Polydrug Use: Robb's Story

Pubdate: Thu, 08 Feb 2007
Source: North Coast Journal (CA)Copyright: 2007, North Coast Journal
Contact: ncjour@northcoast.comWebsite: http://www.northcoastjournal.com/Welcome.html
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2833
Author: Monica Topping

FIGHTING DEMONS: ROBB'S STORY

My name is Nancy Courtemanche. I'm the mother of Robb Rierdan. Robb's not here to talk for himself, [he] died from an overdose of heroin. This is his story.
When I think back of Robb as a little boy, when he turned about 9, he went from being a happy boy to a sad boy. I wondered about that a lot, and it continued to just kind of hang around him. Then, at about age 13 we moved up here to Ferndale, and I think it was about that time that Robb began to experiment with marijuana and maybe some other drugs.
Move forward a couple of years and his behavior had changed quite a bit. He was very talented musically, very talented artistically. He was hanging in what he called the alternative crowd, and was very caught up in that world. There seemed to be a lot of alcohol and drugs in that world and it was very hard for me to watch.
He left home and was living in his friends' apartments, crashing on their couches wherever they would let him. I think at that point, around 18 or so, is when he got really involved with crank. He went from a normal weight down to 108 pounds. He looked like something out of a concentration camp, and I did not know what was happening. I didn't know the symptoms of crank use, I just saw my son dissolving in front of my eyes.
He told me later that he took himself off of crank, which was probably more difficult than I can even realize as I look back. I'm pretty sure after that he never used crank again, [but] I think it permanently damaged him.
After [that] he was clean for probably six or eight months, and then he discovered alcohol. He would drink himself into blackouts where he didn't know what had happened for even a whole day nor two sometimes. I think at that point the bipolar disorder kicked in. It came to dominate his life as [the] years passed.
One of the things I'm realizing now is that there is a vicious circle [for] people who have mental illness using drugs ... Robb may have had a predisposition to depression, and the drug use made it worse.His art was still amazing and his guitar skills were amazing, but the drugs at certain points [would] affect his ability to play, and there were a couple of bands that told him that if he didn't straighten up that they would not allow him to play with them any more. And that was pretty devastating to him.
When he was 23 he was living in Eureka, and I know that many of his friends were using heroin. He called what he did "recreational heroin," where you smoke it or you shoot it once in a while but you somehow don't manage to get hooked onto it. It's just something that you play with.
I remember in 2003, he came to me and asked me to take him to the doctor so [he] could get medicine. And I said "Why?" He said, "Because I'm hooked on heroin." I was devastated. I had no clue. But I went to the doctor, and he got the medicine, and he got himself off of heroin without going into rehab. He did it by himself. It was awful. He was sick, he was sick, he was sick, and then he got over it. And he promised me he would never use heroin again.
For the next couple of years, his depression got worse. He was taking a lot of meds -- for the bipolar, for everything that he had. He had a lot of pain. One of the things that happens with depression is people withdraw. They lose their appetite, they don't feel like going anyplace [or] doing anything, they don't have any energy. Decisions are overwhelming. The creative juices that they may have had at one time slowly begin to dwindle away.
I talked to Robb about choices, about good choices and bad choices. Toward the end, in the last year of his life, the consequences of [his choices] caught up with him. He got a DUI and lost his driver's license. He had lost his transportation, so it was hard to get around with his band equipment. He had steep fines he couldn't pay.His friends would get upset with him because he would drink so much when he went out to bars that he would get in fights, or he'd get so obnoxious they would ask him to leave. And then he would feel really bad and he would withdraw even further.
It was very sad for me to see. Very sad.I didn't know what I could do. I was helpless. He always appreciated when I would help him, and I encouraged him to do everything that he wanted to do. I would help him with transportation. I would help him buy art supplies. And it got to the point where that didn't even help. He just kept withdrawing more and more. I felt at some point that he was in this box where the sides got so high that he couldn't get out.
The last few months of his life were very sad. One thing that he did want to do was to go up to Seattle to visit his friends. He was really excited about that. So he went up there, and he was gone for a week. And when he came back, he wasn't right. I was suspicious and very afraid that he was doing something -- I was telling myself it wasn't heroin.
He got back on Thursday night. We went out on Friday and had a really wonderful afternoon together, and when I left that day, I thought maybe things were going to get better. And the next day, at 4:30, I got a call from his roommate, and he told me Robb was dead.
That's when a parent goes into denial. You don't believe it's true until you drive up and you see the coroner's car is there and the police are inside and you go in and you see the body of somebody that you have loved for 29 years. And you see this shell.
The word went around the community very fast that he was dead. Some people thought that he had committed suicide. I talked with the coroner, who was absolutely wonderful, and he said that no, it was an accident, that the lethal dose is 1 cc, but Robb died from 1.04 -- that's four one-hundredths. I don't know what that looks like, but I imagine to myself that maybe that's a half a drop, so my son died from a half a drop more than what it took to be within that line of where you could shoot heroin and survive.
It devastated his friends. There was so much hurt, so much sorrow, so much guilt, and so much anger. And so many of his friends reached out to me, came to his service and talked with me. A lot of [them] have stayed in touch -- I've known quite a few of them since they were 15 or 16, and now it's 15 years later and we've gone through a lot together. And some of these friends have gone through the drug scene and have gotten clean now and are really, really tired of seeing so much drugs in the scene, like, "Couldn't we do this without the drugs?"
The interview with Nancy Courtemanche was conducted by Monica Topping of KSLG radio as part of a series she produced with Mike Dronkers about drug use on the local music scene. "Lifestyle: Addiction in Humboldt's Rock Scene" begins airing Saturday, Feb. 10, at 1 p.m. on KSLG 94.1-FM

*****

Robb's story is, in a sense, so routine that it is boring. Kid begins experimenting with drugs ("marijuana and other drugs") at abou age thirteen, over the years progresses through a whole series of drugs -- amphetamines, alcohol, heroin, back to heroin, finds himself trapped in a world of mental illness, and dies.

On the other hand, many features of this story bear emphasizing. First, his drug use started at an early age (many even begin earlier than Robb) and it involved many drugs from the beginning.

I'm not sure his mother knew the whole story -- most of us parents don't know our childrens' histories as well as we think we do. First drugs are usually alcohol or tobacco, not marijuana. A dear friend of mine used to tell how, when she was in the seventh grade, she would buy a box of No-Doz (caffeine tablets for those of you who never pulled an all-niter), sell them to the grade school kids for fifty cents a pill, and use the profits to buy Ritalin for her own use from the older kids.

The second thing to note is the ease (relatively) with which Robb moved back and forth between drugs; he was not hooked on just one thing.

This often repeated story shows that it is not the drugs that cause addiction. Drugs are just neutral things that can be used wisely (morphine after surgery) or unwisely (morphine from a shared dirty needle in a shooting gallery). Some people -- a minority of drug users if we look at the government statistics -- find themselves unable to control, limit, or regulate their own drug use.

Many of those users suffer from mental illness of one kind or another. In effect their drug use is an attempt to self-medicate, often with the wrong drug for their condition, and with disasterous results. Robb's mother said he was suffering from bipolar disorder and depression; the symptoms continued, by her account, for sixteen years. I think she confused cause and effect, for she seemed to blame the Crank (a dear, old-fashioned term I haven't heard in years) for the depression, rather than realizing that the symptoms were probably there well beforee the drug use. But in her story there is no mention of any attempt to find appropriate therapy for Robb's condition.

Robb's death may go into the record book as a drug overdose and an example of abuse of illegal drugs; but doesn't most of the blame rest with parents, teachers, and doctors who, for sixteen years, could not recognize and find treatment for a rather common mental illness.

Remember it's not the drugs that are the problem; it is why and how and by whom they are used.