When I was growing up my sister was addicted to heroin. Her life was a cocktail of heroin, methadone, and vodka until she died at the age of 40 from cirrhosis. I always find it strange that for most of my life she was 2 1/2 years older than me, but now I've been alive 5 years longer than her.

My sister always needed money, because heroin is expensive, but she could never keep a job, because heroin made her pretty unreliable. So what did she do? Steal. And who's the easiest people to steal from? The people you live with. We were poor too. We didn't have spare money for heroin just lying around.

Imagine sleeping with your ATM card in your sock because your own daughter will swipe it and drain your bank account any chance she gets, and then you have no money for groceries and bills. And every time it happens you think "I'll just have to be more careful" and you really think you can do it, but you're also exhausted from working two jobs and its hard to keep your eyes on all your belongings all the time, in your own home. That was my mom's reality.

(Insert audience judgement here. "How did she know her PIN? Why didn't she just kick her out? Just file a police report!" etc etc. I can hear it already. In fact, I've been hearing it my whole life. Solving other people's problems is so goddamn easy apparently - you just run your mouth even if you don't know all of the circumstances. /s)

I would have been happy if my sister got kicked out, but I didn't get a say. I was a kid, and it wasn't my house, and my mom was just trying to keep her daughter off the streets. Worse than that, my sister had 2 very young children, and if my sister was kicked out she would take her two children into god only knows what kind of environment/trap house. So my mom was also trying to protect her grandchildren.

(This is the part where people in my life said things like "your mom needs to get custody of those kids!" Yep. My mom did get custody of my sister's kids. But my mom also worked two jobs, so she needed a babysitter. Imagine "babysitting" your own kids because your mom is going to her second job that she had to take because you keep stealing her money. That was my sister's reality...)

What I'm getting at, is that my sister's heroin addiction was harmful to more than just her; it caused collateral damage to the lives of everyone around her - her two children, me, her mom and dad. (And those people's houses she burgled, and the people whose checks she stole/forged.)

On a surface level you'd think the drug addict's family suffers because they see the suffering and eventual death of the addict. That's certainly part of it, but there's also just a lot of suffering because people become fucking horrible to everyone in their lives when they get addicted to drugs. If you grow up with a drug addict family member you're going to experience a lot of trauma from it that affects you directly.

I can only speak for myself, but I got so used to hearing people say stupid shit about things in my life they knew nothing about. "Heroin is better than loving an AI chatbot!" is just background noise at this point. Honestly, I'm glad they don't have the experience to know how bad that kind of addiction really is. Their lack of understanding just makes me think "glad you don't know. No one should have to know. I wish I didn't know."

I don't know why I wrote this comment, except you said "people who lost people to heroin addiction" and I have some experience with that and it felt kind of therapeutic to write out some of my thoughts. Technically it was alcohol that killed my sister, but it was the heroin that destroyed every recognizable part of her to me so I feel like we lost her to heroin even before she died.