Scream the Truth

So, addiction, meth and heroin, is something that weighs heavy on my heart where I live. It’s everywhere, it’s just so much more up close and personal in a small town. I have a sister and a nephew who are both in a permanent meth induced psychosis and will never recover.

There is a great deal of denial within the community, we call these people “mentally ill” as if they just suffer from some kind of organic brain chemistry problem and self medicate. It isn’t really true, but few people want to actually name the problem. We say the “mental health community,” because it sounds so much better and it’s a way of avoiding the problem entirely.

We have a needle exchange program here and recently the paper reported that we handed out 14,000 needles last year. In a town this size that is a staggering number, but rather than declaring we have a serious problem, this program is praised and promoted as a great success, a solution to what ails us. There is additional funding that is now going towards overdose kits we plan to pass out, in the hopes of preventing some deaths. I’m not opposed to either of these things, just endlessly frustrated that we deal with the symptoms of a problem and never actually get to the root cause.

It is absolutely devastating for a mother’s heart to watch kids I have known since they were infants and watch them change over night. They are babies, they have no idea what they are involved in, what a thief and destroyer that is. Often I think those of us on the outside looking in suffer more than they do. They can’t see their own misery as clearly, they are anesthetized. Those of us who love them are forced to feel all the feelings, to bear witness to all the destruction. Addicts are often very self absorbed, narcissistic, so it doesn’t occur to them how many other people they are hurting in the process.

It’s not all kids either, it is adults too, parents who pretty much emotionally abandon their children with their addiction issues. Those kids often become the adults, the caretakers, losing their own childhoods and carrying a burden much too big for them.

It’s not all “poor people” either, or “tweakers” or “those kinds of people.”  There are many well off, well connected people, who get caught up in addiction themselves, who sell, who entice, who keep the cycle going. It is just an entangled mess of misery, that ripples out and impacts every area of our community.

Here’s a blog that speaks more to the issue, Heroin. Stop the Silence. Speak the Truth.