Kicking out a child addicted to drugs

[mariannaspring]

One of my family friends has a daughter in the States who got into prescription painkillers a year ago after having her wisdom teeth removd. She is 17 and will turn 18 in March of next year. She escalated from taking Vicodin to heroin. She's pawned off her families electronics, jewellery, and her own stuff.

The mother wants to throw her out but the father says it will only lead her down a slippery slope. He wants her to give her an ultimatum of rehab or being kicked out. What would you do?

[Beatty]

If she is still under 18 then move her far far away from her social circles plus rehab.

Move to a cabin in Alaska.

Nothing is too extreme as it's life or death.
I worked with heroin addicts. Many die on the streets

[95438756]

In all brutal honesty, cruelty is the best kindness for the daughter now. Sadly, there are NO soft options left period. Her brain is hard wired to get the smack no matter what.

bootcamp or abyss.

[Fugue]

Throwing out a young woman, who's an opioid addict, with nowhere to go? Nope, can't see any downside.

[PogMoThoin22]

What a horrible thing to even consider. I wouldn't give up on someone I love

[Setanta]

What a horrible thing to even consider. I wouldn't give up on someone I love

A good friend of mine suffering quiet bad with a coke addiction and in over his head regards debt,his parents had to sell a house,decent sized forest they wished to use for retirement and took E30,000 off his brother to bail him out

He returned home few weeks,coked off his tree and battered his mother black and blue for no reason....she had to get a restraining order after she got out of hospital


But that being said,I've another close acquaintance who come out of addiction centre two weeks,fingers crossed now she can stay off it.........it's never a cut/dry issue as regards dealing with someone with addiction,but afaik noone will ever overcome it,unless they want to

[JayZeus]

What would I do?

I’d find out if I can have my child involuntarily committed for Rehab, before the window closes when they turn 18:

https://americanaddictioncenters.org/re ... hab-forced

I’d also blame myself for allowing this to happen. The parent(s) are at fault here, 100%.

The opioid epidemic is nothing new and as a parent of a teenager in the US today, there is nothing they can say that makes it okay for their accepting the prescription of an opioid painkiller for their teen and their abject failure to safeguard their daughter from that terrible decision and ultimately to the situation they allowed her to end up in.

They brought it on themselves and they damn well better move heaven and earth to help her now. The mother should be ashamed of herself for wanting to throw her CHILD out, and the father should be ashamed of himself for not protecting his family by acting as their guardian in every aspect of their lives.

[Apelles]

One of my family friends has a daughter in the States who got into prescription painkillers a year ago after having her wisdom teeth removd. She is 17 and will turn 18 in March of next year. She escalated from taking Vicodin to heroin. She's pawned off her families electronics, jewellery, and her own stuff.

The mother wants to throw her out but the father says it will only lead her down a slippery slope. He wants her to give her an ultimatum of rehab or being kicked out. What would you do?

She's very young . . at seventeen . . still only a child really.
Her parents should be doing everything in their power to get her into and help her successfully through a drug rehab programme.
After all, she hasn't been an addict for very long after just a year. It sounds like she has inadvertently ended up in this situation after receiving an opiate prescription (given by a medical professional) for post surgery pain. Her doctor and her parents should really have been much more aware of the potential consequences of giving her such a drug and should of kept a closer eye to prevent her becoming addicted to this Vicodin shit in the first place. . I mean, it's not as if it hasn't been a much openly depated topic in the states for the last number of years, everyone over there now knows the dangers of how strongly addictive and how similar to heroin some of these over the counter pain killers can be.
I imagine she's probably made their life a living hell for the last year or so, but I'd be telling your friend that this girl is way too young to give up on, and if they do chuck their daughter out on the street and she dies as either a direct or indirect result of her addiction . . they'll never forgive themselves.

[kadman]

Its part of being a parent, able to make the easy decisions as well as the tough ones that we dont want to even consider. Childs welfare and safety is paramount, thats the goal.

[Fugue]

The possibility of her ending up a needle junkie and prostitute is surely sufficient not even to consider throwing her out.

[CelticRambler]

It sounds like there's more going on here that we know about. To go from receiving post-op pain control to petty larceny to feed a hard drug habit in a year suggests that the girl and/or her parents were already on a slippery slope before the dentistry.

A JayZeus says, there's absolutely no reason for the parents based in the US not to have known the risks associated with opioid pain control, and as she would have still been a legal minor at that time, it was there responsibility to protect her from this kind of thing. So either one or both of them failed then, or she's not so much of a "minor" as her age would suggest, and she'd already been "experimenting" and found the prescription stuff was better than whatever she'd been able to get hold of before.

I've always been pretty Victorian in my attitude to child-rearing, so I'd come down hard and give her one-off a choice: serious rehab now (with my support), or pack her bags and go live whatever kind of adult life she thinks she can manage. In fact, I'd probably take her to somewhere like Los Angeles or San Francisco first, and put the ultimatum to her while surrounded by fentanyl zombies.

[isha]

A detox camp in Asia followed by about a year spent volunteering in agricultural work in somewhere like Laos or Lhasa or anywhere very rural and culturally very different. And me with her.
She is only a child. (My oldest in his thirties is sometimes only a child in my opinion.) The world is hard enough without your parents abandoning you too.

[Deleted]

Was Oxycotin prescribed to her at all during all this ?

Big pharma have a lot to answer for ...

[JayZeus]

Vicodin is just as effective as a gateway to recreational substance abuse. A skip to street purchased Oxy and then on to Heroin is a common pathway to an early death.

[Fugue]

I find it baffling that anyone would consider throwing their under-18 child, with an opioid addiction, out. Needle drugs, crime, prostitution, assault... maybe death, would await her.
Seems like internet talk to me.