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We (America) Need More Empathy Towards Drug Addiction

If it was a requirement as a U.S. citizen to report your honest opinion on our country’s drug addiction crisis, the amount of people who genuinely have empathy towards drug addiction would roughly fill up three quarters of a professional football stadium. That’s such an exaggeration. Yeah, maybe it is a slight exaggeration, but tell me, how many people in your life right now actually care about the overwhelming growth of drug addiction rather than averting their eyes from the news and pretending it doesn’t exist for the protection of their own comfort? I mean, if someone struggles with a drug addiction it’s entirely their fault, right? According to a majority of America, yes.

Just in case America had temporarily forgotten about the ongoing addiction crisis, we were given a rude awakening earlier this month when photos were released by the police of a couple passed out in the front and passenger seat of their car while their young child sat in the back of the car, almost unresponsive with fear. Within minutes, an explosion of shock, anger, frustration, and sorrow were released from keyboards all over the country, and the world. The pictures themselves sent a shiver through my spine, but what sparked anger in me was the comments from various people on Facebook. It was an even mix of wishing the parents would rot in jail, or an over generalization that “junkies are the garbage of this world.”

Do I agree that the child should be taken away from the parents? Absolutely. Do I believe that the parents deserve help over jail? Absolutely. Will most people agree with me on that? Probably not. 

If you still don’t believe that drug addiction is increasing in this country, a NowThis video was recently posted to their Facebook page reporting that eighty-two people had overdosed on heroine in one week in Cincinnati. What does this have to do with empathy?

It’s simple, really. Dual diagnosis. What is dual diagnosis, exactly? Dual diagnosis is when someone struggles with drug addiction and mental illness at the same time. “In the past year, 20.2 million adults (8.4%) had a substance use disorder. Of these, 7.9 million people had both a mental disorder and substance use disorder, also known as co-occurring mental and substance use disorders.”

In short, those who suffer from drug addiction are not doing it for fun. They cannot stop whenever they please. Hence, addiction:  a medical condition characterized by compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli, despite adverse consequences.

Nine out 0f ten times, those struggling with addiction attempt to find help, only to not be able to afford it or to have no help available for them. Not to mention that those addicted to heroin and opioids run a higher risk of catching lethal diseases such as viral hepatitis and AIDs, which ultimately slow down the recovery process. I’d go into the difficulty of getting mental health help in America, but that takes a whole other article.

Throughout my years of high school, when I truly began to understand the daunting truth of drug addiction, I began to notice that people who had empathy toward addiction either had a family member who had/was struggling, or had lost someone to drug addiction.

I never thought I’d fall into that category.

When I was sixteen, I lost a childhood friend, someone who I considered family, to drug addiction. For the first week, I had entirely forgotten how to breathe. Zachary was only eighteen. My sister and I spent a good chunk of our childhood running around in his back lawn with his two triplet brothers, Tyler and Michael. They taught us how to play video games, they pushed us in the pool when we weren’t expecting it, and consistently created havoc. Although I would never admit it at the time, I idolized them, all three of them. They were a couple years older, which was an automatic pass on the cool meter for an eight year old. As we got older, they grew apart from my sister and I, which was understandable. Since they went to a different school district than us, it was inevitable that they would want to hang out with their friends from school. I still thought they were the coolest kids on the block, even if they ate all of the cookies before anyone else could have them. A little less than a year before Zachary passed, my mother told me that Zach and I were facing similar battles, so that I wouldn’t feel alone. I never talked to him about it, and I don’t think he knew about mine, but it was comforting knowing that I wasn’t alone. His death was one of the hardest things for me to comprehend. The morning after my mother told me, I was sitting in algebra two when the pipe suddenly burst. Before I knew what was happening, I was sitting at my desk in the middle of what only could be described as a gross, sobby panic attack. My teacher sent me to the nurse, and when the nurse asked why I was crying, the only thing I could muster to respond was: “He needs to come back, he deserves a second chance.”

He was one of the kindest people in the world, and he will forever continue to be that.

It shouldn’t take losing someone important to you to have empathy for those struggling with addiction. Addiction lives everywhere, under the streetlights, in the alleys, in the gutters, in the living room of your neighbors house, and in the bathrooms of the high school.

If we want recovery, we need empathy. If we want to stop seeing these stories on the news, we need empathy. If we want to provide the opportunity of a second chance to those struggling with drug addiction, we need empathy.

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