Carol Katz Beyer was willing to try almost anything. Two of her three children, Bryan and Alex, couldn’t stop using opioids. The health care marketing consultant brought her sons to outpatient programs and inpatient programs, counseling, 12-step meetings near their New Jersey home. Nothing stuck. The substance use problems that had troubled their teenage years followed them into their young adulthood.
“When my boys began this journey of experimentation with drugs, I really didn’t find a lot of support, not in a way that made sense to me,” Beyer told me this year. “At the time it was just tough love and you have to not enable.” She sent Bryan, her eldest, to a rehabilitation program in Florida. He graduated into a sober living home, but then, like the majority of people with substance use disorder do at least once and usually many times, he relapsed. Bryan cycled back into detox and more rounds of rehab and stints in jail, a demoralizing pattern that would last for several years. It wasn’t all bad times: Bryan found love, got married, and started paying Beyer back for the steep costs of his rehab trips. But he died at the age of 28 in 2016, after taking heroin and fentanyl.
Beyer’s middle son, Alex, struggled with drugs alongside his beloved older brother. Panicked after Alex, too, got in trouble in his teens for substance use, Beyer sent him to a boarding school. Then, like Bryan, he followed a typical American treatment program and went to rehab in Florida. He had bad phases—months in jail for drug possession—and good phases, proudly graduating from college. But, like his brother, he relapsed too. Alex overdosed and died at the age of 27, in 2017. He had heroin and fentanyl in his system.
Beyer had followed all the expert advice, but it did not save her sons. She is not alone in this regard. Families and friends of people who have died of overdoses across the country are confronting the vast inadequacy of the current approach to drug treatment. “As parents, we were taught hit bottom, let go, let God, and all the kinds of tough-love models that are prevalent in the United States,” Beyer said. “But they’re not working.”
[Read Kate Knibbs's full piece about overdose-prevention spaces, which help save lives but are illegal in the United States.]
