The mother's voice on the phone was full of anguish and she was talking so fast that I could hardly get a word in edgewise.

She was looking for a recovery program that would accept her heroin addict son. It seems that he was having a problem getting accepted anywhere because he had been convicted of a sex offense some 10 years earlier. She had called me because she knew we had 800 beds for recovering addicts and alcoholics. Her son, she said, was living on a sidewalk because he had been evicted from the last program he was in when they discovered he was a sex offender.

She went on to explain that his offense was minimal. It involved his having consensual sex with a 16-year-old girl when he was 18. When I told her our program didn't accept those convicted of sex offenses she directed me to a website that detailed his case. A visit to the site confirmed what she had told me. However, for some reason the son was still required to register as a sex offender and that disqualified him from acceptance into our program.

She asked me if I knew of anywhere else he could go. I directed her to a nearby hotel that accepts some levels of sex offenders.

"Are there drugs there?" She asked, apprehension in her voice.

"There are drugs everywhere," I told her. "There are even drugs in prison."

After spending nearly an hour with her on the phone she thanked me for referring her to a place that would accept her son. And that was the last time I talked to her.

Later I was told that the mother, having not heard heard from her son for a few days, went to the hotel and entered his room with the key had given her. Inside she discovered him sitting slumped over on the bed, dead from a probable drug overdose.

These are the kind of tragedies that are always devastating. This story demonstrates the horrible impact that drug use has on our loved ones.

Many times when I'm counseling those in our program they tell me that they didn't harm anyone but themselves when they were using. But then they didn't hear the pain in this mother's voice when she was looking for a place for her addict son. She was crying out in the hope of finding a better life for him.

Sadly, she was unable to find it.