# data[].attributes.body
"Meth addicts are more likely than other drug users to engage in antisocial behavior. A successful business man took the drug to work longer hours, became addicted, and murdered a man who owed him drugs and money. An addict shot his wife, another fatally bludgeoned his victim, and another murdered a couple for a car and seventy dollars. A couple, both meth users, beat, starved, and then scalded their four year old niece, who died in a bathtub. A Pontoon Beach, Illinois man was under the influence of meth when he murdered his wife and then killed himself. In Portland, a woman on meth was arrested for killing her eighteen- month old child, strangling her with a scarf. In Texas, a man high on meth, after arguing with a friend, tracked him down and murdered him - shooting him six times in the head. In Ventura County, California, a man under the influence of meth raped and strangled a woman. Also in California, a meth-addicted mother was convicted of keeping her two young children locked in a cold, cockroach infested converted garage. An Omaha man was recently sentenced to forty years for murdering his girlsfirned's child after shooting meth. The child had been smothered and had numerous broken bones. There have been trials in Phoenix, Denver Chicago, and Riverside, California, of mothers accused of murdering their babies because they nursed them while they were on meth. The mother in Riverside, during her trial, said, 'I woke up with a corpse.

# data[].attributes.body
"As many as half of all meth users , and a larger percentage of ice users, tweak. That is, at some point they experience the type of meth psychosis first identified in Japan in the late 1940's. It is characterized by auditory and visual hallucinations, intense paranoia, delusions, and a variety of other symptoms, some of which are indistinguishable from schizophrenia. The hyper anxious state of tweaking can lead to aggression and violence, hence the following, from a report for police on how to approach meth addicts: "The most dangerous stage of meth abuse for abusers is called 'tweaking.' A tweaker is an abuser who probably has not slept in 3-15 days and is irritable and paranoid. Tweakers often behave or react violently....Detaining a tweaker alone is not reccommended and law enforcement officers should call for backup."

# data[].attributes.headline
Over 60% of teens report that drugs of some kind are kept, sold, and used at their school.

# data[].attributes.subject
Over 60% of teens report that drugs of some kind are kept, sold, and used at their school.

# data[].attributes.headline
Guilderland Parents Desperate as Addict Son Lives on the Streets

# data[].attributes.subject
Guilderland Parents Desperate as Addict Son Lives on the Streets

# data[].attributes.body
The Flood family, who live right in our backyard in Guilderland, have experienced the exact same thing as Nic's parents in Beautiful Boy. The Flood's son, Dan has battled a heroin addiction for almost 7 years and is now homeless, living behind the McDonalds in Albany. The Floods have put Dan through countless rehab programs, only to be disappointed every time. Dan's father says that often he drives by the area where Dan stays, to see if he is alright, and says that sometimes he passes a man that is not even recognizable - Dan. Dan has been banned from their house and no longer speaks to his mother. Teen drug abuse is what tore this family apart.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
How far would you go to save your child from heroin addiction?

Would you send your 17-year-old son to eight drug treatment programs in five states over more than six years and exhaust your retirement savings of nearly $400,000?

Kevin and Diane Flood of Guilderland did.

Would you change the locks on your house, put a padlock on your bedroom door and buy a safe after your son stole heirloom silverware, a grandmother's cherished jewelry and other family keepsakes and pawned them to buy heroin?

The Floods did.

Would you scrub away blood stains you discovered on a wall in your son's bedroom where he injected heroin while you slept just down the hall?

The Floods did.

After being lied to for so many years by a manipulative heroin addict you hardly recognized and no longer trusted, making you feel like prisoners in your own home, would you kick your son out on the street in a last, desperate attempt to force him to get clean?

The Floods did.

And would you awaken in the middle of the night after not hearing from your son for weeks - torn up over the tough-love tactic and worried sick about his welfare - and in a panic call hospitals and the morgue because you feared he might have died in a gutter somewhere.

The Floods did.

"A living hell" is how they described what they're living through, an ordeal that has given them a renewed respect for the unvarnished truth.

"As horrible as it sounds, there have been times when I thought he might have been better off dead," his mother said.

*

The Floods' 24-year-old son, Dan - who was a solid student, played guitar, earned a black belt in Tae Kwon Do and competed in recreation basketball at the Guilderland YMCA with his younger brother - slid into homelessness after a long, harrowing spiral of addiction that felt to his parents like a journey through the circles of Hell in Dante's Inferno.

As Dan fell further and further, his parents kept thinking that he had hit bottom. What could be worse than getting thrown into jail for drug possession? Or the report from a treatment center that Dan was so desperate for a high in a drug-free facility that he guzzled hand sanitizer for its alcohol content and inhaled oven cleaner for its hallucinogenic effect.

When the Floods thought Dan's situation couldn't be more dire, they learned that he had worn out his welcome couch-surfing at friends' apartments and has been squatting for the past six to eight months beneath an Interstate 787 ramp in downtown Albany. He spends his nights in a sodden sleeping bag on a muddy slope in a clump of bushes and scrub trees behind a McDonald's restaurant at the corner of Madison Avenue and Pearl Street.

He stands near a traffic light along the I-787 entrance off Madison Avenue and holds a sign that says: "Homeless. Out of Work. Anything Helps. God Bless."

Motorists have cursed him, tossed garbage at him and looked right through him. Occasionally, a driver will slide a few crumpled bills or a handful of change through a car window. The cops routinely take away his sign and tell him to move on.

"I don't remember what day it is most of the time," Dan said one recent morning. He was unshaven and his face had the windburned ruddiness of someone who lives outside. He wore blue jeans that hung low, a black hoodie and a green barn coat he got from City Mission, where he goes sometimes for a free breakfast and clothes.

He stared blankly into the middle distance when he talked, which was often a mumbled near-whisper. He had a glazed, floating visage and often halted in mid-sentence and veered off in another direction, or fell silent.

Full disclosure: I've known Dan Flood, at least from a distance, since he was a toddler. He and my son, Sam, both attended Pooh's Corner Day Care in Niskayuna. Dan was a sweet little kid. I pushed Sam and Dan on the swings at Pooh's, kicked soccer balls with them and cried at their graduation as they moved up to kindergarten. After that, the two went in separate directions and we lost touch.

"What was your name again?" he asked after I had given him my business card and had spent nearly an hour with him. We reminisced about Pooh's Corner and playing hoops as a teenager at the Guilderland Y, where I had also seen him occasionally.

Now, he spends his days panhandling and standing in the McDonald's parking lot, bumming cigarettes from his homeless buddies, with whom he pools cash to buy $1 McChicken sandwiches and $1 cups of coffee. Dan likes his with cream and extra sugar.

He is part of a posse of homeless men in their early 20s to late 50s - with sad tales of loss and regret - who sleep in the bushes behind McDonald's. I met Chris, Duke, Kevin and Pete.

They look out for each other and say they feel safer in numbers. They sleep 50 yards off gritty Pearl Street, in a halo of street lights, a few blocks from a rash of recent shootings where drunken fights and harassment by roaming teens are not uncommon.

Dan said he had not used heroin since the summer, mostly because he can't afford it. He buys synthetic pot when he has cash. He smokes a lot of roll-your-own tobacco his buddies give him.

"Don't tell those guys about heroin," he whispered after he pulled me aside. "They don't know about that and they're not into drugs."

But several small empty ziplock plastic bags, the kind that hold $10 worth of heroin, were strewn around the site.

"We don't trust him anymore," his father had said. "We start with the premise that everything he says is a lie."

*

The first serious problems surfaced in his sophomore year at Guilderland High School. An average student, Dan stopped doing homework and began failing classes. Something had changed. He was cut during tryouts for the junior varsity basketball team, a blow to his self-esteem. He started smoking marijuana regularly and got high before class. He was kicked off the track team for smoking pot. Two more suspensions for marijuana use followed, he failed academically and he quit school before he was expelled.

"We thought we were pretty savvy parents, but he was really good at hiding it from us. We never saw him drunk or high," said his father, a sales representative in the food industry.

Kevin and his wife, Diane, a state employee who works in health care, knew their son was in trouble, but they didn't know where to turn. They felt school officials did only the minimum and were of little assistance with their family crisis.

"The school district doesn't want to admit its drug problem," Diane said.

They took Dan to see a psychiatrist, who prescribed an anti-depressant drug. They found a residential drug treatment program in Idaho. It was expensive, thousands of dollars a month, but they felt intensive professional intervention was the best chance to get Dan back on track.

He completed work for a GED diploma, took college courses and seemed to be thriving. But then he was kicked out of the program for having alcohol and failing drug tests and he returned to his parents' home.

He washed out of four local detox facilities, too, including all three locations of one program. "We can't help him because he doesn't help himself," one drug counselor wrote.

"I don't know how he's still alive," another counselor said after a drug test revealed normally lethal levels of opioids in his system.

The pattern of getting kicked out for failing drug tests was repeated at residential drug treatment programs from California to Massachusetts. The Floods were hemorrhaging money, about $9,000 a month for the rehab facilities and $2,000 to a consultant for a one-hour meeting.

"I feel that the industry exploits parents who are lost and desperate," Kevin said.

The Floods' younger son, Brian, 21, now a graduate student at Boston University, began shunning Dan in high school as he saw up-close the fallout of his turbulent behavior and drug and alcohol abuse. The two have been estranged for years.

The Floods are not certain when Dan began injecting heroin. He was using when he and a high school buddy drove the friend's mom's Mercedes sedan into the Bronx. Police there picked them up driving around a rough neighborhood and found 100 doses of LSD they apparently intended to sell back in Guilderland.

Teenagers at the time, the boys spent three days in a Bronx jail cell. The Floods, by refusing to bail out Dan right away, hoped they were sending a message he would understand.

Later, as his mother drove him to yet another local rehab facility, Dan's answer showed how widespread and easily available heroin is in the Capital Region when she asked him where he bought his heroin. "I could go to that house ... that house ... that house," he said as he pointed out five or six drug houses along Western Avenue within three miles of his parents' home.

*

Kevin and Diane Flood read the obituaries each morning in the newspaper. "There's another one," Kevin often says to Diane, pointing out the sudden demise of a man in his early 20s whose cause of death looks like a heroin overdose.

Dan's best friend, Carl, died of a heroin overdose two years ago at age 21, two weeks before Christmas. But that didn't faze Dan. Around that time, Kevin and Diane noticed blood spatters on the white ceiling in the bathroom. He had been shooting up in there.

"We've tried it all. We' don't know where else to go from here," Kevin said.

"I'm done. I can't do anymore," said Diane. "It's too painful."

She has refused to visit Dan for the last several months while he's been living on the street. He was kicked out of local homeless shelters and halfway houses for breaking curfew and being drunk or high.

His father tries to visit Dan once a week, searching for him around the encampment and taking him to lunch. Once, he drove right past a dirty, disheveled, broken-down homeless man shuffling down the sidewalk. He was 50 yards away before he did a double-take and realized it was his son.

Occasionally, if Kevin is working at home and his son calls, he will let Dan stop by the house to wash his clothes, shower and sleep in his bed. His mother chooses not to see him on those visits. He is not allowed to spend the night.

Dan has told his father that he's been clean in recent months but Kevin found syringes in his pants pockets in the laundry room.

Kevin thinks the years of heavy drug use have caused severe psychological damage. He has seen Dan acting erratically and expressing suicidal thoughts. Mental health professionals tell Kevin that if Dan is not an imminent physical threat to himself or others he cannot be involuntarily committed to a facility.

"He's so shot I don't know what anyone can do at this point," his father said. "We try to focus on Brian and thank God he's doing well. He's a great son. But I won't ever completely give up on Dan. As long as he's alive, there's a glimmer of hope."

The Floods said they reluctantly shared their story in the hope that someone might offer an idea that they have not tried; that other parents might see their plight as a lesson that heroin destroys kids in "good schools" from "good families;" and that school officials, law enforcement agents and parents need to present a united front against heroin.

With winter coming, Kevin is worried about Dan sleeping in the bitter cold in the weeds behind McDonald's. His sleeping bag is thin and no match for sub-freezing temperatures.

"Don't worry. I'll figure it out," Dan said when I asked him about his plans for winter shelter.

His parents conceded that they sometimes wake up in the middle of the night, heartsick, unable to get back to sleep.

"If Dan doesn't make changes, this will not have a happy ending," his father said.

This much they know: Suffering in silence has not helped. And they are done keeping quiet about heroin addiction.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Guilderland parents desperate as addict son lives on streets

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Guilderland parents desperate as addict son lives on streets Would you send your 17-year-old son to eight drug treatment programs in five states over more than six years and exhaust your retirement savings of nearly $400,000?

# data[].attributes.body
Teen drug abuse is one of the leading problems in America. The gateway drug for teens, meaning the drug that is most commonly the "start-up" that leads to other drugs is Marijuana. According to the most recent accuarte study, done in 2012, 45.3% of seniors in high school claimed to have done marijuana in their lifetime. Although, being a teen and knowing what goes on in teenager's minds, I believe a lot more than half of high school seniors have used drugs at least once in their lifetime. Many people think of this as an insignifigant problem and think of this issue as just some pesky kids that are "junkies."Teen drug abuse is a serious and increasing problem. 570,000 people die from drug overdoses per year. Cut that number in half and that is the amount of teens that overdose each year. Close to 300,000 teenage lives are taken every single year. 300,000 lives matter and 300,000 lives are a problem that need light shed on them.

# data[].attributes.headline
By the 8th grade, 28% of adolescents have consumed alcohol, 15% have smoked cigarettes, and 16.5% have used marijuana.

# data[].attributes.subject
By the 8th grade, 28% of adolescents have consumed alcohol, 15% have smoked cigarettes, and 16.5% have used marijuana.