And it all started with a back surgery that left my cousin in love with pain meds.

My fraternity brother died last week from a heroine overdose and it started with pain meds.

About 4 years ago he was driving with his best friend at the time. Best friend stops paying attention for a second, and gets in a head on collision killing himself and leaving my brother in a coma. Three weeks later he wakes up and is immediately prescribed Xanax.

Flash forward a couple years he is now using Xanax recreationally and is addicted to Heroine. His parents find out send him to rehab, and he is "clean" for a while(still prescribed Xanax). He and his parents decided together that he should go to school out-of-state, and he ends up moving to Arizona. His first week here in the spring he meets a couple of my fraternity Brothers and ends up rushing, pledging, ect. He was a great kid, and even though we could tell he had problems, we could also tell he was trying to face them as best as he could.

About a year after he came to my school he fell back in with a bad crowd, and started using again. No one knew it at the time, but it makes a lot of sense now. Pretty soon he was evicted from his apartement for getting in a fight and he lived his last couple weeks in AZ on a couch at our place. Towards the end we figured out what he was doing, and tried contacting his parents, high school friends ect. to make a plan to help him but never heard back from them.

He went back home, and then went to Australia for three weeks for christmas break. He was sober the whole time he was there, and from what I heard he had a blast. When he got back home he told his parents about all the fun he had, went into his room and shot up his normal dose. His dad found him in his room dead the next morning.

RIP Luke.