Charlie Oen’s battle with addiction started when he was 16 and his family moved to Lima, Ohio. It was the last stop in a string of moves his military family made — from Panama to North Carolina, Kentucky, Texas and Germany.
“I went toward a bad group because those were the people that accepted me,” he says. Drugs became a substitute for real friendships.
He started drinking, popping pills, cooking meth and shooting heroin. He was homeless for a while when his parents kicked him out of the house. “I would just be wandering the streets of Lima at all hours of the night until I found somewhere, chilled, sat down, fell asleep in an alley,” he says.
[For more of this story, written by Bram Sable-Smith, go to http://californiahealthline.or...the-opioid-epidemic/]
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