoulder-length brown hair, a former Brownie Scout, a junior at Birmingham Groves High School, a heroin addict her friends can no longer help.”

Such an odd statement…”her friends could no longer help”. You wonder how they tried. What could they have done to bring to a halt their friend’s slow descent.

“It’s May 24, 2006, and she is about to become the public face of fentanyl, a nasty laboratory concoction often mixed with heroin that exploded on the streets of Detroit, ending the lives of hundreds of metro-Detroit drug users, and more than 1,000 people nationwide.”

Yes, it’s yet another drug, another conconcoction courtesy of the dealers and the dirty labs that they run. fentanyl, like all drugs, does not discriminate between it’s victims. Rich, black, female, poor, educated or decent - it doesn’t matter once the drug owns you.

“The drug stole a once-promising young bowler from Shelby Township, a retired autoworker from Detroit, an ex-logger from out state and the lead guitarist in a rock band.

Inside the house in Detroit, a 21-year-old from Pontiac named Ben puts his fingers to the neck of the Bloomfield Township teen and feels a slow pulse.

Someone draws cold water and pours it over Lauren.

The girl is still breathing, but her pulse is faint, her blood pressure plummeting. Her eyes roll back … and she is somewhere else.”

So begins the prologue to a 15 part series on the drug fentanyl and it’s devastating presence in Detroit. Perhaps it should be mandatory summer reading for troubled teenagers.