The mother of a young heroin addict who died recently has spoken of her heart-rending battle to save him from his demons.Lynn Spencer said she felt alone and let down by the system when dealing with son Christopher’s five-year battle with drugs.He died aged just 25 on October 27. His mother is still awaiting the outcome of tests to determine the cause of his death — but believes it was drug-related.Ms Spencer decided to speak out about what happened, explaining: “I want to remove the stigma. This can happen to anybody. We need an honest and authentic approach to drug education which acknowledges the temptations of drugs and educates young people about the harm they cause and the risk of addiction.”Her son, a former reporter with the Mid-Ocean News and The Royal Gazette, suffered depression from a young age.Despite his troubles, he was a well-educated and bright young man who became deputy head boy at Saltus Junior School before heading to boarding school in the United States in his mid-teens.However, he got expelled after being caught smoking cannabis and moved to another boarding school where he graduated and ended up at college. It was there, according to his mother, that he “really learned to party”.By the time Mr Spencer was 20, he was experimenting with harder drugs. She believes his addiction was a coping mechanism linked to his depression as it helped “to take away the pain”.She explained: “Parents in Bermuda need to really understand that there is a difference between using drugs and alcohol recreationally and self-medicating.“He was very honest with me about when and how it started, and that he needed help. We had a very close relationship and he told me more than I wanted to know.”Ms Spencer — who brought her son and his younger sister up as a single mother — went to the US to stage an intervention. Mr Spencer ended up in rehabilitation for the first time, in Pennsylvania, but he told her he learned more about drugs there than he ever knew before.“He was learning how to be a real drug addict in rehab by hiding and lying. Right now, I believe that drug rehab centres are a moneymaking business but you don’t have any choice at that point,” said Ms Spencer, who paid almost $30,000 per month for her son’s treatment.“You send them and think they are going to get better and that’s it.”Mr Spencer, from Paget, went for further treatment in Tennessee and stayed clean for several months. He came back to Bermuda, started to work at the Mid-Ocean News, and moved in with a friend.However, things took a turn for the worse again after his flatmate moved out, leaving him with unpaid bills, and the newspaper closed down. He began work at The Royal Gazette but it became clear that his life was on a downward spiral.“He moved home because he couldn’t afford to live on his own and that’s when I really noticed the insane person that he was becoming when he was using drugs,” explained his mother.“There was something wrong. There was a lot of ‘nodding out’ while we were talking. He would always have a cigarette in his hand and he would be dropping the cigarette and it would be burning the carpet. I would hear him walking around at night and talking to himself when he was in a drug-induced state.”“I felt like I was going insane and he was denying he was on anything, but I believe that was when he first started using heroin. Your whole personality changes. He was still going to work and I was petrified and wondering ‘what’s going on? What do they know at work? This is a very serious drug — what do I do?’“Eventually they figured it all out. He was calling in sick, not getting work done and nodding out at meetings, but he so desperately wanted to maintain both lives. It was beginning to really kill him inside because he wanted to be a good person but he had this addiction.”Speaking of the moment she realised her son was taking heroin, Ms Spencer said: “It was scary. The word heroin made everything else look like children’s toys. The whole concept was like ‘that’s the person on the street. That’s the end of the road’.”She explained that her son was taking the highly-addictive drug each morning in order to function, otherwise withdrawal symptoms, including physical sickness, would kick in. Ms Spencer convinced him to go back to rehabilitation in the US. His employers said they would hold his job open for him until he was well enough to return.However, Ms Spencer said her son was “too embarrassed” to return to the newspaper and ended up working at a freight company when he got back to Bermuda.All too soon, the recovery he achieved at rehab fell apart again.“You’re in a bubble in rehab. You’re not in the real world and you can’t stay in that bubble,” said his mother, who gave up her job at a gym to focus on his needs.“When you come back to Bermuda, your chances are very slim and heroin is the hardest drug to quit. If heroin wasn’t available there were other things he would do — anything and everything — sleeping pills, cocaine, any kind of prescription drug. It’s so easy to get hold of this stuff and the only consequence an addict is capable of considering is the consequence of not getting heroin. And heroin is not just a physical addiction — it destroys a person mentally. Just getting clean doesn’t remove the blanket of shame and guilt.”She explained: “During this whole time he would wake up every morning and say ‘I wish I wasn’t alive. I wish I was dead. I have so much guilt I can’t sleep at night’.”She added that for those who knew her son, finding out he was a heroin addict was a shock.“He was a charismatic, genuine, intelligent, warm, generally ‘normally functioning’ person. The drug quickly became a hidden mental obsession and physical requirement for him; that is how heroin works. He went down a path he should have never been on, and he couldn't get off it,” she said.As for the impact on his mother, she explained: “I was becoming insane. I was just a nervous wreck.”She struggled to strike a balance between supporting her son and enabling his behaviour — and although there were times she told him to leave her home, she couldn’t bear the thought of him living on the streets.Mr Spencer spent further stints in counselling and rehab, including Turning Point and the Men’s Treatment Centre in Bermuda, to no avail.While his mother has concerns over the way treatment facilities are managed (see separate story) she acknowledged: “He ultimately didn’t want the help. He wanted to not be an addict but he felt he was a lost cause. He had been in and out of rehab and relapsed every time. He didn’t believe there was any way to cure him and he felt out of control. He said that he was no longer human.”In the week leading up to his death, Mr Spencer was struggling to detox at home while his family researched treatment programmes in the US. He wanted to try a prescription drug called Suboxone which is not available on the Island, that can medically wean people off heroin.“He had completed an application and a phone interview with a treatment centre in Vermont, during which the representative indicated that an addict has to be in crisis mode in order for them to take them,” said his mother. “This sent Chris into a drug-using frenzy so that he could ‘qualify’ to enter the programme the following week and it killed him.”On the evening of October 27, she found him dead in his bedroom. While she still awaits the autopsy results for a definitive cause of his death, the preliminary tests indicated it was a heart attack triggered by heroin.“There should be no reason that an addict cannot walk into the hospital and ask for help — waiting a day or even several hours for the process to unfold is the difference between life and death,” she said.While Ms Spencer said she has had “a lot of support” since her son died, she wishes it had been there before, when she needed it.“That’s what I would like to change for somebody else,” she said. “Drug addiction is such a secret. It’s swept under the carpet and it was a very lonely five years for me. It will continue to be. People still don’t know what to say. You’ve got the death of a child who was a heroin addict and people aren’t used to that. They don’t know how to handle it.”She added: “By speaking out, I want to remove the stigma. This can happen to anybody. It is happening to so many people.”The family asked for donations to anti-drug organisation PRIDE in lieu of flowers for Mr Spencer. His mother urged people to find out more about PRIDE and the importance of drug education and community activism: www.pridebermuda.bm or 295-9970.l Other useful websites: www.streetdrugs.org, www.drugfree.org, www.teens.drugabuse.gov.