Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Something about what we're hungry for

On the stage where you posed last summer, the doctor talks now about how the medical establishment, under the benevolent instruction of the drug companies, pushed opiates on the people to treat acute and chronic pain and, seemingly, just about everything else. I remember thinking it was absurd - everyone who came to the Emergency Room was asked if they were experiencing any pain, no matter what their chief complaint was, and to rate it on a 1 to 10 scale. Like if I came in because I was a little depressed after losing my job, you'd ask me that question and then give me a little something for it. Not the listening to me or the encouragement I really needed, but the medicine for the pain I didn't know I had. And now the numbers of addicted, overdosed, and converted over to heroin use are growing at a rate of ten percent or more a year for the last ten years or more.

I'm sitting in the same seats in which I fretted last summer,  ill at ease with the whole thing but trying to be supportive to you, trying now not to fall asleep. Did he say we, in this country, consume 99% of the worlds opiates? I believe he did say that.

Another man speaks. He used drugs for the first time when he was 8. He's now not used drugs for 28 years. He tells us that we - the treatment community-love to finger wag and, not surprisingly, that never helped him. He says what saved him, coming out of prison and going into treatment, were the people who saw his humanity and held it up, the people who believed in him until he learned to believe in himself.




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