Heroin Abuse: Reaching to the Suburban Youth The best driving force to get informed and motivated about a certain topic is a personal experience and my motivation came when one of my best friends passed away from a heroin overdose. Almost exactly a year ago, this friend of mine passed away from a heroin overdose and none of his close friends or family even knew the problem had escalated so greatly. It had all started with a pill addiction to xanax that slowly grew more severe but with a few interventions and a couple of trips to rehab, most of us thought that he was doing well and had kicked the habit. Little did we know that he had kicked the xanax habit only to graduate to something as intense as heroin. The frightening thing about this drug is that my friend was a small, upper class, Jewish boy from the suburbs of St. Louis and would not typically be the image you think of when a person might think of a heroin addict. He was the furthest thing from an underprivileged, poor, inner city adult. But addict hew was, and it is still somewhat of a mystery to those who were closest to him as to how he was able to access his drugs. For every person that believes they know the true meaning of the word “addiction,” there is another person right beside them to argue a different point of view. In this day and age, one would think that doctors or scientists or psychologists would have narrowed it down to a universal description but this is not the case. There are many different aspects to understanding what makes an addict who they are, and why they do the things that they do. Because every person has a different story and a different way to handle certain situations, it seems that addiction is often dependent on context. Regardless of the debates that ensue regarding the exact meaning of the word, there is a general consensus on the main themes that arise when