Skip to main content

Chester County Press

Responses to 'The Heroin Crisis'

09/04/2013 02:18PM ● By Acl

During its three-part series "The Heroin Crisis," the Chester County Press received several comments from its readers about the report. For reasons of privacy, we have chosen not to publish the names of these authors.

 

Too many of us in Southern Chester County live this every day. My son passed away from a hroin overdose in December. You think it could never happen to my family, not to my children...and then it does. We hid it for so long afraid (ashamed?) to tell anyone what our family was going through. But, that is not the answer. Thank you, Chester County Press, for bringing this epidemic to light.

---

Timmy is a very lucky young man and his parents are lucky, too. Our son passed away on Valentine's Day of 2011. He was 26 years young, a smart student, a great athlete, and a good boy from a good family. It could happen to anyone. It's very sad, very scary, and we are very lost without him.

---

I wanted to take a quick moment to thank you for your article on the Heroin Crisis.  It hits very close to home for my family. My brother passed away from a heroin overdose in December 2012.   He was brought to the Jennersville Hospital into the room pictured in your article with Dr. Alex Fernandez.  Unfortunately, my family is some of the statistics you shared in your article.

As someone who has lived through this, everything you wrote about was very accurate.  Thank you for taking the time to educate the people in the Chester County area.  If your article even stops one person from using it was well worth it.  Heroin addicts don't realize that it's their families who have to live in the sometimes fatal consequences of their decisions.  I pray your article has prevented other families from going through what my family has had to. 

Thank you again!

---

So many prescription drug deaths ... many go unreported ... so many young people it seems have been prescribed some really dangerous drugs ... oxycontin , xanax, vicodin, methadone ... why are we not addressing this also? They are in the same class of drugs (opiates). To leave out the "legal drugs" that are killing our kids ... to me ... helps little.

---

I am so moved by this story. I live with this every day! My one son has been clean for eight months and lives in a halfway home. Then I have a son who is now in jail. He has been using too, off and on for a couple of years. My son who is living in a halfway home went to jail in December, and called us to bail him out. I refused and told hime he couldn't come home. It was one of the hardest and saddest things I have ever done, but if it made him sit in jail and think about where his life was going, then I did my job. With my older son, he didn't live at home because of the drugs. It hurts every day, knowing that he was out there using. Now he sits behind bars, and maybe it will give him the time that he needs to get honest with himself.

-- Richard L. Gaw