I'm one of those people. I didn't know my mother very well because she abandoned my family when I was 3 years old, but I did eventually start to get to know her again starting in 2012.
She was always struggling with addiction, but never did any form of heroin until she injured herself while walking down a stairwell drunk. She was prescribed OxyContin and quickly became extremely addicted.
My last conversation with her before she died was one where she was desperately begging me to find her any kind of opiate painkiller I could. This was because she had been cut off by her doctor who wouldn't renew her prescription. She ended up procuring some heroin which was apparently laced with fentanyl. She snorted it in her car in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven in Washington DC and overdosed and died in 2015.
I'm not going to pretend like she was living a productive life because she certainly wasn't. I'm also not going to pretend like she wasn't already an addict in other ways. But this product and this evil family who knowingly pushed it into Appalachia and other parts of the US where the residents are ignored by the political parties has caused tremendous damage to many people.
The first time I lost a friend to an overdose on oxycontin was in 2000 when I was a freshman in college. We were in southwestern Virginia, right in the heart of the emerging crisis. He was my co-worker at a Pizza Hut.
Nobody gave a shit about the droves of people dying until it hit New England 15 years later. It was only then that anyone even took notice in the media.
The biggest insult added to this injury for me personally was when I was a contestant in a hackathon for the US health and human services department in 2017. This is the organization that is in charge of the FDA and they had a whole slew of speakers talking about the opioid epidemic. At no point in the entire event did any of these bureaucrats admit any form of culpability and complicity in approving this drug. As far as I know not a single person in the FDA or HHS was ever fired for allowing this horrible product to be pushed like junk food into this country's most forgotten communities.
I've heard the Ehrlichman quote, but just to be super clear:
I am vehemently against most aspects of the drug war. I've even grown multiple cannabis plants with a hydroponic system/grow tent I setup in my basement. Heroin and opiates are on a different level due to the physical aspects of the addiction/withdrawal, as well as the effects opiates have on suppressing psychological pain and creating a slippery slope for treatable mental illness to untreatable mental illness.
While I support allowing doctors to administer it in designated, supervised locations, I'm 100% against the Vancouver inspired approaches advocated for by people like Johann Hari. I was once a supporter of these approaches. I witnessed implementation in 3 different communities. I was wrong, and it's an utter disaster. Giving needles to addicts so they can continue to support the black market is a dumb idea. I watched it turn entire neighborhoods into inhospitable hell holes in Asheville, SF, and Vancouver. No thank you.
For some reason the problems of opiates tend to not manifest when availability and quality are stable and prices affordable. Nobody used needles when heroin was available OTC.
She was always struggling with addiction, but never did any form of heroin until she injured herself while walking down a stairwell drunk. She was prescribed OxyContin and quickly became extremely addicted.
My last conversation with her before she died was one where she was desperately begging me to find her any kind of opiate painkiller I could. This was because she had been cut off by her doctor who wouldn't renew her prescription. She ended up procuring some heroin which was apparently laced with fentanyl. She snorted it in her car in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven in Washington DC and overdosed and died in 2015.
I'm not going to pretend like she was living a productive life because she certainly wasn't. I'm also not going to pretend like she wasn't already an addict in other ways. But this product and this evil family who knowingly pushed it into Appalachia and other parts of the US where the residents are ignored by the political parties has caused tremendous damage to many people.
The first time I lost a friend to an overdose on oxycontin was in 2000 when I was a freshman in college. We were in southwestern Virginia, right in the heart of the emerging crisis. He was my co-worker at a Pizza Hut.
Nobody gave a shit about the droves of people dying until it hit New England 15 years later. It was only then that anyone even took notice in the media.
The biggest insult added to this injury for me personally was when I was a contestant in a hackathon for the US health and human services department in 2017. This is the organization that is in charge of the FDA and they had a whole slew of speakers talking about the opioid epidemic. At no point in the entire event did any of these bureaucrats admit any form of culpability and complicity in approving this drug. As far as I know not a single person in the FDA or HHS was ever fired for allowing this horrible product to be pushed like junk food into this country's most forgotten communities.