Unless you’ve experienced it yourself, it can be hard to understand what it’s like to watch a loved one struggle with heroin addiction. Nancy Chappell’s son Sam started using prescription opiates when he was a student at Kickapoo High School. He consequently became addicted to heroin, an addiction he would struggle with for years. Those years were tough for his family. “It was horrifying because you feel like you can’t understand it,” Nancy says. “You feel like there is something you should be able to do, [like] there is some key that you should be able to use to unlock this puzzle, but there’s nothing. There’s nothing you can do, and it just plays out in front of you in this horrifying way. I didn’t sleep for probably three years.”
The Chappells moved to Springfield in 2007 when Sam was in seventh grade. Sam was the oldest of three children. He was a quiet, cerebral kid—a thinker and a dreamer who played the guitar and loved animals and nature. He was the kind of kid who insisted his family rescue a squirrel that was drowning in Bull Shoals Lake, the kind of kid who could name every sea creature he spotted during a family snorkeling trip. But he struggled with the social aspect of school. “I think by the time we got to Springfield, maybe he was looking for an easier way to fit in, an easier way to belong,” his mom says. “People who do drugs really welcome other people who are willing to do drugs.” By the time Sam was 17, he was addicted to prescription opiates.
In an effort to help Sam get off drugs, Nancy enrolled Sam in a therapeutic boarding school. He did well at the school and graduated from high school early. He held down a job for a while, and things were starting to look up. But he couldn’t kick his addiction, and Sam ended up moving from abusing prescription opiates to using heroin, eventually overdosing. Sam survived the overdose and started treatment at Center for Addictions. Nancy remembers one of Sam’s doctors telling her that Sam would likely have to be on medication for his addiction for the rest of his life. “I remember thinking there’s no way,” Nancy says. “That can’t be true. The other thing [the doctor] said was this addiction to opiates is like having been in the desert for three days with no water. When you get out of the desert the desire you have for water is like having this addiction, and yet you have that desire every single day.”
Source: 417 Magizine