Supporting someone with heroin addiction

When heroin is in your family

Few things change a household as completely as heroin. The fear is constant and physical, you sleep with the phone on, and you learn the words for things you never thought you’d need to know - naloxone, fentanyl, methadone. If you’re the parent, partner, sibling or close friend of someone using, you already know that supporting them isn’t a single decision but hundreds of small ones, made on tired days with imperfect information.

Fentanyl contamination has made every use a roll of the dice, and the most dangerous moment is often the one that looks safest, the first use after a clean stretch when tolerance has dropped. The old advice to let someone hit rock bottom can now mean a funeral. Recovery is real and it happens, but that weight isn’t dramatic. It’s just the weather you live in.

What you’ll find here

The posts below are from people in the middle of this. Some are parents of adult children who have been using for years. Some are partners trying to decide whether they can stay. Some are siblings who have stepped back and are working out how to come back in. There is no single path through this and these posts don’t pretend there is.

You don’t have to share to read.