Driving home from jail, where he had spent nearly two months following a DUI arrest, Grant Timbes told his best friend that he was done with drugs.
When Timbes, 27, was arrested in October, his friends and family agreed not to bond him out, hoping that incarceration might be the solution to ending his dependence on prescription pills.
“He talked about staying clean, about trying to get back with his girlfriend in Tennessee,” said Ryan Whittington, 28, who had known Timbes since grade school.
It would be their last conversation. Timbes died of a heroin overdose that same night; Whittington discovered him face down in his father’s bathroom, a used syringe and small plastic bag of heroin by his side.
“I had no idea he was doing heroin,” Whittington said. “I thought it was just pills.”
Timbes is one of three fatal heroin overdoses reported in Forsyth County since December, and his death follows a national trend. With prescription pills harder to obtain, addicts are increasingly turning to heroin, which is more readily available, cheaper and, experts say, more potent than ever.
“We don’t experience too many overdoses in Forsyth County,” said sheriff’s office spokesman Dep. Douglas Rainwater. “For us to have three, that’s a lot.”
via Fatal heroin overdoses on the rise in Georgia | www.myajc.com.
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