In late September, more than 1,000 family members who have lost loved ones to drug overdoses rallied in Washington with an angry message: We’re Fed Up! with the epidemic of drug addiction in this country and the soaring number of overdose deaths.
Those family members have every right to be angry. They have every right to use their First Amendment rights to direct that anger toward the federal government and the current status quo.
I get it. I’m angry too; in fact, the Fed Up! rally made me angrier. It stood in stark contrast to the tenor and tone of the many other Recovery Month events I had the privilege to attend this past September.
It is apparently OK for those family members to angrily demand a better response from the federal government to the current health crisis. But when the addiction recovery community — more than 23 million Americans and their families — gathers to walk, speak and put a face on recovery there doesn’t seem to be much anger at the current state of affairs that is costing us more than 100 American lives every day.
[For more of this story, written by Greg Williams, go to http://jjie.org/op-ed-anger-a-...ry-community/107825/]
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