My Addicted Son/Choice vs Disease

So, tomorrow my son gets out of jail and going back to rehab, which he has been court ordered to do. This will be his 3rd time in rehab. I am at a complete loss here. I will be completely honest and say that I truly don't understand this at all. I have read that heroin overdose is becoming a larger cause of death than car accidents! Seriously!?!?! That's some pretty scary stuff. I heard a story about 2 kids sitting in a car getting high and the one OD'd and died in the car. It just so happened that it was his car, but anyway, his "friend", after the kid passed out, searched his car and his pockets and took the other kids drugs! This has got to be something with super powers. Tyler will sell everything he has, steal everything I have, that his brother has or anyone else for that matter, in the name of this drug. Then he will complain about not having anything.

I picked up his clothes and his stuff from where he was staying to wash it and get it ready to go to rehab. I am allowed to make an emergency drop for him so he has the things he needs while there. All of his clothes smell old and musty and some of them were still clean. I washed everything. Want to know something kind of scary? Searching through a drug addicts belongings to sort out everything and get together what he is allowed to have at rehab. I found a tube of Burts Bee's lip balm and a can of opened almonds along with some protein powder. He can't have any of this stuff in rehab (well, the lip balm he can). I looked at the lip balm to see if it had been opened because if it had been, I was going to keep it and use it while i work out and then buy him a couple of brand new tubes. It had been opened so I put it back..why you ask? Well, because its like this. From all the needles that he has used, and I'm sure most of them were never sterilized and were probably passed around, he has Hepatitis C. I don't know that much about Hep C and I'm pretty sure you can't get it from a tube of lip balm, but, in all honesty, I don't know this for a fact so better to be safe than sorry.

I have been thinking alot about something and the more I think about it, the more confused I get I guess. When someone gets cancer, its a disease. They didn't make that choice to get the disease, it somehow chose them. They say drug addiction, or any addiction for that matter, is a disease. I am a smoker. I don't smoke alot, but its something I enjoy and I know its also an addiction. But if I had no money for cigarettes (and I have been there), it would never, ever occur to me to steal something to buy cigarettes, or to beg money, or go without food to have cigarettes. I would never ever let my kids go without so I could smoke. There have been alot of times where I had enough money to either buy cigarettes or a gallon of milk. Their needs of course won over my habit. Thats just how it is and maybe thats part of being a parent. I don't know. But I choose to smoke. That being said, when do drugs become a disease? Its taught in school from grade school up how dangerous drugs are. Now, I'm not an idiot and I know that it goes in one ear and out the other because it is, after all, school.

But help me out with this. Isn't doing drugs a choice? Now, I know that no drug addict wants to be a drug addict. I don't know anyone that would ever want that to be their goal in life. At what point does the choice that you made become a disease? Is it something that you are born with or something that you create for yourself. What drives a person to stick a needle in their arm and inject something that how the power to kill them in seconds? Do they lose the knowledge of that or does it just become unimportant?

Tyler told me one time that he has done every drug under the sun, his choice drug is heroin and he will tell you that drugs are awesome. He said he never smokes pot though and I guess that would kind of be like taking ibuprofen instead of vicodin. He also told me that when he does drugs, he feels 2 emotions..anger and excitement. That doesn't seem like a healthy combination of emotions to me, but what do I know.

Its a decision to do drugs, and at some point, you know how dangerous it is and I figure a person doesn't intend on having it be such an integral part of their life. Tyler told me that going through heroin withdrawal is enough to make you keep doing it. If thats the case, then after rehab, why do you go back to it? AND, after rehab, and after being out of rehab, isn't it a choice to start again? And after rehab, don't you have even more knowledge and power than before you went it? Is the drug so powerful that it wins over everything? Or is life to hard to deal with so he runs, but on the flip side, his life is what he made it from the choices that he has made..or is it a disease?