Courtesy of Patricia Roos

Retired Rutgers University sociology professor Patricia Roos does not hesitate the inclusion of addiction as a cause of death in posthumous for her 25-year-old son, Alex Clarke. Although Roos was devastated by the heroin overdose, he felt compelled to take a stand.

““Writing the obituary was my first act of activism,” Roos said. “I wanted Alex‘“A person’s life had meaning, and was not just another statistic.”

Roos continued to write—and research. She applied a sociological lens to examine the systemic factors contributing to addiction and the shortcomings of the nation’s dominant approaches to addressing the overdose crisis, especially the reliance on the criminal justice system. The result is Surviving Alex: Mother‘A Story of Love, Loss and Addictiona sociological memoir published in May by Rutgers University Press.

“I want people who‘I have experienced this and I know that they‘seen again, and I want to reach out to those who feel like this could never happen to their family,” said Roos, who joined the Rutgers sociology department in 1989 and retired in 2020. She dedicated the book to both her son and her husband, Lee Clarke, who joined the sociology department six months before her and wrote one of the book’s most emotional chapters.

Roos will give a lecture on his memoirs on Thursday, September 26, at the Rutgers Global Village Living Learning Center in New Brunswick (Douglass Campus). It tells the story of Alex’s addiction and raises the issue of the need to seek alternative treatments to conventional methods that focus solely on abstinence. Free event includes a panel discussion with activists on harm reduction methods and a question-and-answer session.

“I feel a great sense of urgency in pushing for a public health strategy to take precedence over a criminal justice strategy,” Roos said.

Interim data recently released by the National Center for Health Statistics showed that overdose deaths dropped by 10% between April 2023 and April 2024. Still, more than 101,000 people have lost their lives. As of 2021, more than 100,000 Americans die from an overdose each year.

Courtesy of Patricia Roos

After Alex‘After her death on May 11, 2015, Roos shifted her research focus from inequality, gender and work to addiction. She found that both of the main models of addiction — individual choice and brain disease — miss key social factors, such as the fact that only 10% of people who use alcohol or drugs become addicted, Roos said.

“We need to look at the bigger picture, including poverty, unemployment, mental health and stigma as factors that lead people to self-medicate,” she said. In Alex’s case, the family learned, those factors were anxiety and depression.

Alex grew up in an affluent, family-friendly neighborhood in Metuchen. He was a happy, bright and athletic kid who attended a private school in neighboring Edison. But by the summer before seventh grade, his smiles had faded and his weight had dropped, said Roos, who has reviewed family photos from the period.

Diagnosed with anorexia, Alex underwent extensive treatment before returning to school, where he was accepted by his peers. In high school, he was popular and excelled as a baseball player, planning to become a doctor.

But Alex was struggling beneath the surface. He began drinking, then smoking marijuana. In his first semester of college, an arrest for underage possession of alcohol was his first of many brushes with law enforcement. Alex often had plenty of friends close by, but, as his family later learned, he still felt isolated.

His struggles worsened after he graduated from college with a bachelor’s degree in biology. He began using heroin and was arrested for drug possession and driving under the influence. He robbed his parents to support his habit and went to jail for stealing money from cars. He would disappear for days at a time, locking himself in the bathroom of his house to get high.

Courtesy of Patricia Roos

Despite these setbacks, Alex made numerous attempts to get clean. He enrolled in 12 rehabilitation programs and lived in sober houses. Although heroin thwarted his master’s plans‘After earning his degree, he re-enrolled at Rutgers as part of a three-year “reset” plan.

In 2015, abstinence-only programs dominated treatment. Even today, only 1 in 5 adults with opioid use disorder receives medication-assisted treatment, even though it has been proven to be effective, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “The 12-step program didn’t work for him, and at the time, we didn’t have access to other options,” Roos said.

After writing her book, Roos, who describes herself as a liberal, began working with Christina Dent, a conservative Christian foster mother from Mississippi who also wrote a book advocating for substance abuse reform. “We‘we completely agree with our belief that addiction should be treated as a public health issue, not a punitive one,” Roos said. “Red and blue can come together when we focus on common ground.”

Roos believes a comprehensive approach is needed – one that includes medication-assisted treatment, widespread availability of naloxone, decriminalization of drug possession, greater accessibility and equity in insurance, and an emphasis on medication-assisted treatment over punishment. “Ultimately, we must recognize that healthcare is a right, not a privilege.”

Her son’s inability to overcome his addiction has left him without hope. Naloxone, which can reverse the effects of opioids, saved him from previous overdoses, she said. In a note police found in his pocket, he apologized for hurting his parents but said he couldn’t handle his life anymore. He ended with the words, “I will love you forever, Alex.”

Roos said she is encouraged that a more open approach to addiction may be gaining ground. “I think if we had lived in a harm reduction world when Alex was going through this, Alex might still be alive,” she said.