A Columbine survivor’s tragic battle to reveal the ‘ripple effect’ of gun violence: trauma, addiction, suicide

With 377 school shootings since Columbine, Americans are still reckoning with the real toll of these attacks

On 18 May 2019, a 37-year-old man died of a heroin overdose in Colorado. Many of the overdose deaths that year – nearly 200 each day – did not receive much attention, but his was marked by a few news stories.

Austin Eubanks had struggled with addiction since 1999, when he was shot and witnessed his best friend killed in the Columbine high school library. A doctor prescribed the 17-year-old opioids to help deal with the pain from the bullet wounds in his hand and his knee, but the teenager found the drugs more helpful for his emotional wounds, the ones he did not know how to talk about. Within months, he was manipulating doctors for more prescription medication, then moving on to other drugs.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/8AlLfJ4