The war on drugs redux
America has a drug problem, this much I knew. I’d read the stories about the so-called opioid epidemic, and I’d known its victims. A former boyfriend overdosed on Oxycontin long before it was making headlines.
But I wasn’t prepared for its pervasiveness.
I got a taste of the problem in New York City, where on a late-night 2 train I saw a woman getting high on aerosal.
Middle-aged and dressed in black spandex, she boarded, sat and lolled a head of stringy blonde hair before pulling out her front teeth. Then she raised her bag to her face and began inhaling. A pair of women next to me rolled their eyes and whispered under their breath. It didn’t seem to matter much to anyone that she was huffing on the subway.
Addiction to opioids, such as heroine and prescription painkillers, is far more troubling. According to New York City health statistics, more than 1,000 people died from an opioid overdose in 2016, more than the number of deaths from car accidents and homicides combined.
The year before, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio — troubled by the rapid rise in overdose fatalities — announced that Naloxone, a medication that can prevent death from opioid overdoses, would be available without a prescription at hundreds of pharmacies.
The city also put millions of dollars toward a public education push to reduce overdose deaths. Signs on some trains in New York now promote Naloxone’s “Save a Life” campaign with slogans like, “I saved my neighbor’s life,” followed by anecdotes from New Yorkers with first-hand experience.
The stories of addiction out of Ohio are the most troubling for me. I know many of the towns mentioned. I can picture the poverty, the desperation. But I also remember them differently and want to go back now to see how they’ve changed. Many of these places were homes to friends or family. They were downtrodden then — and I wonder, what now, more than a decade after some of them lost the town's main employer?
What now, if Republicans get their wish to repeal Obamacare? In a recent radio interview, the head of the National Association of Medicaid Directors described a potential rollback as “pulling the rug out” from beneath people beginning to recover from substance abuse. Many states have used the Medicaid expansion to try to confront the opioid crisis.
What happens with healthcare is something we’ll all be watching. But I'm quickly learning, as are most Americans, that the impact any outcome will have on the most vulnerable -- the addicted and those struggling to recover -- could be astounding. This war is far bigger than I for one expected.
