What would you do if your 22yo son got on meth and became homeless while your other son was still in HS?

Guessing wrote:

This is hypothetical. What would you do if you had one son who was a major screw-up in pretty much every way who became addicted to tobacco, alcohol, and methamphetamine, was violent, behaving erratically, paranoid, frequently in trouble with the law, and now got kicked out of his apartment and needed a place to stay? Would you invite him into your home while your other son, a straight-A student and state champion xc runner was still living with you and in high school? What if your criminal son regularly stole things from your A-student son, broke his things, and threatened violence against him and stated at least once (while on meth) he was going to kill him. Would you continue to let this 22 year old live in your home with your 17 year old son? What would you do?

Have him aborted.

Progressive-liberal wrote:

Guessing wrote:

This is hypothetical. What would you do if you had one son who was a major screw-up in pretty much every way who became addicted to tobacco, alcohol, and methamphetamine, was violent, behaving erratically, paranoid, frequently in trouble with the law, and now got kicked out of his apartment and needed a place to stay? Would you invite him into your home while your other son, a straight-A student and state champion xc runner was still living with you and in high school? What if your criminal son regularly stole things from your A-student son, broke his things, and threatened violence against him and stated at least once (while on meth) he was going to kill him. Would you continue to let this 22 year old live in your home with your 17 year old son? What would you do?

Have him aborted.

I think it's still legal if you touch one of his bare feet to mommy's groin while splitting the skull. I know it's true because Pelosi once said that her faith informed her decision of that procedure.

Experience wrote:

My brother is the real-life incarnation of your hypothetical meth addict. My parents allowed him to live in their house and supported him financially throughout his addiction, which is still going strong 14 years later as a result. He is now 33 and has NEVER held a job. My father is 74 and has destroyed himself financially supporting my brother and paying his legal expenses for this long. He also destroyed his relationship with me, because I will never forget nor forgive the misery of sharing a house with my psychotic meth addict brother when I was in HS. We had several violent encounters over the years and he frequently spoke of his desire to kill me, but no threat to my well-being was serious enough for the Great Enablers to kick their little 28 yo bundle of sunshine out of the house.

Parenting does not end when the kid hits 18. Your parents decided to roll the dice and have kids. Your brother and you is what they ended up with. It sucks but that is life. You can't just walk away from your kids.

Experience wrote:

My brother is the real-life incarnation of your hypothetical meth addict. My parents allowed him to live in their house and supported him financially throughout his addiction, which is still going strong 14 years later as a result. He is now 33 and has NEVER held a job. My father is 74 and has destroyed himself financially supporting my brother and paying his legal expenses for this long. .

I totally get your anger but the thing is you don't know how it would have turned out if they had been harsh with him. You say the addiction is still going strong "as a result" of the parents. That may or may not be true.

If they had been a hard ass, maybe he would have turned his life around. Or maybe he would have killed himself. You simply do not know and I don't know of any studies that exam things like this.

I think it's important not to blame your parents. Maybe they screwed up but can you imagine what it's like to have a kid grow up to be an addict. You'll probably understand it better when you become a parent.

You are wise indeed to have kicked your daughter out. You saved her life by doing so.

rojo wrote:

I totally get your anger but the thing is you don't know how it would have turned out if they had been harsh with him. You say the addiction is still going strong "as a result" of the parents. That may or may not be true.

If they had been a hard ass, maybe he would have turned his life around. Or maybe he would have killed himself. You simply do not know and I don't know of any studies that exam things like this.

I think it's important not to blame your parents. Maybe they screwed up but can you imagine what it's like to have a kid grow up to be an addict. You'll probably understand it better when you become a parent.

You may mean well but this is totally wrong. While these is no guarantee my brother would have straightened out if my parents had cut him off, there is a high likelihood that he would have, and if he had killed himself, at least he wouldn’t have continued living as a subhuman animal, and the world would have been rid of him.

I've seen this situation a number of times with childhood friends and their siblings. You are wrong and Rojo is right (for once). Being cut off doesnt actually help. They just steal to support themselves.

You are blaming your parents unfairly for trying to do the right thing in a terrible situation. If they gave him money, that was a mistake, but providing him with a roof and attempting to keep communication open was not.

To be totally blunt, your parents seem to have two messed up kids, but only one has enough introspection to realize it.

I think this is a very interesting query for a few reasons. I'm a political science major who lives in Washington State, where I've seen, much like other US states, the effects of the heroin epidemic as a part of the larger homeless population in my area. As a political science major I see things a lot more from a macro level where I consider different policies and how those would effect the whole community but not so much of the micro level like this scenario. My father and I disagree with each other on how to solve it and I often have a tough time trying to figure out what the best course of action is here, and if it aligns with my political principles. The second part is that there's a similar situation on my stepmom's part of the family where one of her sisters is like this. The whole other good kid thing is kind of lost in my parallel because the only people in their household are here, the mother, and their brother. My stepmother, her sister, and brother are all in their 40s so definitely not the same as this really in that aspect. But their is still an issue of how to get this sister off being an addict and this forum is definitely interesting to me in the different solutions.

Here's my two cents:

I agree that there has to be a willingness from the older brother to change because I think that just forcing change on someone like that without addressing the motivations is ineffective. If you were to have enough money to get into programs that use whatever drugs that make the user want to stop physiologically, then that would be good, but I'm pretty sure those are expensive so I think following the advice of others in this forum that encourage working to get different rehab and requiring their participation in it would be the best path forward. I agree that it would be foolish to just accept the older brother into the house without first addressing the addiction and expecting for a positive outcome out of nowhere. I also disagree with the idea of just kicking him to curb and rejecting him completely. I think there's a strong parallel between aggressive drug war policies and this mindset. The drug war failed with the same ideology of being a hard ass as evidenced by the continuation of drug use. In the same way, not everyone responds well to pressure and this older brother could just go about committing thefts to support a drug habit while living in a tent or something of that nature.

You have no experience with any of this, Rojo. It's easy to tell because you would not say such foolish things if you did. The OP describes my family to a T, and I can tell you that if my drug addict/criminal brother died it would be the best thing that ever happened to my family. Enabling the addiction and deviant behavior is the LAST thing you want to do. ANY drug counselor will tell you that.

YMMV wrote:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y21Vj9-Pu3U

The only answer in this thread worth anything.

While I appreciate your feedback and understand that you are trying to recommend a positive solution I have to disagree with your failure to see the need to draw a hard line. My wife's and my decision to kick our daughter out of the house was the hardest thing I have ever done. At some point the addict has to feel the consequences of their actions or there will be no reason to change. This decision is not 'kicking them to the curb and rejecting them completely' as you present. This is a result of the addict not following through on an agreed upon path forward. When we kicked our daughter out she understood the reason and was also aware that we were there to provide help when she came to a point that she was ready for a change. As I said previously, we were very lucky and she did get to a point where she wanted to change and she cleaned herself up. Would this have happened if she had continued to live under our roof with full support? I have no way of answering this question. I just know that we reached a point where we felt that making a strong stand was our only viable option to facilitate a change in circumstance. AA meetings also provided to be a big help for our daughter and she has now celebrated 3 years of sobriety.

Good luck, this is not an easy journey.

Huge congratulations to you and your family. You did the right thing. So many parents continue enabling their child's behavior by never drawing a line and instead ALWAYS giving them a place to come to so they can go straight back out a day or a week later and go back to using. You're a perfect example of what works. My family is a perfect example of what doesn't. You should be very proud.

asians are awesome wrote:

Easy, you try to help him as much as you possibly can and offer him a place to stay as long as he's not violent.

I sort of agree with this. There is a soft spot for a child that no decent parent should let go. If the child is not violent, keep him or her safe. You do not want to regret any horrible accidents that might occur to him otherwise. You don't ever let your kin go, if you can help it.

I have one brother that OD’d when he was 30’and my other brother is 46 now on meth/weed/alcohol..... and pretty bi-polar. We came from a totally normal family I swear. I don’t think I’d let him live at home.

I was 17 years old when this all started.

It did keep me away from drugs.

The now 46 year old bother went crazy around 22 years old. My parents did all they could but never allowed him to move back in except for short stints. None of those ended very well. He sort of got my other brother into smoking weed and he died at 30 after some Cocaine/methadone.

My family has a history of mental illness and alcoholism and my siblings all new it. The oldest and the youngest decided to roll that dice with drugs and both tripped the trigger at 17 and 24.

There really is nothing you can do that doesn't enable and end in disaster.

My younger brother fluctuates between almost normal and batshit crazy in a routine cycle. He and we know how to manage it but he just doesn't want it badly enough.

In the end it's just not worth the battle.

Parents are just less able to cope with this in their 70s and that's what they are dealing with now. My brother is 40 years old and living with them.