His son was supposed to meet him and his wife for dinner but never showed up. Joe Klein got a call from police the next night instead.
Most parents would be surprised to receive a phone call regarding their son’s death, but as parents of a heroin addict, Klein and his wife knew it could come at any time.
“Obviously I was sad, but it wasn’t something that was entirely unexpected.” Klein, whose son died of a heroin overdose after eight years of battling addiction, said. “He was always kind of a risk-taker, he was always the kind of kid who would stand on his tiptoes to get on a roller coaster.”
Timothy Klein, 31, died at a friend’s apartment on the corner of Wilson and Broom Street in June of 2008. His was one of 21 overdoses in Dane County in 2008 that have contributed to the rising trend in heroin use and overdoses in Madison and throughout Dane County in recent years.
According to the Madison Police Department, the number of heroin overdoses in Dane County so far in 2011 is 131, over six times higher than in 2008.
“As much as I hated to see it happen, I can tell you one thing: Since that day [he died], my life’s been a lot better,” Klein said. “It really has because it was a constant, constant either aggravation or worry.”
Madison’s heroin problem has increased substantially over the last 10 years, with a spike around five years ago, according to Skye Tikkanen, a counselor at Connections Counseling in Madison and a former heroin addict.
Mayor Paul Soglin has called the city’s heroin problem “an epidemic,” because of “the loss of life of productive people … the costs related to the expense of the drug” and major traffic problems.
Police have reported 12 traffic accidents in 2011 in the Madison area in which drivers operated vehicles under the influence of heroin.
Lt. Brian Ackeret of the Dane County Narcotics and Gang Task Force said although he is unsure whether many of these users attend college, he said police would be “naïve to think that there are not heroin users on the UW campus.”
The increase in overdoses has most affected the 18 to 24-year-old age bracket, Ackeret said.
Heroin users often finance their addictions through burglarizing and reselling valuable items to pawn shops for quick money, which places students in a highly vulnerable position, Soglin said.
“Students are trusting with roommates and dozens of people coming and going every day,” he said. “And students have what’s marketable: electronics.”
Klein was forced to put a lock on his bedroom door after Timothy repeatedly stole his debit card and his wife’s expensive guitar. He sold them at pawn shops for easy money to fuel his addiction.
“It just turns a good person into a monster,” Klein said. “He got caught stealing copper and embezzling from his job, writing bad checks, just a litany of things, one after another.”
The drug, which is circulating through Madison from bigger cities like Chicago and Milwaukee, “puts everyone at risk,” Soglin said.
“It puts anybody who is active who might have say a sports-related injury,” he said. “That would tend to be younger people, students.”
But the heroin problem in Madison, Dane County and throughout the U.S. did not spring up out of nowhere. Rather, it surfaced from increased addictions to painkillers prescribed by doctors nationwide.
“The first place [painkiller addicts] look is to get the same medicine on the street,” Soglin said. “That’s very expensive. So then, as the addiction [and] the dependency increases, heroin becomes a cheaper substitute.”
Soglin said the U.S. Conference of Mayors has pushed the medical community to reformulate painkiller drugs to be less addictive or to find alternative therapies for pain.
Breaking a heroin addiction can be nearly impossible, and an addict can suffer multiple relapses before a full recovery is possible, according to Tikkanen.
Klein sent his son to rehab three or four times. With the money he spent hoping he would recover, Klein said he probably could have sent Timothy to Harvard.
“When someone has a relapse, our stance at Connections is that it’s not a failure of them, it’s not a failure of treatment; it’s just part of the process of recovering,” Tikkanen said. “So we really try to take the relapse as a learning opportunity.”
But addicts often fall victim to an overdose before the recovery process is complete.
Klein’s son would often be clean for a year or more after rehab until old friends would reappear in his life and expose him to the drug once again.
“[Timothy] told me, ‘Dad you just can’t … never having taken heroin, you can’t imagine what it feels like, it is the most amazing feeling there is in the world,” Klein said.
Reality hit Klein and his wife when they noticed teaspoons missing from their kitchen cupboard and discovered needle syringes among their youngest son’s belongings.
Shallow breathing and “slowed down” behavior are also major indicators someone may be using heroin, Tikkanen said.
When he was addicted, Timothy’s parents often considered throwing him out of their house and turned him in to police more than once to limit his access to the drug.
“People who haven’t experienced living with an addict just don’t have any idea what it’s like,” Klein said.
The epidemic in Madison has gotten to the point that Soglin and Dane County Executive Joe Parisi put forth an initiative to combat the issue.
They announced the plan Oct. 19.
The plan will cost $60,000, money that will be split between city and county budgets. The initiative outlines six steps to hinder the use and spread of heroin in Madison and Dane County.
But Soglin said it is too early to tell its progress.
Life will “never be a bed of roses” for addicts’ families once an addiction begins, Klein said.
“The best I can [tell anyone to do] is pray,” he said. “Because the light’s got to go on in the addict’s head.”
