Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - On pills and needles: To hell and back; Dad's story of teen son overdose

Episode Date: February 7, 2018

About 115 Americans die each day from opioid overdoses, a frightening statistic for parents. When Rick Van Warner's son went missing, the father's battle to save his son from becoming one of the countless victims began. Warner and shares his story in a book "On Pills and Needles: The Relentless Fight to Save My Son from Opioid Addiction." He joins Nancy Grace to talk about the struggle, along with Los Angeles psychiatrist Dr. Carole Lieberman, and opioid addiction expert Dr. William Morrone. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. destroyer. It impacts everyone, poor, middle class, wealthy, black, white, suburbs, rural cities, you name it. How does a teen boy, a teen boy never been in trouble, leaves home on a usual Friday morning, just like your child, just like your children, just like you. And then suddenly, he's staring into the face of death by overdose. I just had to let that sink in for a moment because, you know, this morning, like every morning, I wake the children up. I sing, oh, what a beautiful morning as I wake them up. I bring them a warm drink in bed. We get ready and we go to school, get there early. Just trying to imagine if that afternoon I find out one of them are looking at death by overdose.

That is exactly what happened to my guest, Rick Van Warner. I'm Nancy Grace. This is Crime Stories. Thank you for being with us. Joining me, Rick Van Warner, author of a brand new book on pills and needles. The Relentless Fight to Save My Son from Opioid Addiction. Rick Van Warner. With me, Dr. William Maroney, opioid addiction expert, author of American Narcan, and LA psychiatrist, Dr. Carol Lieberman, Alan Duke, and Jackie Howard. First, I want to go to Rick Van Warner. Rick, thank you so much for being with us at a time when the rest of the world is looking at America and claiming we have an opioid crisis that we cannot control. That's all well and good for a headline, but it's more than a headline for you.

Let's start at the beginning, Rick. What happened? You know, it really, we had no idea that our teenage son had fallen into this addiction until one day on a Friday, he did not return home from school. And we initially felt that while this was unusual, there are times that 16-year-olds have a certain amount of angst and rebellion. But as the night fell that particular evening, the dread started sinking in, and we started searching around and calling around and looking to friends' houses, etc. And the information we got turned our fear into terror, really, because we heard that he had hooked up with a friend of his and that they were using some serious drugs, which was an absolute shock to us at the time. And that led to a several-day search.

I'm looking at your Chapter one. And as you were talking, Rick Van Warner, Jackie, look at my arm. The hair on my arm is standing up. I'm covered in chills. The way you describe, you know, it's a typical Friday. And your son doesn't come home like he normally does. And then the hours pass. Your first chapter is called The Vanishing. The first sentence, as darkness fell on the day after Tommy disappeared, his mother became increasingly anxious when her call to his phone went straight to voicemail. I've got a bad feeling, she says. I'm just, oh, that's just breaking my heart. She

said, I've got a bad feeling. So when he doesn't come home from school, at first you think, oh, he went to a friend's house. He did this. He's that. But then it gets to the evening. It's dark outside. What's the first thing you do? And did you have a feeling, Rick, that something bad was going on? We got some information from one of his friends that he could be in serious trouble and this could be a very dangerous thing. And at that point, I enlisted the help of a friend. And our daughter was very young, so my wife needed to take her home. And my friend and I went to search a building, an abandoned building in Orlando where we had been tipped off that they may be. It was a very imposing, large, vacant building full of graffiti and broken glass. In fact, it was so daunting that we called the police and the police refused to search the building because they felt it was too dangerous

and anybody could be hiding in there, et cetera. It was a multi-story building. So we went in it ourselves and I almost felt a feeling of evil and dread in this. It was just a very, very dark and dangerous place where anybody could be hiding. With me, Rick Van Warner, the author of On Pills and Needles, The Relentless Fight to Save My Son. You said you just had this feeling of evil when you went into that building. To Dr. William Maroney, who is not only a best-selling author of American Narcan, but also a renowned medical examiner and physician. Dr. Maroney, you and I have both investigated a lot of criminal cases. You in your way, me in mine. And I've got to tell you, there have been times when I would get out of my car at a scene

and I would just start walking in, no problem, all of a sudden, armed with nothing but my badge. I would feel a sense of, not dread, but a sense of evil, of something wrong, of something horribly wrong. And it's not like I had my mind set on that feeling. I'd be thinking about, oh, I've got to get back to the courthouse. I've got to do this and that and that and this. And all of a sudden, it's pervasive. It's like a dark blanket seeking down on you, Dr. Maroney. For the last 15 years, there's been a slow and insidious disregard for safety and common sense in medicine.

People have begun to share medicine. Doctors became careless. Pharmaceutical companies became aggressive. And drug lords became street savvy. And it brought us to a heroin crisis in America, where we used to think it was just the homeless and the criminal element. And now it's our sons and daughters. It is every family in America. I have had people tell me that everybody in counseling knows somebody that died of an overdose this week or this month. And it used to be once or twice a year, you said, oh, remember the guy in high school, he school? But it's everywhere. And the estimates are underestimates. People are dying in places we cannot measure. We need to understand how big the heroin problem is, how deep it reaches.

And every state is different, but some states are just caught way off guard. To Dr. Carol Lieberman, L.A. psychiatrist, this sense of dread, this sense of something horribly, horribly sinister. You know, when people tell me they have a hunch or a gut feeling, very often that will be poo-pooed. But, you know, Rick, in one of his chapters is called

Hunches and Heartaches. That's chapter three in his book on pills and needles. Dr. Carol Lieberman, I always say a hunch is nothing to sneer at. A hunch is something created over thousands of years of our evolution, of instinct, of something you may have seen, but you don't realize consciously you've seen it or heard it or smelt it or felt it, you get that feeling of dread. You feel it. Just like when Rick Van Warner was telling me about his child not coming home from school and hours start passing. It's a feeling, you know, something is wrong. And he says when he walked into this building, Carol, just this pervasive sense of something

sinister surrounded him. Yes, people really need to pay attention to their gut feelings, their instincts. You know, too often we just kind of push that aside and say, well, that's not logical. Or we try to talk to ourselves and tell us all the reasons why, you know, it'll be okay. But yes, the other thing is with a parent or a family member or even good friends, when you know someone so well, really your unconscious mind is what's telling you, you know, all the reasons why something really bad might happen, you know, in Rick's case, why his son might be doing something bad or it might be a bad outcome.

All of the reasons actually are what's creating that hunch. Back to Rick Van Warner, author of On Pills and Needles. Rick, while you were walking into that building, what did you observe? Well, I observed broken glasses all over the floor. It was strewn with trash and a lot of graffiti. Some of the graffiti was pretty horrific in nature. Just darkness, really. There wasn't any, you know, there was no light or anything to see. But my hunch kept me coming back to that building as the days passed. And I'd been to the bus station, the train station, passed out flyers of my son. We had reported him missing in the missing persons

database. And as the days went by, I just found myself continually being drawn to this building. And every time I got near it, day or night, I would feel that same sense of almost sinister feeling. And it was a gut instinct that he was there. And I searched the building with friends because again, the police would never go in the building, felt it was, especially the upper floors were too, too unsafe. And, you know, elevator shafts were empty. It was, you know, a building that was a Naval building on a Naval base at one time. And on the fourth day, my son had joined the search by now, his older brother, and we found him and he was in that building. He wasn't there the whole time or we would have found him on the searches. He'd been in and out of that building as it turned out, but we found him curled up in a

corner and heavily into opioid use. And then we were able to get him into a hospital from there. I want to understand what you're telling me. Rick Van Warner with me, who fought relentlessly to save his son from opioid addiction. I'm talking about heroin, but it's much bigger than heroin. It's OxyContin. It's Oxycodone. It's Percocet. It's fentanyl patches. It just goes on and on and on. And opioids start over the counter, OTC.

And that's what he started with as well. Really? He started on OxyContin. Really? Yeah, he started on. Well, he was unfortunately coming of age at the epicenter of the pill mill epidemic in Florida and the just extraordinary flood of Oxy, starting with OxyContin and Purdue Pharma. But the flood of all these drugs, they were so easily available in the high schools that one officer told me they were as easy to get as candy at a 7-Eleven. And so his initial foray into opioids started with prescription pills, which although marketed deceptively as non-addictive,

all you had to do was crush them to eliminate the time-release mechanism, in which case they were easily snorted or injected or smoked, and it was the full dose immediately. And that's what started his addiction was prescription pain pills, which were easily available at five bucks a piece in the high schools. How did he get his first pill? Well, he got it in high school. He got it from a friend and he thought

that they would try this, that they'd heard about that this was because prescription pills are essentially synthetic heroin. And it's just one's made in a pharmaceutical lab and one's made in a street lab. But they essentially had those pills and had planned out a Friday night to experience what that was about. And then he just started using more and more from there. And, you know, over the course of the following eight years, which is this journey we've been on, and 13 relapses, 13 detoxes, twice he's been revived from death by overdose. And really, it's a story about how a family can not give up hope. And it's a story of survival, the book, as well as an insight into this epidemic. You know, I'm just keep going back to you and that building and that feeling of nefarious or sinister evil as you walk in, the police don't even go in. And even after you look around and

you don't find your son, I mean, I can just imagine this. You keep going back to the building, something is pulling you back to the building. And then you ultimately discover that your son ends up in that building and you find him curled up in a corner. I want to pause and thank our partner making our program today. Exposing opioid addiction possible. It's LegalZoom. New Year's is over. And now it's time to write your own success story for 2018.

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Because at LegalZoom, pricing is up front. What a relief. Write your own 2018 success story at LegalZoom.com now. Special savings? Enter promo code Nancy in the referral box at checkout. LegalZoom, where life meets legal. LegalZoom, where life meets legal. LegalZoom.com. With me, Rick Van Warner, who fought a seemingly endless battle, a relentless fight to save his son from opioid addiction. The author of a new book on pills and needles.

His family put through hell, hell to try and save his teen boy dr william maroney now world-renowned expert in opioid addiction author of american narcan naloxone heroin fentanyl associated mortality and dr carol lieberman very well-known, high-profile LA psychiatrist. Dr. Carol, I want to talk to you in just a moment about when one person in your family, particularly your child, is suffering a drug addiction. After what you're hearing from Rick Van Warner, how it puts the whole, you go to the devil. You go to hell and back. The whole family is along for the ride. Dr. William Maroney, first to you, opioids.

When we say that, what are we talking about? We use the word opioid to say it's like an opiate. An opiate is from opium. Opium poppies allow you two natural chemicals, codeine and morphine. Those are naturally occurring chemicals in the opium plant. When you chemically change it and synthesize it, it becomes an opioid. Hydrocodone, oxycodone, methadone, all those chemicals that are taken and copied from the original natural plant are opioids. Technically, the only two opiates that are available are codeine and morphine, and they come naturally from the poppy plant, and we've had them in medicine for 5,000 years. Okay, hold on.

When I think of opiate, think of heroin and i also think and i've told you this before don't laugh at me i think of the wizard of oz when dorothy is running through the big fields of poppies and you know with the tin man to get to the wizard okay Emerald City all right then they get sleepy because they're in poppies i.e. opiate i.e. heroin and they fall asleep and then for some reason I can't remember the dog is the dog never goes goes to sleep or starts snowing and they wake up and they're saved. Dr. Maroney, heroin or opioid now comes. Give me the names of medication that is considered to be opiate related.

Oxycodone, oxycontin well percocet norco vicodin opana all these i have brand names and generic names they come from pharmaceutical companies that have copied morphine. And scientifically, heroin used to be available prior to 1914 in the Harrison Narcotic Act. It was sold because it was used to try to get people off of morphine when they realized people were addicted to morphine a hundred years ago. This isn't the first time this happened in America. This happened in America a hundred years ago. This isn't the first time this happened in America. This happened in America a hundred years ago. And a chemist made heroin so we could get people off of morphine addiction without realizing that heroin was three to ten times more addicting than morphine. So then it became illegal. Right. Dr. Carol Lieberman, LA psychiatrist.

Rick Van Warner is describing the years, eight years he battled to save his son, 13 relapses, in and out of programs. They have other children. So father, wife, the son, the rest of the family, the whole family goes on the trip it's not just the one child that you're trying to save everybody is put through so much torture dr carol yes it's actually it throws the whole family into chaos um first of all you know there's a degree of helplessness, confusion, what do I do, a fear of losing the child, anger at the helplessness and anger at the child for throwing the family into chaos. The siblings feel, on the one hand, they don't want anything to happen to him either, but they are angry that the parents are paying so much attention to that sibling and not paying as much attention to them. Going through the rehabs, that would have cost a lot of money and that wasn't being spent on them.

Feeling guilty for their sibling grudge. All kinds of feelings are stirred up when one member of the family has an addiction. Now the key is for the family to be willing to look at themselves to see what they may have contributed to why this other family member has become addicted. And in Rick's book, I see how he is willing to look at himself, look at his own father, who was an abusive alcoholic, and see how that affected him, which then he realized affected his son.

So the openness to acknowledging what kinds of things that you may have done to contribute to the addiction is part of what a family needs to do to help the addict to recover. Back to Rick Van Warner, author of On Pills and Needles. Rick, you find your son curled up in a ball. Yes. In a corner of this empty warehouse. What happens then? Well, we were able to, my son actually found him and brought him out.

And we then, his mother, by then his mother and his sister were there and his brother, one of his brothers. And also the policeman had to be on hand to release him from the missing persons because he was now found. And we all just embraced and he was in a daze, but there were tears and everybody was very, very relieved. And then we took him directly to a psychiatric ward of a hospital that also did detoxes at the time. And he was there for a few days and then straight into his first residential recovery because he was still a minor and we're able to insist that that happened. I think that the biggest thing is to understand that the

root cause of this, it's a very convenient label to call addiction a disease. But in a lot of cases, it's a complex stew of brain chemistry. It's socialization and life experiences, as was just mentioned. It's someone's mental health. Do they have underlying anxiety or depression or anything of that nature? And there is a genetic predisposition factor as well. But it's not one thing. It's a complex stew of things.

And that person ultimately, especially with opioids, which is a drug of not getting high, but a drug of escape from pain, if you will, and escape from feelings of isolation and worthlessness. And that's really the underlying cause of what were our son's problems. But hold on, Rick, I want to ask you, you know, I look at a teen, I'm like, they've got the whole world in front of them. They're young, they're healthy, they're happy. Feeling bad about what? What is there to feel bad about? You gave them a beautiful home, a loving family. What feelings led him to trying that first pill and then becoming an addict? Well, I look back on it and I talk a lot about this in the book, but he never could find his

group. And I think that even starting in middle school, that's critical that kids find their group, whether it's science club or a sport or music, whatever it is, people need to feel that they belong. And it's a harsher world than ever. Social media adds to those feelings of isolation when you're not in a group or don't have a ton of friends. And this was my one son who tried a lot of things, but could never, wasn't very good at sports, wasn't, you know, wasn't, he was a talented artist, but never could find a core group. So then the group becomes the misfits, if you will. It's a little bit like the island of misfit toys. It's the people who feel disenfranchised and disengaged because they don't have a group

by the time they're 15 or 16, they find each other. And a lot of times that leads into some of these destructive behaviors. But he never felt, he was, he, out of our four children, the kindest, most gentle, never heard a fly, nicest kid, still is, and thank the Lord he's alive. But we shifted to family love and acceptance is really, in the end, what saved him to date. And, of course, it's a one-day-at-a-time proposition. When you say it's a one-day-at-a-time thing, Rick Van Warner, author of On Pills and Needles, his relentless fight to save his son from drug addiction, a brand-new book out right now. And it really overwhelmed me, Rick Van Warner, when I read it, your battle to save your son.

I'm thinking about that moment when you first see your son after he has been missing and you couldn't find him and you keep going back to this empty warehouse strewn with glass and needles and graffiti. When you first saw him, what did you think? What did you feel? How could this happen? Just a profound sense of sadness and relief that we found him, but just tremendous hurt and sadness and grief to say, how could my sweet son be in this state? How could this possibly, what could possibly be going on that he feels about himself that he was indifferent to whether he lived or died. I was looking at your chapter six, Out of Sight, Out of Mind. It starts, sitting in a circle of folding chairs in the center of the room, we listened as stranger after stranger recounted familiar tales of pain, anger, and despair. From California to Maine, blue-collar towns to wealthy suburbs,

the story's the same. Drug-abusing children nearly destroying families and marriages. What does that mean to you, Rick Van Warner? Your son's addiction nearly destroying families and marriages. Well, it was, as was mentioned earlier, chaos. The entire family was in chaos during this period. Tommy sucked all the air and energy out of the family, whether he was with us or whether he was in a period of homelessness or a period where we had to turn him out to protect the family. You mean there were times that you put your son out of the house?

Yes. Why? There were times when his behavior, well, the stealing, the pawning of his siblings and our belongings, there were times when if he was in active use, it just was untenable to have him there. And there were times, most times it was him leaving or running off and disappearing. And again, when I talk about the, you know, the name of that chapter that you mentioned, it's really about the kicking the can down the road. And it took us several years and probably $200,000 worth of mostly debt related to various rehabs, residential and outpatient to try to realize that none of this is really having much of a difference in him. He would,

you know, it's a vicious cycle of sobriety for a period and then relapse, detox, recovery, and then right back to it. So after a while, we understood that it's a disease of isolation. It's a problem of self-esteem. And what are we doing if we're just shipping them off to another rehab? We're just exasperating the feelings of isolation, rejection, and some of the underlying causes of him turning back to drugs in the first place. So we started detoxing him at home several years into this and started really just embracing him with unconditional love and acceptance of his family. And that's when things started to turn for him. And that's much more powerful than the isolation

of just what I call kicking the can down the road and sending to a recovery center. Recovery programs work for some, they don't work for everyone. It's a gray world, not a black and white world. And especially with opioid addicts, its success rates of traditional 12-step recovery are pretty low. And just thinking about what all you and your family went through and the pain. I just can't imagine the pain of having to put my son or daughter out of the house. It's almost unthinkable to me. Dr. William Maroney, you're hearing what Rick went through trying to save his son.

Why is it you go to rehab, you get clean, is it a physical addiction? You have to go back to heroin or opioid? There's two steps to the answer the first answer is the social discharge out of a rehab has to go into an environment that continues the care and what he did was he created that environment in his house we look at that as aftercare whatever Whatever you do in rehab, it's completely meaningless unless you can have the follow-up. And that follow-up has to be investment to the family, the friends, significant others, parents, spouses. And the second thing is,

the Surgeon General last year said addiction is a chronic relapsing brain disease. Somebody may have chosen the first time to take a drug, snort it, put it in their mouth, or inject it. But once that drug is in the brain and things change, they don't know the sense of time. They don't have the sense of time. They don't have a sense of value. All they know is now and I need something because if I don't get it, I'm going to get sick. And it's a deathly sick that scares people. People, their guts hurt. They're in panic. They can't breathe. They break out with a cold sweat. They have goose flesh. And there's nothing you can do to stop that by going to a primary care doctor or an urgent care. You have to go to the specialist that

understands what's happening. And on the street, you just go back to heroin. If you go to a specialist, they'll talk about symptoms and maybe substitution therapy and helping with counseling. But he brought up an interesting point is that the traditional 12-step abstinence base has a success rate of 5% to 10% at the end of a year. So you really need specialized counseling and medicine that stabilizes the brain. But if you're really worried about death, you need to have rescue medicine because it's a chronic relapsing brain disease. And they keep relapsing. Well, just in a nutshell, what is that life-saving medicine? The only medicine in the world, not in the United States, in the world is naloxone.

It's an opioid like the opioids of abuse, but it's a blocker. And its brand name is Narcan. And it's available in hundreds and thousands of pharmacies across America. Parents have to look for this themselves. To Rick Van Warner, author of On Pills and Needles. Rick, when you look back over those eight years in and out of rehabs, what was the worst moment during that time? Well, there were many, so it's hard to pinpoint one, but I do believe finding out from my brother during a period where my son was living in New Jersey, and that was his first foray into actual street heroin that he had overdosed and been revived through CPR.

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I'm thinking back on what you just said, Rick Van Warner, author of Pills and Needles, The Relentless Fight to Save My Son from Opioid Addiction, that the worst moment was when your brother calls and says your son has OD'd on street heroin. Yes. His mother would lie in bed and plan his funeral in her mind, she later confessed. Somehow he survived through all of this process, and we were able to help him survive through his family. And really, that's the only thing that kept him afloat. So it goes from, as a teen boy, to one pill, one oxycodone or Oxycontin pill, one pill to you

searching the city, searching abandoned buildings, warehouses, streets, alleys, trying to find your son to the moment you find out he is actually overdosed through one rehab after the next, after the next, after the next. Relapse after relapse, 13 in all. You know, I'm thinking about what you said that every night you go to bed afraid, dreading that you're going to get that call that he is dead. You know, Rick, my fiance was murdered shortly before our wedding. That was many, many years ago. Do you know to this day, to this day, when I wake up at night, I go check every single person in the house to make sure they're still breathing.

I understand. Isn't that like crazy all these years later? Because I'm convinced. I mean, I don't think it through rationally. I just know it can happen. And in my world, it will happen. That feeling you and your wife had when you would try to go to bed at night, describe that. Well, it's very difficult to be on the same page in the midst of such a crisis.

It's very hard to tend to the needs of your other children. And I think the needs of your spouse end up being about last in line in the middle of this. So I think that that feeling of just horror, of pain, and just despair. It was absolute despair. And it can happen to anyone. It's no family safe from this epidemic. It is out there. It is everywhere. I think that one of the biggest problems we have right now is there's so much stigma still around, and a lot of it to the word heroin itself, which has been stigmatized for decades now. I think that we need to drag this out of the shadows and create more awareness and education around this. And that's really why I wrote the book, to help other families and try to do that.

To let other people know that you're not walking down this road alone. There are many others. Most of them, however, are keeping it to themselves because of the stigma and not seeking out support of other families and other people. Your chapter 11 of your book on pills and needles with me, Rick Van Warner, is titled The Abduction. And it describes you at the beginning, racing through the airport with your son Paul racing racing getting on a plane planning an abduction and your son says so what's the plan dad once you're finally sitting on the plane and you say I have no idea why were you on a plane planning a kidnap well because it was right after the moment that we found out that he had overdosed on heroin. His friends performed CPR.

They immediately took him to a rehab center in New Jersey. He checked himself out within two days and went right back to using and was with an older woman an older woman that he was now living with at the time. And I was certain, and my wife and I were certain that this was it. This was the end. The next time he wasn't going to be revived and he would be dead. So my oldest son came home from college and the two of us flew up there without a plan because our plan was if we have to stick them in a suitcase, we're going to bring them home. We're going to force them home. Of course, it didn't work out that way because a person only can choose to come

and you can't exactly abduct a 19-year-old at that point. You know, I'm looking at your Chapter 13 titled Planning the funeral i when i say those words planning the funeral i can't even bring myself to put my twins in that sentence but you had to do that about your son it says it took eight days from the time i dropped tommy for the first time. He dropped him off. I guess this is at a rehab until the experts deemed him completely detoxed and ready for the next step of recovery. He was transferred to a recovery center. And suddenly, after a long weekend sleeping on benches and scrounging for food, he shows back up and they give him a second chance. Was this rehab number six or seven? Why do you title this chapter planning the funeral for your

son? Because we had been through so much of it at this point that we had to reach it because it was such a roller coaster. We had to reach a point of what I called at the time, hope neutral. In other words, you can't get too hopeful or get too high when he's doing well, because that makes the low even lower when he's doing poorly. And we had to adjust to accepting the fact that there wasn't a single thing we could do about it. It's not something we could have any control over. All we could do was provide him with the love and acceptance, but only he could help himself ultimately. That's a tough thing to come around for a parent. Yeah, we take care of our kids from

the time they're young and we try to protect them from the world. When you have somebody who's fallen into addiction, to accept that you no longer have any control over what happens to them or what they choose to do, it's very difficult. So that chapter related to my wife's lying in bed and what she shared with me about what she used to think about. But it really, it was a period where we accepted that we had no control over his, over ultimately whether he lived or died. Your chapter 14 is titled Fleas, Fiends, and Fractures. And it describes your boy, after you've been through so much, is living in a place, a slum east of Orlando. Fleas, fiends, and fractures. Black Teeth was the name they abused me with, sometimes several of them chanting this in unison. What does that mean?

Well, that was to do with my own childhood. I had a condition with the color of my teeth as a young child, and it was my introduction to how brutal kids can be when it comes to bullying. And how does that relate to your son living in this horrible condition? Well, I think that that gave me empathy. I've never had any tolerance for bullies or people who choose to pick on the weak. I've never had any tolerance for that in my entire life. And I think that it created a lot of empathy in me. You just feel for your son in those conditions. And he had been very, very, he'd been living with a girl who was also an addict. And he'd been living in terrible conditions, as we found out. And it

was when she eventually died from an overdose that sent him into his very bad relapse where he almost died again as well. I mean, just really, Dr. Carol Lieberman, L.A. psychiatrist, how many times can you go through an overdose? Then he's brought back to life. He's dragged to the hospital. You put him through, I forgot how many inflicted upon them, but from their choice? Their addiction is not really a choice. It is an illness. It is a physical addiction to go back to opioid.

How can you as a parent, how many times can you bring your child back from death at the door of opioid and at some point just not get numb? Well, yes, it's hard to not get numb. But the answer to that is really as many times as it takes. You know, it's kind of ironic that with opioids, especially since they start from prescriptions, you know, they're prescribed and get into the wrong hands and so on. But you know, they are for pain. These are painkillers. And it's not so much physical pain. It's the emotional pain that people have that let them lead them to become addicted to them. But I must say that I'm wondering if there's anything, Rick, that you would tell people to do differently,

because you say something in your book about you don't believe in tough love, and yet it pains me, and I'm sure it pains you a lot more, to actually put your son out of your house. I mean, in a sense, that is tough love. And I don't know that, I mean, from what you were saying, it seems like obviously it became intolerable. But out of your house, there is more chance of his dying of an overdose, as you saw, actually.

And I'm wondering, like, why you didn't call the police? You know, if someone is abusing, like you said, you couldn't bring a 19-year-old, kidnap him, but you could call the police and they could put him in jail for possessing or, you know, the drugs or some crime that they could use to put him in jail, which would start at least his detox, and then you could get him to a hospital. So your question is why he didn't call police, I think. What about it, Rick? Well, when, you know, let me address the tough love thing. Initially, we did believe in tough love because that's what the, that's what the doctrine of, of the same kind of doctrine that's all or nothing of 12 step, which is that this is the, the only approach that works is that.

It was much later when we realized that tough love rarely works with a person when the core issue is self-esteem and feelings of worthlessness. As far as calling the police, when we were in New Jersey, there was no grounds to have him arrested. He had no drugs on him per se. There was, you know, he was an adult. There was nothing really that we were aware of that was like a Baker Act in Florida or anything of that nature. So there really wasn't much we could do. He didn't live with us. He was already on his own. So it's two different things. One was the tough love earlier on before we realized that there was no positive impact of that. And

the second one was why we didn't call the police much later when we tried to force them home. I want to get to Chapter 18 called Breakthrough. And Rick, you described going into the hospital to see Tommy, your son, your boy you've been battling for, and he is lying attached to IVs and heart monitoring wires. At first, you're happy to see that he's not bloody and battered, but quickly that relief turned to frustration. Why? Well, he wanted nothing to do with me being there as soon as I tried to talk to him about getting some more help. He felt nothing was wrong. It was just a little bump in the road, and he needed to get to work.

So he was ready to sign himself out of the hospital. And then when I started asking him what had happened, he wouldn't give me any information. And then, of course, the nurses wouldn't give me any information. So it's just a cycle of madness in many ways, of, again, helplessness and understanding that you don't have any control over this. I think the biggest thing is you just can't give up, as was mentioned. They're your child. You'll do anything to save them, and you'll do anything to help them within your power no matter what. And that's really our fight through that. He understands that now. I think that it's the reason he's alive today is that and doing quite well is the fact that we wouldn't give up on him and we had to

convince our other children to not give up on him as well and to embrace a very difficult journey. With me, Rick Van Warner, author of On Pills and Needles, The Relentless Fight to Save My Son from Opioid Addiction. Dr. William Maroney, opioid addiction expert and author of American Narcan, Naloxone, and Heroin Fentanyl Associated Mortality and renowned psychiatrist Dr. Carol Lieberman. Rick, what is your advice to parents? Well, I would advise that no matter what, don't give up. Understand that your child, when they are using opioids, they only have one thing on their mind.

It's the drugs. Reason, logic, normal punishment that might change behavior. All those are out the window. It's again, the same, same idea of tough love, rarely working with somebody who, who feels so, so low about themselves. So I think that the biggest thing is to accept without judgment. You know, don't sweat the small stuff. I mean, in our case, he's alive. So what if he now has a couple of tattoos? Or, you know, don't sweat the small stuff. The most important thing is to keep them alive, to let them know they're loved, and that you're not judging them and that you accept them. Recognize there will always be ups and downs, but your job,

first and foremost, is to keep them afloat. You know, people who are, as one of the doctors mentioned, people who use opioids, it rewires their brains. The good news is the brain can repair over a long period of sobriety, but it does rewire the brain in ways that it is so difficult for them to get off the drugs and to overcome this. I understood that it took, you know, very minor setbacks would lead him to relapse and a car accident and a breakup with a girlfriend. Of course, you know, the death of a girlfriend was the worst. But all these types of things, understanding that these small coping mechanisms are just not there for somebody whose brain's been rewired by opioids. On pills and needles, Rick VanWarner joining us with Dr. William Maroney and Carol Lieberman. Nancy Grace, Crime Stories, signing off.

Goodbye, friend.