I have seen so many lives destroyed, so much human potential wasted. A young woman whom I had gone to kindergarten with was murdered and cut open and had her entrails pulled out by a couple of desperate junkies who thought she had swallowed condoms of junk to bring into town. She had but they didn't find them. My first and best friend from toddler days, a really academically bright person, an amazingly gifted athlete, was lost for years in a life of petty crime, dealing and pimping to support his habit. He lived for many years in an AIDS hospice in later life. He is a survivor - the AIDS meds work for him. In his 70s, he is belatedly rejoining society and trying to put a life together. There is so much he could have done and contributed to the world. Another friend, a recreational dabbler, gets a bad batch, ODs, and leaves behind a wife and young children. I could go get my school annuals and pick out all dead dead and the zombies existing in either a desperate fix-to-fix existence or a perpetual methadone half-life haze, many of them, as young offenders, having being put through the adult prison system where they experienced violent bullying and sexual assault, but I won't go get the books. It's too depressing. And this was all before big Pharma pushing synthetic opioids.
Now it is worse in its extent. It knows no social boundaries. A respectable middle-aged couple in a mansion in the wealthiest area of the city ODs on fenanyl or carfentyl. A homeless person does the same in gutter of a back alley. Its all the same.
One of my kids works as a landscape gardener, servicing the grounds of large properties. Naloxone kits are now standard issue for gardeners it seems.
I won't discuss potential answers to the problem because any discussion is bound to be politically charged. I, will, however, draw attention to the apocryphal and probably erroneously attributed Albert Einstein quote:
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
