I had a great visit with my patient, Edward (not his name) earlier this week. Edward grew up in West Virginia and started using Oxycontin^® toward the end of his high school years. He got hooked and when pills became expensive, he started using heroin.

Edward is kind, smart, shy, funny and a talented chef. Heroin robbed him of all those things.

He spent several agonizing years avoiding relationships, betraying close friends and family, crashing anywhere he could, and basically cutting off any opportunity he had to continue to develop into the person he was capable of being.