Ron

When I was a first semester freshman at the University of Kansas, my friends and I from the 9th floor liked to smoke at the baseball field near our dorm. We would climb up onto an 8x4 platform set up just beyond the center field wall—it was intended for a cameraman to film the ballgames. We called our little spot “The Loft.”

In order to get to The Loft, we had to cross a small parking lot adjacent to our dorm. One night in late September, as we were walking back toward the dorm from The Loft, we saw a kid, who we vaguely recognized from the 7th floor, passed out in his car. Since it was a Friday night, we assumed he must have just gotten little too drunk at a party (we’ve all been there) and passed out in his car smoking a cigarette. Looking back, that didn’t really add up: Who hot-boxes a cig in their own car when benches are set up outside the dorm specifically for smoking? Anyway, we saw him at the cafeteria the next day and didn’t give it a second thought…until a few weeks later.

            It was a cool but comfortable Wednesday night. We had friends coming to visit from Mizzou, but they were behind schedule and didn’t arrive until about 11 p.m. As soon as they did, we got down to business. We rolled up and made for The Loft. We didn’t notice anything strange in the parking lot. We were too busy catching up and talking about whatever dumb stuff 18-year-olds talk about. Sports, probably.

            We smoked, talked, laughed and, finally, began to head back to the dorm. Except this time through the parking lot, we noticed a car with its lights on. It was that same car we’d seen a few weeks earlier, and inside was the same kid, passed out again. We ran up to his car cheering and laughing—someone being too drunk, on a Wednesday no less, was hilarious to us. I got to his side of the car and started knocking on his window to wake him up and make it known that we had caught him in this embarrassing moment, but he didn’t wake. That’s when my friend on the passenger side of the car said the words I’ll never forget: “Dude, he has a needle in his arm.”

            I looked down, saw for myself, and my stomach dropped. The next few moments are a blur. I’m pretty sure there was a lot of “holy shit, what do we do?” going around the group, but I know it was me who ended up the one on the phone with 9-1-1 dispatch. “Um, there’s a kid here passed out in his car with a needle in his arm. Please hurry, I think he might be dead.”

            He wasn’t dead, though, thankfully. But what happened next was nearly as disturbing as the scene we had just come upon.

            We were waiting about 10 yards from the car when help finally arrived. A police officer walked to the car, knocked on the window, and was able to wake the kid. I don’t know what happened in the next few seconds, but the kid eventually got out of the car. He and the officer had a brief, seemingly agreeable conversation. Then the officer, the ambulance and the fire truck all left—without the kid who I thought was dead fewer than five minutes ago.

None of us, me least of all, understood what the heck was going on. The kid then walked over to us, now sitting on the benches outside the dorm, and he tried to explain himself. His eyes we’re barely open, and he spoke in the low, monotone way that someone on heroin speaks. If you’ve ever heard it, it’s unmistakable. He tried to tell us what he’d told the cop: that he had diabetes, that the needle we saw was just his insulin shot and that he was asleep in his car because his roommate was loud.

OK…I’ve seen insulin shots before. That wasn’t insulin. You don’t tie off in your car because you have to take your insulin. You don’t pass out with an insulin shot in your arm. What I didn’t get was how a story that a bunch of 18-year-olds could peg as complete B.S. could pass with a police officer. He didn’t search the car, question the kid for more than a minute, or even force him to go with the ambulance as a precaution. It was very clear: that officer was not ready to deal with the situation he found himself in. Heroin wasn’t “a thing” for rich, suburban white kids at a state university. For whatever reason, that cop didn’t want that syringe to contain heroin, so he decided that it didn’t.

We even went to our RA the next day and told him what happened. It’s not that we wanted the kid arrested or in trouble. We just wanted him to live, or maybe someone to get him some help. But nothing ever came of it. We still heard rumors of people finding him shooting up in the 7th floor bathroom. We’d still see him staggering to his car late at night when we were out for a smoke.

That experience, I think, speaks to how we, collectively, are not ready or willing to deal with the growing opioid abuse problem in this country.

According to the CDC, heroin use has more then doubled among 18-25 year-olds in the past decade. And a growing percentage of those users are kids from small towns and suburbs. Until we accept that this is everyone’s problem, not something that can be pushed to the fringes or written off, people will continue to slip through the cracks.