Families of Addicts
Families of Addicts is a support group that was started by Lori Erion because she needed people to talk to about her experiences during her daughter April’s path to recovery. The group is not a 12-step group and is open to everyone, including addicts.
The group meets weekly every Wednesday from 7:30 to 9 pm at:
Lutheran Church of Our Savior
155 Thruston Blvd, Dayton, Ohio 45419
Cross Streets: Between Woods Rd and Garden Rd
Families, friends and addicted loved ones (ALO) are welcome to attend with an attitude of willingness, open-mindedness and honesty, the website says.
For more information, email: info@foadayton.com or call 937-307-5479 or visit: FOAdayton.com
Lori Erion knew her daughter, April, was doing recreational drugs when she was in high school.
April, who had been a “perfect little girl” growing up started changing in the middle of her sophomore year at Miamisburg High School. She tried out for Color Guard but quit. Extracurriculars were not on her agenda, Erion said.
“April was always really smart but she didn’t feel like she necessarily fit in,” Erion said. “She was not a huge go-getter.”
While Erion worked, April and her brother and their friends hung out at their house and that’s when Erion thinks April started smoking marijuana. She started hanging out with older kids and going to parties at Wright State. She had a falling out with a boyfriend and some trust issues with a girlfriend.
“I was concerned,” Erion said. “But you can’t exactly chain them up in their room.”
Things got worse in April’s junior year when she started taking Xanax, Erion said. “Things started falling apart.”
Xanax made April groggy and slurry in her words and she developed “Xanatude,” a bad attitude that made her belligerent. Erion remembered a night when April was upset because she wanted to go to a party after police broke up another one she was at and her mom picked her up to go home.
“She started getting really crazy belligerent with me,” Erion said. She pulled over and April got out of the car and walked home in the rain. When she got home, she continued to rail at Erion. She woke up the next morning and planned to go to work but she was still high. Erion wouldn’t let her leave and called the police. After threatening suicide, the police took April to the hospital.
By the beginning of April’s senior year, the family moved to New Carlisle and April was scheduled to change high schools. Erion hoped a good byproduct of the move would be to get April away from negative influences. But when things didn’t play out with her school schedule as she hoped, she returned to drugs.
She already had started snorting heroin. “She hadn’t settled on heroin as her drug of choice but had been dabbling with a bunch of stuff. It hadn’t really started its huge demise yet.”
By late spring 2013, April looked more and more sick. She was losing weight. She realized she wasn’t going to college and her dreams of being a lawyer or working for the FBI might not happen.
Erion thought she looked “sickly” and took her to the Urgent Care. When April pulled up her sleeves, Erion saw the track marks.
“I asked her, what is that? but I think I knew,” Erion said. “She looked at me and said, ‘You know what it is.’ I was horrified. I didn’t know she was snorting and shooting heroin.”
April thought doing heroin would be like all the other drugs, Erion said.
“She’d already done all those bad drugs,” Erion said. “She didn’t know that after two weeks she’d be hooked.
“Heroin just gets wrapped so tight around your brain and body, you can’t stop.”
Erion likened addiction to having a switch in the brain that turns on for certain substances.
“Once you’ve switched it on, you have a hell of a time turning it off,” she said.
April has been in and out of treatment and is in rehab in Florida now. Several of her attempts to get clean were with medication-assisted treatment, but they didn’t seem to work for her, Erion said.
In January, she went to California. She was using after a week of being out.
Erion asked her to leave the house after a certain point.
“There are behaviors associated with addiction,” she said. “I phrase it like that because if it were really my daughter, she wouldn’t be acting like that. You can only tolerate so much.”
April came back home a few months ago.
In June, after trying to get clean again, April was tapering down her heroin doses to prepare to receive a Vivitrol shot. Vivitrol is a non-narcotic medication that helps alleviate the compulsion heroin addicts feel. At about the same time, some people from A Road to Recovery, a center in Florida reached out to Erion, after some Facebook conversations. They came to visit Dayton to talk about their recovery center and offered a generous scholarship for April. Within two days she was on a plane to Florida.
She’s doing well so far in Florida, said Erion, who plans to visit her within a week. She hopes April will be able to stay clean surrounded by a new recovery community.
It’s been a difficult road but one Erion said families should be prepared for. She started a group, Families of Addicts, that meets weekly to help others who are going through similar paths.
“Families can arm themselves with knowledge about what’s out there,” she said. “It’s not really until the addict is really ready to be done can all of the things you’ve learned be put into place.
“Ultimately, at the end of the day, all of these attempts to help them. If they’re not ready, they’re not ready. It’s a long journey. It’s a process.”
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