Death, Expected

Those who deal with death regularly say that it’s the sudden deaths that put us into shock more than those that we more or less expected. When someone has been ill for a while and we know that we are going to get that dreaded phone call at any time, the sting of grief is still there, but it is not as shocking.

Mr. and Mrs. Joe Klein were not surprised when the police called to tell them that their son Timothy was dead. He was a heroin addict and they knew that it might come at any time. “Obviously I was sad, but it wasn’t something that was entirely unexpected. He was always kind of a risk-taker, he was always the kind of kid who would stand on his tiptoes to get on a roller coaster.” He died of a heroin overdose after being addicted to drugs for 8 years. He was 31. It is interesting to note that this means that he wasn’t involved with drugs in high school or even during the usual college age. For him it started a bit later. In that year, 2008, 20 people overdosed on heroin in Dane County.

But in this past year of 2011, 131 people overdosed on heroin in Dane County, mostly in the 18-24 year old range. That’s over 6 times as many.

Madison’s Mayor Paul Soglin called the heroin problem “an epidemic,” because of “the loss of life of productive people … the costs related to the expense of the drug” and also traffic problems. By this he means that 12 traffic accidents in the Madison area were caused by people who were under the influence of heroin. He added that the drug “puts everyone at risk. It puts anybody who is active who might have say a sports-related injury.That would tend to be younger people, students.” This is because so many young people seek to excel at sports and then they get injured and get addicted to painkillers. When the painkillers get cut off or become too expensive, they turn to heroin, which is less expensive to use.

The heroin addicts finance their habit by burglarizing homes and also dorm rooms on the campus of the University of Wisconsin. They sell valuable items to pawn shops to get quick money.

Joe Klein even had to lock his bedroom door to keep his own son from stealing his debit card and his wife’s guitar. “It just turns a good person into a monster,” Klein said. “He got caught stealing copper and embezzling from his job, writing bad checks, just a litany of things, one after another.”

The Mayor has introduced an initiative to fight the heroin usage in the Madison area. Let’s hope for success.