Heroin deaths skyrocket, but hope remains

     Taking heroin feels wonderful.
     "It's been described as returning to the womb, and I think there's some truth to that," said David Cohen, who was addicted for years. "There's an instant sense of safety, almost an orgasm feeling at the beginning: 10 seconds of bliss and an overwhelming sense of warmth and comfort and safety from your head to your toes, like you're in a cocoon."
     At first, that is. The bad part quickly follows.
     "You build a tolerance so quickly," said Cohen. "It's not uncommon to need to shoot up three or four times a day. Pretty easy to get a $100 a day habit."
     So users steal to support their habits — that's what Cohen, now 42, did in his early 20s.
     They also have an increasing tendency to die. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that between 2010 and 2013 the death rate from heroin overdose nearly tripled, from 1 in 100,000 people to 2.7 in 100,000. And unlike the cliche image of heroin addicts being youth in the inner city, the group most likely to die from heroin overdose are early middle-aged white males, 25 to 44.
     Why the surge in deaths?
     "People are dying from heroin for two reasons," said Cohen, who managed to kick his habit with the help of his parents, first, and then rehab, AA, and Hazelden Betty Ford Chicago, which he entered as a volunteer and now is clinical director. "First, there's more of it, second more people are attracted to it" because it's cheaper and often more pure — except when it's cut with drywall or other drugs, or even Ajax or poisons.
     Officials have been trying to respond to the upswing. In 2013, the DuPage County created a program to distribute Narcan, the nasal anti-overdose medication, and already credit it with saving 32 lives. The Schaumburg police started carrying Narcan kits in January.
     The FDA hasn't yet approved the sprayable form of Narcan, and Sen. Mark Kirk is pushing for it to do so. Late last year, he formed the Suburban Anti-Heroin Task Force to combat the drug.
     "There is no typical heroin addict," said Cohen, a member of the task force. "I am a heroin addict."
     Cohen was born in Peoria, went to Niles West then Highland Park High School, where he was smoking pot every day at age 15 and, like many, he started taking harder drugs using the most convenient source: his parents' medicine cabinet.
     "Prescription medicines are the hidden gateway drug," he said. "There's a message there. If you have a medicine cabinet full of unused medications, stimulants, sedatives, be smart. Lock up your drugs. When you are finished with your medications, dispose of them properly."
      Cohen overdosed on his 21st birthday, was in a coma for three days, then spent three years living the junkie scramble, until a concerned friend pushed his parents to action, and they shipped him off to rehab. He credits AA for helping save his life.
     "AA worked for me, I loved it," he said. "I found hope for the first time. They took a hopeless dope fiend and turned me into a dopeless hope fiend."
     Which is his message now.
     "While heroin is killing people, there is hope," Cohen said. "No parent should have to go through this alone. There's help out there."
     To reach Narcotics Anonymous, call their helpline at (708) 848-4884.

Maybe killing Ronald would help

   Nobody likes to see a business in trouble. Particularly an important American business, headquartered right here in the suburbs of Chicago.
     That said, am I the only person who's enjoying the troubles that McDonald's is having? Its sales continually erode—another 4 percent slide for U.S. restaurants in February, coming on top of a 2014 spent entirely in the red, solid negative growth, no matter how it struggles to retain its fleeing customers.
     Resentment? Sure. McDonald's was—is—the cheerleader for obese America. The drug dealer dangling our fat/sugar fix. The company and I grew large together. I remember when we both were young, and its outlets  were white and red tile. You ate in your car. My mother phoned my father, after Sunday school, to ask if it was okay for us to go: he had condemned the places as "greasy spoons," a lovely old Americanism. 
      He said it was okay, alas. I remember the childish joy of unwrapping the waxy paper around a cheeseburger, a crusty filet-o-fish. The forceful suck it took to draw a swallow of that chocolate-like frozen shake substance up the straw. 
      That it was crap never crossed my mind. Five years later, when I was a fat, bowl-haircut teen, McDonald's had some celebrate-ourselves special where hamburgers were 10 cents apiece, the way they were when the place was founded. Maybe it was their 20th anniversary. I plunked down a dollar and bought ten. I can't recall whether I ate them all—I hope not. But I remember the warm pile of burgers, the sense of endless need being satisfied.
     I'm not blaming McDonald's. But it didn't help.
     It's satisfying to think that the nation took the same route that I did, from yum-yum-eat-'em-up hungry early years to a more controlled maturity. When the boys were small, we'd go to McDonald's--you have to with children, they make your life hell if you don't. But we regarded each visit as a failure of will. And for a period of time, I'd occasionally want one of those cheeseburgers, out of nostalgia, and order one, with black coffee, every year or two.
     But I'd regret it immediately. Now, if I smell the distinctive McDonald's fare stench when I enter a Metra car—somebody's dinner—I'll turn around and go to another car. I watch what I eat, and while McDonald's has salads and such, that's like ordering milk in a bar. Better not to go at all. 
     I'm not sure if the rest of the country is shunning McDonald's due to healthier living. Or maybe they're just tired of it, a collective revulsion after a 50-year burger binge, and we're moving on to equally-revolting food sold by some other company.
     Either way, me, I'm done with McDonald's. I try to imagine what would draw me into one. If I could buy a whole grapefruit for $2 at a McDonald's, I might go, provided it was good grapefruit. If their salads were bigger and more real...no, the problem would be, even if it were a sweet grapefruit or a decent salad, I'd still have to eat them in a McDonald's.  Their employees are the most put-upon, lowest rung of the employment scale, with their brusque mayeyehelpyou mumbles and their baleful, kill-me-now glares. Their restaurants, the worst kind of primary color, easy scrub plastic play pen. Maybe a redesign. Maybe if they dragged Ronald McDonald behind the corporate headquarters and put a bullet behind his ear. I've always hated him. Everyone I know hates him. That might be a start. Kill Ronald, remodel the stores, and pay your knot of crushed down employees a living wage, to make the  experience more like dining out at an actual restaurant and less like something guilt-ridden, furtive, the gastronomical version of buying a pornographic magazine.
     Or maybe the slide is just going to accelerate.

A question of forgiveness

     American are a punitive bunch. We love to punish people. Nearly 3 percent of American adults are in prison, jail, probation or parole, a figure far beyond any other industrialized nation.
     But that's only the beginning. We entertain ourselves with elaborate revenge fantasies on TV and in the movies, and of course arm ourselves in order to deliver swift justice to anybody who might cross us, changing the laws to better encourage each other to stand our ground.
     While vengeance feasts, forgiveness starves, which is part of what drew my interest to a thin new book—155 pages—by Jeanne Bishop titled Change of Heart: Justice, Mercy, and

Making Peace with My Sister's Killer (Westminster John Knox Press: $16).
      Chicagoans of a certain vintage will remember Bishop as the public defender whose sister and brother-in-law were murdered in their Winnetka townhome in 1990. For a while the FBI painted the crime as being involved with Bishop's work in Northern Ireland, until it was resolved that a disturbed 17-year-old whose parents knew Bishop's had committed the crime, basically, because he was a sociopath.
     It's the sort of book I might normally never touch—God-directed goodness gives me the fantods—but I had met Bishop. She was the public defender randomly assigned to me when I had my own legal troubles nearly 10 years ago, and I created something of a professional nightmare for her, aided by some sloppy reporting by the Tribune, after I implored her to continue as my counsel. Everyone had a good laugh at our expense, and the prudent thing for me to do would be to toss the book onto the slush pile and not bring any of this up. But that smelled like cowardice to me, and I figured, at least read the first line and then abandon the book with a clean conscience. It begins: "Gravel crunched under the tires of my car as I drove into the visitors lot at Pontiac Correctional Center on a cold Sunday morning."
      Not quite, "Reader, I married him," but enough to keep me going. She's at Pontiac visiting David Biro, the man who murdered her kin. Bishop pauses when filling out a form, wondering what to write for "Visitor's Relationship to Offender."
     "What was my relationship to the man whose name stung my lips?" she puzzles. "Until that moment I would have written this: Him, murderer. Me, murder victims' family member. That was where the relationship ended. But now I would have a different one, one in which we were not categories, but human beings. I would meet him face to face."
      In a world where you can find endless slo-mo payback, the idea of seeking out the man who wronged you to—do what exactly? -- propels the reader forward through this crisp, challenging book.
     The killer is convicted by page 40. What we get then is Bishop's gradual progress from standard, let-him-rot victimhood to recalibrating her Christian faith to draw the killer toward her, and reassess her view of the death penalty.
 

Jeanne Bishop

   Biro remains a shadowy figure, while Bishop moves from good ("I don't want to hate anyone" she announces to a room of no-doubt startled cops when the arrives at the Winnetka police station the day of the murders) to really good, making speeches, writing op-eds, appearing before panels, once testifying on the opposite side of her own mother .
     She's rescued from unbearable goody-goodyism when she tells the FBI to pound salt after it comes around, eager to use the murders as leverage to get her to squeal on her Irish contacts.
     And one moment made me think of A Clockwork Orange. Bishop starts visiting the killer and begins coaching Biro to grasp the enormity of what he's done, going so far as to give him Little Women to read, so he can understand the kind of sisterly affection he destroyed. An unforgiving sadist who set out to awaken Biro's comatose conscience and rub its face in his evil deeds and Bishop's God-sent-me mission of forgiveness might find themselves doing exactly the same thing.
     Some parts of the book made me squirm. As a public defender, she is relieved when she gets an innocent defendant freed, "other times, though, a guilty client goes free when the state drops the charges, or a judge grants my motion to quash arrest and suppress evidence, or a jury votes to acquit. What happens then feels less like justice and more like mercy."
     To her maybe. Maybe not so much to the terrified victims, but by this point they've been backseated to the felons, who in my mind were grinning broadly and high-fiving each other, welcoming Bishop over to their side of the moral fence.
     If that seems harsh, then Bishop lost me toward the end, when she contemplated the release of Biro, and people like him, and coldly speculated why some timid folk oppose sprinkling God's grace on felons and turning them loose.
     "We set up David Biro and then others as objects of fear. Let them out, we say, and they may come after us. Our lives will be in danger. I wonder now, though, whether what we are truly afraid of is not that they will never get better, but that they might."
     No, the David Biros of the world set themselves up as objects of fear by doing horrible things. We let them out, and sometimes they really do come after us, or somebody like us. Yes, we are too harsh, and make the road to redemption too narrow. People can change, and do. But by the end of Bishop's book, I was wondering whether the victims deserved a bit more of the compassion she lavishes over the perpetrators.

"It is a fool's life"

    One of the dozen mundane tasks that made Monday a sort of teeth-gritted, "Thirty-plus-years-of-doing-this-shit-and-here-I-am" kind of day, was tossing out all the brochures, catalogues, business cards—except for the one for the really cool story I'm going to follow up on—from my visit to the Housewares Show Saturday. Been there, done that. 
     Tossing out the samples was a little harder. Even though my wife had spurned the Click & Carry, it was a solid piece of well-poured plastic, a rich aqua, with a rubberized section to be kinder to your fingers. Somebody's dream made tangible. The Puritan father in me thought, "This could come in handy..."
     How? Should I tuck it into the back of the van, to rattle around with the flares we've never used and the mass of cloth bags because we're all so flippin' environmental? 
     It hit the copy of Home Furnishing News with a "whap."
     That felt right.  They should teach classes in throwing stuff out. We should practice, because eventually we're going to have to get good at it. My wife had a master class, in shutting down her parents home after her mother died. We both did, regarding all the material that two marketly unmaterialistic people had acquired. Nine roasters. Or was it 11? Or 13? Anyway, a lot of black enamel roasters with white specks. More than a human should have. 
     As if the hoarder TV shows aren't warning enough. Pitch stuff. I'm going to take time off work to spring clean this year, because I don't think I've done it right for about five years. 
     Henry Thoreau had it right. You don't own stuff, stuff owns you. 
     Standing up with a groan, and over to the bookshelf. Books are different. You need those.
     "The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost," Thoreau writes, in Walden. "By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before."
     To which I will add two observations. One, Thoreau's father owned a pencil factory. Thoreau's disdain for possessions was built on possessions, and connected pals like Emerson, who loaned him the axe he needed to build his cabin at Walden Pond which, Two,  was not an organic expression of his desire to live simply, but a book stunt, just like the book stunts today where people read the phone book and date 100 strangers and such.  It was designed to build the Thoreau brand, and it pretty much failed—he had to fall back on those pencils, thought at the time to be the best in America. 
     Not to slag Thoreau. The man could turn a phrase, and it takes the mind of a charlatan welded to the heart of a saint to get through life sometimes. And it helps to throw stuff out when you can. You never miss it.

This "broom" you're selling, tell me more

Matt Schipper, right, demonstrates the humane, Zen-ful Fly Swooper.

     If the violence inherent in fly swatters has always bothered you, rejoice; relief is at hand. The Fly Swooper, a funnel on a stick that, rather than smashing the living, sentient beings that you believe flies to be, nuzzling their young with a human-like affection, instead collects them safely in a small net.
     “And then what?” I asked Matt Schipper, demonstrating the product Saturday, opening day of the 2015 International Home + Housewares Show at McCormick Place, the four-day convention where all the makers of household devices from toasters to toothpick holders hook up with all the vendors who sell them or try to.
     “You release them outside,” he replied. “It’s more of a Zen-ful approach. We’ve done $1 million in sales in Malaysia.”
     That’s why I love the housewares show. You never know what you’re going to find.   

Robert Delaney and his brainchild

    Seven hours of increasingly footsore marching past exhibits barely scratches the surface: countless home care products from the utterly mundane — mops, brooms, sponges, cleaners — to the almost unbelievable, such as Bob’s Butt Wipes.   
     “The polish after the paper!” brand manager Kayla Ward chirped when I hurried over to regard the new product in drop-jawed wonder. 
     “We leave nothing behind, like the Marines,” added Robert Delaney — the “Bob” in “Bob’s Butt Wipes.” He explained that he is a builder in Louisiana, and noticed his contractors taking packs of baby wipes with them when they visit portable toilets...   


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Discuss among yourselves

Display at the 2015 Home + Housewares Show

     Killing time Sunday evening before going downtown to a dinner party at The Kitchen, thumbing through the March edition of Poetry. I checked the table of contents for a writer I recognize; the only one I saw was Tony Hoagland, whose poem, "Jet," is in the book that Sara Bader and I have coming out next year. 
     One line in Hoagland's "Bible Study" jumped out and slapped me around the head and neck:
     "What kind of idiot would even think he had a destiny?"
     That struck me as entirely true. What do you think? 

Sunday Puzzler No. 2

Last week's puzzler was too easy. This one is still kinda easy, but has a certain elegance to it that makes up for the fact. Since the Saturday Fun Activity displays a photograph and asks for a location, in today's Puzzler I offer a location, in the form of this riddle, and to answer correctly you have to name a location (I 'd prefer you post a photograph, but I don't think that can be done in comments, at least nobody ever has). 

As a prize ... hmmm ... tired of coffee, tired of my poster. How about a copy of my 2012 memoir, "You Were Never In Chicago"? Signed. Unless you'd prefer coffee or a poster. One of the three, to the person who solves this less-easy-than-last-week-though-still-kinda-easy conundrum. 

       
                                                 First the first dual integer
                                                 Second the number of seconds
                                                 Not in a day or an hour.
                                                 Third, A Cool Million
                                                 This place doth stand secure
                                                 amidst a falling world.