Drugs

Most of the birth parents we encountered had to choose between drugs or their child. All but one ended up choosing drugs.

This struggle came in a lot of different forms. For some the drug of choice was alcohol. For others methamphetamine. My wife became close to a birth mother who later died from a heroin overdose.

Before January 1980, I had to make a similar choice: drugs or a productive life. I have no right to point fingers, but sometimes I do anyway. After all, foster care can shock just about anybody, even people like me who have made more than their fair share of mistakes.

I recall our first meeting with a biological mother of Tommy, a foster child in our care. She had given birth to a beautiful baby boy. She cuddled him and talked about herself. She did downers and Dilaudid when she was pregnant, but she was rather proud that she never did uppers like crystal meth while Tommy was in utero.

As we drove away, I said casually, “That lady was wasted!”

My wife, Mary, didn’t comprehend. I explained, “Rosanna was high on drugs.”

Mary has a way of clenching her hands around a steering wheel when she is angry. “She would not be high for a visit with her child.”

So, how did I know she was stoned? I graduated in 1979, did not live a particularly sheltered life, and was something of a thrill seeker. My motto might have been: Let’s do something crazy just to see what happens next.

We sat in on the relinquishment of parental rights trial for Ellen, the mother of a baby in our care. The attorney for the county stood up, whispered something to the social worker, glanced at his notes and went to work.

He started out with the positive, probably so that Ellen’s attorney couldn’t make a huge deal about it. “From April until December, did you attend your drug classes?” Yes, she had. “And from April to December did you pass your drug tests?” Yes. “Were you meeting all visits with your daughter between April and December… Did you go along with the foster parents to medical visits… And were you having unsupervised visits in your apartment… And how did these go… Did the foster parents trust you sufficiently to have you in their home… So, you were working your court ordered program successfully…” The answers were all positive. So far so good. “Enemy” lawyers get the good stuff out of the way first.

Then he started asking about the abscess she once had on her arm and the bandage that was covering it up—how did she get it?

She was using heroin. She met a man. The new Mr. Wonderful was a heroin user.

“Why did you experiment with heroin?”

“I always wanted to try it,” she said. “I was curious.” So matter of fact.

She talked about how she became a habitual user. I don’t recall anyone ever using the word addicted, but it sounded like a full-time project. The attorney kept up his questions: Why didn’t you go see your child? Why didn’t you call about your child? Weren’t you worried about your baby? All her answers circled back to her drug use. Drugs trumped motherhood. Damn!

The judge didn’t look happy. He didn’t look angry. Rather he seemed like a man who knew what he had to say but didn’t like it one damn bit.

Parenthood, he explained, was not like a sprint, it was more like a marathon. You have to stick with it, not take vacations for prolonged drug use. The kids have to come first.

The judge terminated Ellen’s parental rights.

The next day at work I got a call from Mary:

Her voice was strained. I could tell she was struggling with tears and losing the battle. It took an awful moment of silence before she could choke out the words, “She’s dead.”

“Dead?” I said uncomprehendingly. “Who?”

“Ellen.”

That sinking feeling. The stone dropping down, down, down into the pit of my soul. The overwhelming numb feeling. Time for some strong denial.

“She can’t be dead… She was just…” I didn’t finish the sentence.

Half-knowing the answer I asked, “How did it happen?”

“Overdose… “ Having a specific question helped Mary pull her shattered gumption endorphins together for a major stand. “She and Randy went to a park down in Riverton. It’s sketchy. I think what happened is that he got her some drugs—some heroin… she might already have had some pills… and she overdosed in the car. He left for a minute, and then when he came back, she was…”

Was it only an overdose? Was it suicide? I’d have bet my money on self-destruction. Overdosing the very day she lost all parental rights seemed like too much of a coincidence.

I never did heroin, but when I was nineteen I watched someone shoot up. Can’t say I liked watching it much. I was partying with some friends of a friend. I hardly knew anybody at the house. I didn’t realize that when you inject heroin you don’t just stick the needle into your arm. First you must find a vein. That usually involves tying up your arm so the vein “pops.” Bodybuilders often take vitamin B1 to get this effect. Junkies have to slap their arms or tie them up. It took this guy about five minutes to find a vein. He had to do more than just push in the plunger at this point. He had to move the plunger back a little, so that blood went back in the barrel, mixing with the drug and turning it red. Finally, he pushed the plunger and injected himself.

“He’s just getting high,” a friend said. No big deal.

The biggest problem in San Meradino County where we lived seemed to be methamphetamines. Over and over the birth parents said things like, We did a lot of meth back in those days. There is a saying at Child Protective Services that crack and crystal meth increase fertility. Our anecdotal information seems to support the theory. All of the birth parents that went into detail about their drug pasts mentioned meth.

But my own neighborhood was far from perfect. The ghettoification process in our own community kept accelerating. A very middle-class lady across the street had a boyfriend who liked to sell some wonder weed. He didn’t see a problem with this, but some of the neighbors did, especially when some other dealers, pissed off ones, came knocking at the wrong doors of the wrong houses looking for him.

Don’t get me wrong—he could be a nice guy. As far as I knew he only sold marijuana and not crack, meth or needle drugs. But when rival dealers come hunting for someone, it tends to put people on edge.

Pretty soon, the other neighbors called in some debts the local politicians owed them, and enlisted help from relatives who used to be on the police force. One afternoon, the cops came and found quantities of pot that were larger than what a non-Rastafarian, casual user would be likely to have. Mr. Weed had to settle down and get a haircut and get a real job.

Then again, a few decades earlier I had to clean my act up and get a haircut and a real job too.