Redemption Delayed [imprintnews.org]

Though I haven’t been personally affected by the addiction/overdose crisis, I know about the callous politics involved with this very serious health/human issue: Government talk, alone, about increasing funding to make proper treatment available to low- and no-income addicts, however much it would alleviate their great suffering, can easily create loud opposition by the general socially and fiscally conservative electorate.

The reaction is largely due to the preconceived notion that drug addicts are but weak-willed and/or have somehow committed a moral crime. Ignored is that such intense addiction usually does not originate from a bout of boredom, where a person repeatedly consumed recreationally but became heavily hooked on an unregulated often-deadly chemical that eventually destroyed their life and even that of a loved-one. We now know pharmaceutical corporations intentionally pushed their very addictive and profitable opiate pain killers — I call it the real moral crime — for which they got off relatively lightly, considering the resulting immense suffering and overdose death numbers.

In this world, a large number of people, however precious their lives, can atrociously be considered disposable. Then those people may begin perceiving themselves as worthless and consume their addictive substances more haphazardly. Although the cruel devaluation of them as human beings is basically based on their self-medicating, it still reminds me of the devaluation, albeit perhaps subconsciously, of the daily civilian lives lost (a.k.a. “casualties”) in protractedly devastating civil war zones and heavily armed sieges. At some point, they can end up receiving a meagre couple of column inches in the daily news.