In December 2012, the year after the CDC declared an opiate epidemic in America, a company in California submitted its application to the FDA’s Anesthesia, Analgesia and Addiction Products section.

The application was to market Zohydro, a new, high-dose, long-acting pain medication. The drug was submitted in capsule form, with no effort made to make it tamper-resistant.

In a familiar tone, the makers of the drug extolled the benefit of the powerful narcotic, explaining how the drug needed to be taken only once or twice a day, compared with the every 4-6 hours of existing hydrocodone tablets.

At the public hearing, parents and families whose lives were destroyed by addiction that began with prescription drug abuse lined up to speak, practically begging the panel to reject the drug’s application.

The FDA’s scientific advisory committee, made up of doctors and researchers responsible for safety recommendations, which the FDA almost always follows, voted 11-2 to reject the drug.

In October 2013, the FDA approved the high-dose, nontamper-proof version of Zohydro.

“The benefits,” the FDA declared in a statement, “outweigh its risks.”

Part 3: To Hell and Back

It really is a shame that the last image I have of my Uncle Mark is him lying on the floor, dying, with my left hand behind his head and my right hand under his chin, trying to somehow breathe my life into him. A syringe lay at his right, a burnt spoon on the table, empty Saran Wrap and a lighter on the floor. Just chaos. Uncle Mark was a gracious man, and part of me feels like he deserved a better final mental snapshot than that.

I was 13.

My Uncle Mark and Me in Happier Times

Uncle Mark was 39, and he knew he had a problem. He had used heroin since he was 14, so that was undeniable. But admitting he had a problem was something he refused to do.

Knowing something comes from one’s head. Admitting it comes from one’s heart. And he’d lost touch with his heart well before he lay dying in my arms.

Heroin eats away at your soul, at that intrinsic little voice that tells us right from wrong, good from bad, love from hate. It numbs everything in its path; the soul is just an innocent bystander.

It takes everything you love, everything you care about, all of your dreams, your aspirations, your friends, your family, everything — and pushes it to the side in favor of finding ways and means to get more heroin.

And until an addict finally succumbs to reality and admits he or she has a problem, there can be no solution. Sure, it can be forced. But more often than not, for addicts’ families, it’s nothing but a lesson in redundancy and heartbreak. It’s feeling stupid for actually believing they’d get it this time around. It’s wondering what they did wrong and how they could’ve stopped such a beautiful person from taking such an ugly path through life.

For the addict in denial, it’s promises — lots and lots of empty promises. Nothing kills the soul more than failing, once again, like they said you would. Nothing annihilates your self-esteem more than using against your own will, possessed by an obsession to outrun a detox in $20 increments.

After the admission, solutions are plentiful. Help is out there.

Auburn, Grass Valley, Placerville, Rocklin and Roseville all have inpatient and outpatient rehabilitation services. County funding is available. There are 12-step meetings for both drugs and alcohol at nearly every hour of the day. Transitional living facilities are available for social reintegration.

The help is out there. But before we can receive it, we must first, as a community, admit that we have a problem. There’s no magic pill we can take to defeat addiction. And let’s face it — America being America, if there were a magic pill, we’d chop it up and snort it or find a way to smoke it on foil.

I spent about six weeks conducting interviews and research for this series. I wish I could say that the subjects were difficult to find — that there was only one drug dealer in town, that there was only one heroin addict in town, that there was only one person whose husband chose drugs over his own family. But the truth is that I was granted only so much space in this newspaper, and it wasn’t nearly enough.

There’s the story of a mother and father who dearly miss their daughter who went from being a straight-A college student holding down two jobs to living in a car in the course of 10 months because of her heroin addiction. A handful of ER nurses told me that their jobs are being constantly interrupted by waves of addicts trying to score narcotics.

The stories were plentiful, and they came from your friends and neighbors right here in Auburn.

If nothing else comes from this series, I hope a dialogue emerges. All of us have either a family member or friend who is battling addiction of one kind or another, and to convince ourselves that because we live in a tight-knit, upper-middle-class community we are immune to stereotypically “inner-city problems” is not only foolish; it’s dangerous. To put it more plainly: It’s denial.

Addiction doesn’t care how old you are, what color you are, what you do for a living, what kind of car you drive, what tax bracket you’re in, how much you love your husband or wife, how much you love your kids.

And it certainly doesn’t care that you live in Auburn.

The isolation of living in the foothills didn’t protect Kristin Netto (Thursday, Part 1) from having her life torn apart by her husband’s drug addiction. Her little boy is now three years old, and when he asks for his father, her only response is, “Daddy’s still sick,” she explains. “What else do you tell a three-year-old?”

She has since filed for legal separation, receiving full custody of not only her biological son, but also her soon-to-be ex-husband’s two sons from a previous relationship. As of the writing of this article, he’s still disappeared into his addiction.

The drug dealer (Part 1), “Kevin,” is trying to stay clean. “When I’m clean, I don’t sell,” he says. “I don’t need to.” At the writing of this article, he was two days clean. That may not sound like much, but believe me, two days clean for a drug addict is two consecutive 24-hour miracles.

As for “Michael” (Part 1), after completing the Community Recovery Resources program in Grass Valley, he has been clean for 42 days. He’s just 19 years old, and the temptation of old friends carries with it the temptation of old habits. To say he has an uphill battle in front of him would be an understatement, but to say it’s an impossible task would be to sell short the human spirit. Millions of others have done it, and it’s up to him to decide whether he is finished. I wish both “Kevin” and “Michael” nothing but the best.

As for me, my clean date is irrelevant, but let’s just say I know what the road ahead of them looks like. I’ve been there. I am there. It’s difficult and it’s trying and it’s frustrating and it’s probably the most beautiful, rewarding journey of self-discovery one could ever embark upon.

You’d think that holding my uncle while he took his last breath would’ve scared me away from ever touching drugs.

You’d be wrong.

It doesn’t work that way. It’d be nice if it did, because then we could show kids “Scared Straight” videos, show them an egg frying in a pan and tell them that “this is your brain on drugs,” come up with catch slogans like “Just say no!,” and we’d never have to worry about them trying drugs.

How has that worked out so far?

No, my path to hell went the prescription drug route after having a back surgery, and when I went in, I went in deep. I almost didn’t make it out. In fact, for all intents and purposes I shouldn’t have, at least according to the ER doctors. But I did, and now I feel that I have an obligation to make the most of this second chance by doing what I can to give back.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s hard work. For me it requires a healthy dose of 12-step meetings, lots of sponsoring, going into rehabs to speak, letting people know there’s a better life awaiting them should they choose to live it.

Addiction does not have to be a dead end. There is a way out. You just have to be ready to find it.

If you had just met me on the street, you’d probably never know that I was a recovering addict.

You’d never know that I’ve seen hell up close and personal, all over the world, in multiple languages, in a variety of cultures, and I didn’t know whether I had what it took to make it back.

You’d never know unless I was willing to talk about it.

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Editor’s note: “Kevin” and “Michael” are the only pseudonyms used in this series; everyone else spoke on the record and for attribution.