We live in a world with about 7 billion other people just like us; people out doing their daily activities and experiencing their own personal struggles. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) around 2.9% of those people just like us – that’s 200 million – are drug users. WHO has approximated that annually, 250,000 people just like us die because of their struggle with drugs. The estimation that 2.1 million years of human lives have been lost to drug abuse suggest that many of those fatal cases were young people with a future before them (Live Science). These dark statistics should serve as a reminder not only that “drugs are bad for you”. Drug dependency also affects other people – and those people need help breaking it.
The word “addiction” comes from Latin and it means “being a slave to”, or “bound to” (Help Guide). Substance addictions can be taught, genetics-based, an attempt to fit in with the wrong crowd, or a bad decision. Whatever the circumstances, they’re dangerous. Drug dependency can be physical, psychological, or both; physical addiction is the state in which the organism gets used to the substance and develops a tolerance to it. Psychological dependency, on the other hand, is related to an uncontrollable craving for the substance in order to relieve stress or negative feelings (Psychology Today). In all cases, it intervenes with a person’s everyday life, and degrades both their physical health. In all cases, it can be deadly.
Whatever their struggles are though, people with drug dependencies are first and foremost, human. The dehumanization they face daily is an issue of social stigma. People’s treatment of them – from the derogatory term “junkie” which compares them to trash, to actual physical violence and harassment – shows that they are perceived as less than human, as if they don’t deserve a chance to get better. Often times this stigma pushes parents into cutting off their children out of shame at a time they need support the most, which only pushes them to a worse life of crime. This negative attitude is expressed most vividly towards celebrities, since their personal lives are in the public eye. Their struggles with addiction are exploited and sold as a scandal, while people receive these stories by mocking and degrading a person in need of help. A tragic example is Amy Winehouse, whose struggle with alcoholism and drug abuse was the subject of jokes, mockery, and degradation until her very last day. Society stigmatizes those who need and seek help, and it seems as if people only realized Amy was a human being after she lost her life. Experiencing struggles, however doesn’t devalue one’s life. Fighting against addiction doesn’t make anyone less human or less important.
As mentioned earlier in this article, addictions have a negative effect on people’s everyday life. The uncontrollable craving pushes people into stealing so they could pay for drugs, and the substance’s influence might lead them into committing fatal crimes. This is why drug dependencies are often related to lives of crime and violence. The very use of most psychoactive drugs is illegal (a notable exceptions are alcohol and tobacco).
NADCP reports that 80% of jailed offenders abuse drugs or alcohol, while approximately 50% are clinically addicted to some substance. The issue with this, however, is that jail doesn’t encourage recovery. In the mean time, it isn’t successful in tackling the problem at its root; an estimate of 95% of people serving time for drug abuse return to it upon being released, which proves its ineffectiveness (NCADD). Methadone clinics are an alternative that has proven to be effective. While providing adequate help to people, the therapy uses methadone as a substitute for opioids like heroin to decrease and even completely break dependency. It’s proven to be a better substitute to detoxification, which results in painful withdrawals (Drug War Facts). Methadone therapies control the distribution of medication that is proven safe; their goal is to help rather than just criminalize people struggling with addiction, and that tackles the problem with violence and death at its core. Despite seeming like an obvious route, however, methadone treatment is not legal or available in many countries, and it is not the standardized way to deal with illicit drug abuse.
Struggles certainly don’t make people less human than anyone else. “They did it to themselves” is an excuse for stigmatization and harassment against people struggling with addiction used too often. There is really no way to justify kicking someone while their down, even if they tripped by themselves. A majority shaming someone for their need for help creates a stigma that makes people forget and undermine the importance and fragility of human lives until it’s too late. But while not everyone is capable of offering or providing proper help, the least we could do as a society is treat fellow humans as humans.
