I just finished the non-fiction book Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones. This novel weaves together several stories of heroin addicts, their famines, and the drug dealers from a small town in Mexico. For the heroin addicts the turning point being prescribed prescription pain pills. There is a sad story of a star football player who suffered a knee injury and was prescription Oxycontin. When he ran out of Oxycontin he went to heroin because it was cheaper. In order to afford his new habit, the football player began selling heroin and bought a gun for protection. He ended up dying from a gunshot wound during a drug deal.
I think you could argue that there were many turning points in this football player's life. If only he was not prescribed Oxycontin then he would not have ended up dead before the age of 20. Another turning point was moving onto heroin and another was deciding to sell heroin. He had the opportunity to change at any one of these junctures, but the addiction was too strong.
The football player’s story is that of one bad decision after another. Once he was addicted to oxycontin it seemed like he was set to follow a path downhill to his eventual doom. The most disturbing part of this story is that it is one of the many stories of young people who have died too soon due to opiate addiction.
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