Son’s Addiction Puts His Family Through ‘Hell’

If you look only at the numbers, opioid prescription and heroin overdose deaths among teens isn’t one of our biggest problems.

New Mexico leads the nation in drug overdose deaths, but it is adults who fuel that statistic. Fewer than one-fifth of the overdose deaths in New Mexico are among people under 25. The median age of people who die of overdose is over 40.

The statistics would say we should spend our energy on those older addicts. But we don’t raise statistics, or drag our lawn chairs to their baseball and soccer games or tuck them in at night: We raise children.

And when it’s our job to keep them safe and they’re finding their potential killers in our purses and bathroom cabinets, it’s a health crisis that’s personal.

Joan Leyba tapped me on the shoulder the other night after we had watched a screening of “No Exceptions,” the new documentary about heroin and opiate pill addiction among Albuquerque teens. She wanted to tell me what it’s like to be the parent of a child whose life is unraveled by heroin.

Joan, a science teacher, and her husband, Andy, who works for the city of Albuquerque, thought they were doing everything right by putting their youngest son, Andrew, in private school and keeping him busy with sports.

Andrew was a striker for St. Pius X’s varsity soccer team and played on a prestigious traveling Red Star club team. In 2007, when he was a junior in high school, he twisted his knee before the St. Pius state championship game and a friend at school gave him an OxyContin tablet.

For Andrew, that pill led to others and to a range of other drugs – primarily cocaine and heroin.

In his senior year, Andrew quit the soccer team and became moody and aggressive. Everyone in the family knew something was wrong, they just didn’t know what.

Joan noticed money, electronics and spoons missing from home, and she found foil in Andrew’s room, but she didn’t connect the dots. That was mainly because heroin use was so far outside their frame of reference. “It was the last thing we expected,” Joan told me.

	On TV “No Exceptions” airs at 7 p.m. Thursday on KOB TV and on PBS stations KRWG 22 in Las Cruces and KENW 3 in Portales

Today, with two overdoses, expensive rehab, relapses and buckets of tears behind her and the family, she wishes they had known what to look for earlier.

“We thought we did everything right,” she said. But you can’t protect your kids from a threat you can’t even imagine.

These days, the word is out. Filmmaker Chris Schueler’s “No Exceptions” documentary includes the Leybas’ story and others. A public awareness campaign warns of prescription opioid and heroin abuse among New Mexico teens.

When I asked the Leybas why they would choose to air their private family troubles in a film and in the newspaper, they told me the issue is bigger than any shame or embarrassment they or Andrew might feel.

“Parents,” she said, “have to open their eyes. We’ve got to stop this. I don’t want another mother, another family, to go through this. The last three to four years have been hell.”

Hell is finding your athletic son blue and barely breathing in his bedroom and doing CPR on him to save his life. Hell is dropping your teen off at a rehab program in Texas and driving home without him. Hell is hoping for recovery while bracing for relapse.

Andrew is 21 now, back in college, living at home and not using heroin, with the help of Suboxone, a narcotic used to treat addiction. He has put weight back on and looks good.

His parents are delighted, but cautious. They now understand the powerful pull of addiction.

“Andrew’s got a really big heart. He’s very caring. But when he’s using, it’s a totally different personality,” his mother told me. These days, she says, “He’s like Andrew again.”

UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Leslie at 823-3914 or llinthicum@abqjournal.com. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal