LITTLE SILVER – Members of the Monmouth County Prosecutor’s office has been traversing Monmouth County for the past two years sounding the alarm to communities of the heroin addiction, which is befalling many young people.
Last year, their presentations were mainly geared to parental awareness, including two well-attended forums at Red Bank Regional (RBR) and Rumson Fair Haven Regional High School. They returned to RBR this month, this time to have this very difficult conversation with students.
The detectives shared the startling statistics: 4.2 million Americans, ages 12 and older, have reported using heroin at least once in their lives. Of that number, 1-in-4 will become addicted; shockingly, only 20 percent of those who become addicted ever recover enough to assume productive lives.
The problem has become rampant in the suburbs of New Jersey, with an increase heroin-related death rate of 45 percent in the past two years, and 24 percent in the last year alone. One PowerPoint slide showed the unnatural causes of death for 2013 in Monmouth County: homicides 4; highway fatalities 29; drug overdoses 37 (of which 31 were due to heroin).
“Is it here in Little Silver?” one student asked, to which detective Barry DuBrosky responded, “The answer is yes.”
“No one is immune to the addiction of heroin,” Lt. Wesley Mayo told the students. “Heroin will alter your mind, ruin your body and eventually take your life.”
The presenters explained that heroin addiction begins with the abuse of prescription medication, predominately Oxycontin, which can be difficult and expensive to obtain. But the plentiful, very pure (thus, more addictive) and inexpensive street drug – heroin – quickly becomes the drug addict’s quarry. New Jersey has the unfortunate distinction of having the purest and most deadly heroin in the world.
“Over 10,000 bags of heroin are sold to Monmouth County kids a week,” Lt. Jason Clark said.
Another slide showed the progression of the disease in the ravaged faces of young addicts, who appeared decades older than their chronological age, drew a collective and astonished “Whoa” from the student audience.
The students also learned of the availability of a life-saving drug, called Narcan, which all Monmouth County police now have been the trained to administer and have permission to carry. The detectives also told students of the state’s “Good Samaritan,” which gives immunity from prosecution to anyone who calls 911 reporting an overdose. Those calls, because of the implementation of Narcan, have already saved dozens of lives.
Mayo told students, “No one is immune to heroin addiction. It doesn’t care if you are the star football player, the smartest person, or the richest. Heroin addiction is strong. It will grab you and you can’t come back.”
That is what happened to Justin Boxman, a gregarious, popular Monmouth County high school student who won the Vince Lombardi trophy in his senior year and started college with the hopes of playing football. He died in 2010, two years after his high school graduation, as another statistic of heroin addiction.
“But he wasn’t a statistic to me,” his mother Abby Boxman told the students. “He is my son and I will never see him again because he made bad choices.”
Boxman presented the students with the other faces of heroin, the ruined and broken-hearted families left in heroin’s destructive wake. She now runs support groups for parents who have lost children to addiction and speaks at assemblies pleading with young people not to try the deadly drug.
She explained that some people are just predisposed to addiction and no one knows if they are so inclined, comparing experimenting with heroin like playing Russian roulette.
Then Monmouth University graduate student took the microphone and told her roller coaster tale of drug addiction. An honors student and multisport athlete, Bethany had some problems that she sought to alleviate with gateway drugs of alcohol, marijuana and pills in middle school. She graduated to cocaine and recalls the nadir of her existence when she was incoherently sprawled on a gas station bathroom floor snorting coke lines.
“And my friends and I thought that was funny,” she sarcastically said.
“I thought a drug addict was a 40-year-old homeless guy living under a bridge in the Bronx, but I am not that, I am a white, Catholic suburban kid who had a nice childhood.”
In essence, she was her audience and spoke to them in their vernacular, relating to their thought processes and experiences.
“I am not that different from the people in here,” she said. “I didn’t think this would ever happen to me.”
She told of three unsuccessful suicide attempts and the burial of seven friends before the age of 24. “I can’t tell you the pain of burying a young person. Heroin kills people because it is heroin. You don’t have to be an addict to die from it.”
Bethany said she desperately tried to stop using many times, but the addiction called her back. It wasn’t until her mother intervened and sent her to a strict and long-term rehab center, that she finally got control of her life.
She is now ecstatic to report she has been sober for more than a year and really enjoys a sober life.
RBR Student Assistance Counselor Lori Todd who arranged the assembly for her students said, “It is very important to lay out the facts and statistics of addiction, but it is very powerful to bring in mothers, like Abby, and young people, like Bethany, who tell their stories and relate to the kids.”
RBR senior Destiny Cooper of Little Silver agreed. “It was really informative and real – not just facts on a PowerPoint. (Bethany’s) personality really came through.”
Renae Ames of Belmar has had personal experience with friends affected by drug-related tragedy. “It was interesting to see that recovery is possible and that it doesn’t always end in fatality,” she said.
