[Patricia Roos, pictured with her husband Lee Clarke (left) and son Alex, will discuss her memoir during a free event and panel discussion on Thursday, Sept. 26. Courtesy of Patricia Roos]

Rutgers University Sociology Professor Emerita Patricia Roos didn’t hesitate to include addiction as a cause of death in the obituary for her 25-year-old son, Alex Clarke. Though devastated by his heroin overdose, Roos felt compelled to take a stand.

“Writing the obituary was my first act of activism,” Roos said. “I wanted Alex’s life to mean something, for him not to be just another statistic.”

Roos kept writing – and researching. She applied a sociological lens to examine the systemic factors contributing to addiction and the shortcomings of the nation’s predominant approaches to addressing the overdose crisis, especially a reliance on the criminal justice system. The result is Surviving Alex: A Mother’s Story of Love, Loss, and Addiction, a sociological memoir published by Rutgers University Press in May.

“I want people who’ve lived through this to know they’re seen, and I want to reach those who think it could never happen to their family,” said Roos, who joined Rutgers Department of Sociology in 1989 and retired in 2020. She dedicated the book to both her son and her husband, Lee Clarke, who had also joined the sociology department and penned one of the book’s most emotional chapters. 

Roos will discuss the memoir on Thursday, Sept. 26, at the Rutgers Global Village Living Learning Center in New Brunswick (Douglass campus). It chronicles Alex’s addiction and explores the need for treatment alternatives to conventional paradigms, which are focused solely on abstinence. The free event includes a panel discussion about such harm reduction methods with activists and a Q&A session.

“I feel a deep sense of purpose to push for a public health, over a criminal justice, strategy,” Roos said.

Provisional data recently released by the National Center for Health Statistics showed that overdose deathsdeclined 10% between April 2023 and April 2024. Still, more than 101,000 lives were lost. Since 2021, more than 100,000 Americans have died of overdoses each year.

After Alex’s death on May 11, 2015, Roos pivoted her research focus from inequality, gender, and work, to addiction. She found that both prominent models of addiction – individual choice and brain disease – miss crucial societal factors, for example overlooking that only 10% of people who use alcohol or drugs become addicted, Roos said.

“We need to look at the broader context, including poverty, unemployment, mental health, and stigma as upstream factors that drive people to self-medicate,” she said. For Alex, the family learned, those factors were anxiety and depression.

Alex grew up in the affluent, family-friendly borough of Metuchen. He was a happy, clever and athletic child who attended private school in neighboring Edison. But the summer before seventh grade, his smiles faded and his weight dropped, said Roos, who looked back on family photos from that period.

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

But beneath the surface, Alex was struggling. He’d begun drinking and then smoking marijuana. In his first semester of college, an arrest for underaged possession of alcohol marked his first of many interactions with law enforcement. Alex often had lots of friends on hand, but, his family later learned, he still felt isolated.

His struggles worsened after graduating from college, with a bachelor’s degree in biology. He started using heroin and was arrested for drug possession and driving while intoxicated. He stole from his parents to support his habit and landed in jail for stealing money out of cars. He would disappear for days and lock himself in the bathroom at home to get high.

Despite these setbacks, Alex made multiple attempts to get clean. He enrolled in 12 rehabilitation programs and lived in sober houses. Though heroin had derailed his pursuit of a master’s degree, he had re-enrolled at Rutgers as part of a three-year reset plan.

In 2015, abstinence-only programs dominated treatment. Even today, just 1 in 5 adults with opioid use disorder receive medication-assisted treatment despite its proven effectiveness, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “The 12-step program didn’t work for him, and at that time we didn’t have access to other options,” Roos said.

Since writing her book, Roos, a self-described liberal, has partnered with Christina Dent, a conservative Christian foster mother from Mississippi, who also wrote a book advocating for addiction reform. “We’re completely aligned in our belief that addiction needs to be treated as a public health issue, not punished,” 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 availability and parity in insurance, and an emphasis on medicated treatment over punishment. “Ultimately, we need to recognize that health care is a right, not a privilege.”

Her son’s inability to overcome addiction left him hopeless. Naloxone, which can reverse the effects of opioids, saved him from earlier overdoses, she said. In the note police found in his pocket, he apologized for hurting his parents but wrote he could no longer cope with his life. He closed with, “I will love you forever, Alex.”

Roos said she is heartened that more open attitudes about addiction might be gaining traction. “I think if we had lived in a harm-reduction world when Alex was going through this, Alex could still be alive,” she said.

By: Margaret McHugh

Date: September 25, 2024

Media Contact: Andrea Alexander, andrea.alexander@rutgers.edu