how good the medication made him feel.
“When he finished those, he helped himself to his girlfriend’s,” she said. “And then he was able to acquire them from his friends; and when he couldn’t get them from friends, it was Craigslist, and when he could no longer get opioid pain pills, he transitioned to smoking heroin.”
Ben’s substance use disorder had an impact on his academic performance, his mother said. She remembered an incident when she was tutoring him in math, and he wasn’t able to retain any information. When questioned him about his lack of retention, he didn’t come clean.
“I went into his bedroom and found foils,” she said.
Ben Dunkle did have regrets about his substance use, his mother said. “What he would say to me in the months that followed was, ‘Mom, do you not think that if I could go back and say ‘no’ instead of ‘yes,’ I wouldn’t do that?’”
However, her son was still in denial, failing to recognize that he had a problem.
Ben Dunkle walked out of his second stint in a Costa Mesa-based treatment center in California on day 54 and met with three old friends. The four friends used heroin together and drove to a nearby bank.
“By the time they got to the bank, Ben was struggling to breathe,” Dunkle said. The three friends left the car and left Ben inside the bank, and when they returned to the bank, “Ben was turning purple,” his mother said.
“Part of the story is that they were extremely frightened,” Dunkle said. “The way that the law is set up, they were frightened of calling 9-1-1.” So the three friends tried to remove all traces of Ben from the car in which the four smoked heroin.
One of Ben’s old friends from high school happened to walk out of the bank and was able to administer CPR. “He managed to get a pulse by the time the paramedics got there,” Dunkle said.
Dunkle was in a hotel room in England with her mother at the time, thinking her son was safe.
Soon after Ben Dunkle was transported to a hospital, one of the four men that were in the car posted on Facebook that Ben was in a coma. “The post just said ‘my best friend is in a coma, please pray for him.’”
Author: Livia Areas-Holmblad
Livia Holmblad is an editor at Addiction Now and covers breaking news, features and everything in between. She moved to SoCal after living in NYC for about 10 years, where she worked for VICE and SinoVision as a writer, editor, host, producer, and director. Born and raised in Rio de Janeiro. Contact Livia at liviah@addictionnow.com
In part two of our four-part interview with Aimee Dunkle, she discussed her son Ben’s early encounters with opioids and how they ultimately led to a substance use disorder. Dunkle lost Ben to a heroin overdose in 2012 when he was 20.
