DRUGS ARE BAD.....MMMKAY?

     Yes, this photo is creepy as hell! But this Ohio mother, who lost her husband to a heroin overdose wanted to share this stirring photo of herself and her children beside his open casket in an effort to warn others about the dangers of drug addiction. To me, it just looks like her and her kids taking a photo next to a corpse. If she wanted to warn others about the dangers of drug addiction, she should have taken a photo of her and her kids next to him passed out with the needle stuck in his arm. That would have been more effective. As far as I'm concerned, this guy died in a car accident or in his sleep or something. 

     Eve Holland of Cincinnati, Ohio, posted with her family's final photo, "The cold hard truth is heroin kills. You may think it will never happen to you but guess what, that's what Mike thought too. I'm sure this photo makes a lot of people uncomfortable. It may even piss a few people off but the main reason I took it was to show the reality of addiction."

     I guess I get that. The young father of two's addiction began with painkillers, according to his widow. He entered a rehab facility late last year and came out "a brand new man" just in time for Christmas, she remembered. Back in May, the then alive 26-year-old Mike Settles posted two photos of himself side-by-side with two hashtags reading "transformation" and "healthy" along with a small smiley face. Two days later, he shared a photo of him with his wife, which read: "This evening we decided to be a family again. Wish us luck!" 

     Tragically, it was something as small as a toothache that his wife said led him to turn to pain pills again. That slip re-sparked his deadly battle with addiction. She wrote, "We were together 11 years. I was there before it all started. I knew what he wanted out of this life, all his hopes and dreams. He never would've imagined his life would turn out this way. He said he could handle it, that he could stop on his own and didn't need help again. Well, he was wrong, last Wednesday, he took his last breath. I just needed to share his story in case it can help anyone else." 

     As of Monday, her photo had been shared on Facebook more than 247,000 times, which included her personally sharing it on two heroin support group pages. Apparently, her message seemed to work on some who saw her post on Facebook and have been battling addiction. I guess this photo does send a pretty strong message. When I was a young Chinese boy, I had a few friends who died of because heroin addiction. One of them died because of an overdose and the other two died from a double suicide. I miss all three of them dearly and think about them every day still. This happened more than 20 years ago now, but just the thought of heroin addiction still gets to me. I've also had friends who became addicted to pain pills for some time and again, another ugly addiction. If you ask me, sometimes addiction is mind over matter, sometimes, unfortunately, it's an inherited gene that can't be helped. I was lucky enough to not have an addictive bone in my body. Yeah, I inhaled! But I just became addicted to music and that's an addiction that will never go away and will never kill me.....Well, eventually, it will kill me, but not for a while.