One-Way Ticket

Below is an excerpt from my book, One-Way Ticket: Our Son's Addiction to Heroin. Perhaps this book will touch you, but if nothing else, some parents may be able to shed their sense of uniqueness and guilt and see themselves as citizens of the world, influenced like everyone else by their family's particular landscape, biology, geography, politics, timing, heroes, history, and luck. Possibly Josh's story will influence a few kids who, like him, crave excitement and think it's cool to be a part of the drug scene.

The book is available in its entirety at Amazon.com.



It was 1974, Josh was almost seventeen when he went AWOL from the Institute and came home. We decided not to send him back. I had never been comfortable with their long-term institutional philosophy, and in those eleven months he had not related to the psychiatric intern they had assigned to him. In fact, Josh hated him then, and over the years his anger towards him never subsided. After looking at Josh's records, I understand why.
This jerk wrote, "His family appears to be very cold and uninvolved." Then, at the end of the clinical report, he contradicted the previous statement: "They do not seem able to separate themselves from the intense emotional attachment they have with their son."