Readers React: Drug addiction isn’t ‘wolves’ vs. ‘sheep’
To the editor: Author Kerry Madden should keep going to Al-Anon. She’s still struggling to understand what’s happened to her son, a recovering addict, and his dead friend Noah, and she never reveals what their gateway drug may have been. Could it have been pot? (“When drug addiction conquers all,” op-ed, March 20)
But Madden’s confusion and pain testify to the scourge of drug addiction. It takes money, silence, complicity with other users, deals with dealers, and lies upon lies to loved ones and to oneself to become an addict. No one is a “lamb.” No one is a “wolf.”
No addict is the person you once knew. Everyone involved gets burned — the addict, the friends, the family. Some addicts die. Some addicts live permanently impaired. Some addicts get sober and live to rebuild.
Frances O’Neill Zimmerman, La Jolla
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