An estimated 150,000 people per year try heroin, most of them are under the age of 26 and relative newbies to drugs. The stories of those within these jaw-dropping numbers are the tether needed to wrap our collective minds around this problem. Author Jude Hassan's memoir, Suburban Junky: From Honor Roll to Heroin Addict, is a personal account of his journey from a smart, well-loved kid with great potential to a fear-filled addict and how he found his way back.
In Suburban Junky, Hassan was the last kid anyone would imagine a junkie. He had loving and attentive parents, was a great student, his father was a drug counselor; he knew all he was supposed to know. When his family moved to the suburbs just in time for freshman year, Hassan was more lonely than ever, shy and eating lunch alone. When a boy his age finally approached him and offered him drugs, it was all it took. Though he knew better and had all the tools to resist, his desire to fit in became an unhealthy obsession.
Hassan quickly went from smoking pot to experimenting with other drugs. He eventually landing on heroin. It took an enforced detox in a jail cell and his father's cancer to give him the will to climb out of the deep, dark hole he'd lived in for six years.
