I recently dreamed that my daughter, Carrick, was perched on the edge of a dock on a lake. I stood behind her. As she slipped into the water, it dawned on me that she was taking a swimming test and I was the only one observing her. Her back arched and her arms plunged in a graceful butterfly stroke, but her head did not emerge. Her skin suddenly blanched, and I sensed she was in trouble. I jumped into the gray chop, landing beyond where her efforts had carried her. As I faced her, she sank feet first, her long hair swirling in the water. She was just inches away but it seemed an infinite distance. I felt responsible, as if my thinking that she might drown had made it happen. I wanted to change the direction the dream was taking, but I couldn't do it. I knew that she would plunge faster than I could dive after her, and that I would not be able to bring her to the surface even if I managed to catch her.
I woke up. My chest felt raw and empty, as if my ribcage had been ripped open. At first I thought the dream was about my feeling that I have something to lose again. But as I've thought about it, I realize that my subconscious was confirming what I've learned the hard way. I cannot “save” my daughter. If she wants, I can only try to help her learn to swim. When it comes to addiction, that's all anybody can do.
The Specter
For several years, I've lived with the specter of my daughter killing herself. It haunted me whenever the phone rang at a time when it didn't normally, or if a holiday passed without our having heard from her, or when I saw or heard Deirdre, my wife, weeping. However her death happened - a heroin overdose, hypothermia, murder, suicide, AIDS - I knew I would have to the find the words to express what had happened, and why.
And so, in interior monologues, I would imagine myself speaking at Carrick's funeral. I wanted everyone to know something about the hopelessness of addiction. The powerlessness of love. The elephant of drug and alcohol abuse on our village's Main Street - indeed, on all Main Streets. The thin line between enabling and encouraging. But words without stories are feeble comforts, like that of the priest in Alice McDermott's Charming Billy who assures us that Billy's death from drinking “wasn't a failure of our affections, it was a triumph of the disease.”
Carrick started smoking marijuana when she was twelve years old, and worked her way to a heroin addiction by seventeen. She sees her drug dependencies, as do I, as the inevitable outcome of a concatenation of genes, influences, and events. We have had a trying journey. When Carrick was using drugs, she often overwhelmed Deirdre, our son Duncan, and me — individually and collectively. We all have different ways of coping. My way has been to try to find some connections to the experiences of others. And so, as part of this journey, I have been writing The Elephant on Main Street: An Interactive Memoir of Addictions, which has become this website.
Thanksgiving 2004 was the first that Carrick spent at home since 1999 when she was 15. In 2000, she was in a wilderness therapy program in the high dessert of Utah. In 2001, she was living on the streets of Philadelphia with a lost soul who called himself Chaos Destruction. In 2002, she was hanging with Pete, who had just been released from state prison for drug dealing. In 2003, she and Pete were either incarcerated on Riker's Island or about to be — she was so strung out on heroin and cocaine that one day blended into the next.
After Thanksgiving dinner 2004, our 15-year-old son Duncan surprised us with a box of chocolates and a greeting card. He wrote: “Mom, Dad, Carrick, Pete. I love you guys all. We stick through the hardest times as a family.”
While I am always aware of our tenuous holds on sobriety, sanity and life itself, that's what The Elephant on Main Street is all about: Sticking through the hardest times — and telling the story.
Dateline NBC
In July, 2005, NBC's Dateline aired an hour-long special report titled "Saving Carrick." More precisely, Dateline documented the impact Carrick's addiction had on my family from the summer of 2003 through the autumn of 2004. During this period, we threw Carrick out of the house after she walked out of yet another rehab. She served time on Riker's Island and started speedballing. Wracked by this combination of heroin and cocaine and realizing that she could not return home as an active addict, she finally hit bottom in January 2004. She and Pete detoxed at Coney Island Hospital, then entered a methadone program at Mount Sinai Medical Center.
In April 2004, our family reconciled. Carrick, who turned 21 on August 4, took twelve college credits last year to obtain her high school diploma and will matriculate full time in the fall of 2005. She has talked to Dateline's audience about her addiction in a way that could profoundly change many people's lives. Deirdre, meanwhile, has graduated from a substance abuse certificate program at the top of her class. She worked as a drug counselor at a program for women in the Bronx that was shut down for lack of funds, and is now the intake coordinator for Madison East, a new program at Mount Sinai.
I've suspended my fear that Carrick will unknowingly inject rat poison into her veins. I fret now when she rides the subway late at night, as fathers normally do. I still worry that the hepatitis C that she contracted while she was on the street will corrode her liver. I also fear that all the good things that are happening right now could slip away as easily as Carrick does in my nightmare. But her death is no longer something my conscious mind compulsively discusses with itself. Now, I find myself celebrating Carrick's rebirth in little moments like hearing a glass shatter in the next room and knowing her fumble fingers were responsible.
The Elephant on Main Street is the back story of the struggle for recovery and reconciliation that Dateline's cameras report within the context of our family's — and our neighbors'— quest for escape, sociability and meaning through drugs that alter our consciousness. In particular, I write about the three-year period between the time that Carrick first tried heroin and ran away from home to a day when I simultaneously smell pot in her room and read a stunning essay she has written about the first time she shot up. I also deal candidly with Deirdre's and my past use of drugs and alcohol - indeed, we were high on booze, pot and cocaine the night Carrick was conceived - and to genetic, cultural and social factors that were part of the mix of all of our addictions. Vignettes of other addicts, survivors and unsung heroes in our small village provide context to a story that is as universal as it is personal.
The Impact of Addiction
Even when she was not with us in our home, Carrick's demands on our psyche dominated our lives. Multiply our experience by the anguish caused by the one in ten Americans who are dependant on or abuse alcohol, illicit drugs, and/or prescription drugs and it's clear that the emotional impact of addiction on our society is enormous.
The economic cost of substance abuse in 1995 — ten years ago — were pegged at $414 billion by the Schneider Institute for Health Policy, Brandeis University in its Substance Abuse: The Nation's Number One Health Problem report.
Well over half of Americans - sixty-three percent - say that addiction has had an impact on their lives, according to a survey conducted in April 2004 by Hart Research and Coldwater Corp., either because they are addicts themselves or a friend or family member is.
According to the government's most recent National Survey on Drug Use, more than twenty-two million people (9.3 percent of the total population) needed treatment for an alcohol or illicit drug problem in 2003, although only 1.2 million actually received it. There are no accurate estimates of the number of people in recovery, whether through formal treatment regimens, twelve-step programs, or on their own, but they logically number in the many millions.
Teen drug use is epidemic. More than one-fifth of eighth grade students report that they use alcohol, according to National Institute on Drug Abuse's Monitoring the Future survey. The figure rises steadily through high school to nearly fifty percent of twelve graders. Fifty-four percent of students have tried an illicit substance by the time they finish high school; twenty-nine percent of twelve graders have tried an illegal drug other than marijuana. The number of adolescents from twelve to seventeen admitted to substance-abuse treatment programs increased sixty-five percent between 1992 and 2002, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
Substance abuse among adolescents is particularly insidious.
"More than ninety percent of adults with current substance use disorders started using before age eighteen; half of those began before age fifteen,” according to a position paper issued by Physician Leadership on National Drug Policy.
According to National Academy of Science figures quoted by the New York Times, thirty-two percent of people who try tobacco become dependent, as do twenty-three percent of those who try heroin, seventeen percent who try cocaine, fifteen percent who try alcohol and nine percent who try marijuana. Other ramifications of substance use - from fights to vandalism to rape to automobile accidents - are well known.
Still, some parents remain remarkably ambivalent about their children's drug and alcohol use, and this dichotomy has become front-page news. A Wall Street Journal feature proclaimed: “Uneasy Compromise: To Keep Teens Safe, Some Parents Allow Drinking at Home” (9/14/04, $$$).
We all know kids will be kids. The question is whether parents will be parents. We think that parents who condone, facilitate, encourage, or turn a blind eye toward underage drinking and drug use are putting their kids, and ours, in harm's way. They certainly are perpetuating a myth — drinking and drugging are requisite part of “growing up" — that unfortunately has become a social norm.
Thom Forbes
July, 2005