Legal Addiction
If you’ve gotten your wisdom teeth out, you or your parents probably have a pill bottle stashed somewhere that holds the painkillers you were prescribed. They gave me a percocet prescription, and other friends of mine, all around the age of 20, have been given opioids after surgery like they’re candy - dangerous, life-ruining candy.
That’s what they did with my uncle, Jeff, for back pain caused by a car accident years earlier. If someone had asked, they would have found out that Jeff had been a heroin addict for much of his life but had been clean for a long time. He wasn’t a casual pot-smoker or a drink-with-dinner kind of guy, he was an addict. But nobody asked, and Jeff was given an OxyContin prescription.
It didn’t take long for him to become addicted, and even less time for him to go back to heroin. He died of an overdose when I was nine. He was only 53 years old.
I never got to know my uncle. My mom lost her brother. His kids lost their father. We could blame his doctors, but that wouldn’t be quite right. We could blame Jeff for not speaking up about his prior heroin use, but addiction is an illness that gets you in its clutches and never lets you go, so I don’t believe Jeff’s relapse was fully his fault, either. There is nobody to blame but Purdue Pharma, the company that makes and distributes OxyContin.
OxyContin is the brand name for oxycodone, which is a type of opioid. Other types of opioids include heroin, morphine, and fentanyl. When you take an opioid for the first time, users experience a rush of dopamine in very high levels. Not everyone likes it - my uncles Rick and Jeff did heroin for the first time together, and the one who didn’t like it is still alive today. But if you do like it, say bye-bye to life as you know it, because you’re going to spend all your time chasing that feeling again without ever being able to reproduce it. After that initial high, your body starts to lack the ability to produce its own dopamine, causing intense depression. The next time you take an opioid, all it does is make you feel normal.
Methadone is a medication you can take to help ease the withdrawal process, which is almost impossible to do without it, because not only is withdrawal physically uncomfortable but addicts are also dealing with that dopamine drop. The bad news is that Methadone is not widely available, because of course, if something can actually help people, we have to make sure it’s nice and difficult for them to access it.
What Purdue Pharma did was misrepresent research that indicated how addictive OxyContin can be -- they were able to say that there is little risk of addiction, but left out that this piece of information only applies to short term use. Purdue gave doctors bonuses based on how many OxyContin prescriptions they gave out, along with other shady tactics that they got sued for. According to the New York Times, Purdue Pharma has been dissolved and the owners, the Sackler family, has to pay a 4.5 billion dollar settlement.
So, why do we spend so much time demonizing and vilifying addicts as if they have a choice in the matter? Why do we blame and blame and blame the person suffering when the real criminals, the pharmaceutical companies, are raking in billions of dollars, even as the bodies pile up? And why do we lock addicts in jail and let them wither away from withdrawal instead of rehabilitating them and gently weaning them off the drugs that have ravaged their bodies for likely years?
I don’t have one final answer for you, but one aspect of it is American society’s general negative view of addicts, which has racial motivations in most cases but not all. Some drugs that are stereotypically used by certain demographics, especially Hispanics and African Americans, are particularly stigmatized while white people with a cocaine “habit” get a hall pass. But heavy drug users are going to be thought of as criminals and lowlifes, no matter their race, by the general public.
Most of us have been told not to give money to people who are homeless because they’ll “use it on drugs”. We are assaulted with images of scarred faces, yellowed, rotted teeth and extreme hair loss juxtaposed with a picture of the person “before” they became an addict, warnings that not-so-subtly say, “if you do drugs, you’ll be ugly” -- as if this is going to stop the kid with generations of alcoholics before him from taking his first sip. And it certainly won’t occur to the middle-aged mother who is just taking the OxyContin her doctor prescribed her for some hip pain, listening to her doctor as most people do.
So I’m asking you to have some compassion for people who are struggling with addiction. This won’t solve anything, but if we can create enough of a cultural shift in the way we view drug addicts, it may allow legislation to be passed that will actually help them, instead of shipping them off to prison.
I’ll leave you with some hope - New York has just become the first state to allow supervised injection sites, where addicts will have to bring their own drugs but can use without worry of getting a disease from the needle or overdosing without anyone there to administer Narcan, which can reverse an overdose.
I know this might seem crazy or radical, but let’s all be honest with ourselves -- anyone going to a supervised injection site was going to use anyways, so why not make sure it is safe? I am hopeful that other states will follow in New York’s footsteps once they see the benefits of not letting addicts just die off without any aid.
According to the National Institutes of Health, in 2016, there were a reported 42,000 opioid-related overdose deaths in the United States. The people in that statistic were not all the same -- addiction does not discriminate based on race, class, age, or gender. They could have been your neighbor or your friend.
And someday, you could be a number in a data set, too. None of us are immune. So let’s be the generation that doesn’t let anybody get left behind.
Drug addicts deserve empathy too.
National Drug Abuse Hotline: 1-800-662-4357