Addiction: A Life of “Deep-end-ence”
You’re an addict. If you’re not, you have been. If you haven’t been, you will be at some point in your life. Your addiction may not involve drugs, alcohol, or tobacco, but there’s something you’ve either tried quitting or have thought about quitting. There may not be a rehab center for caffeine addicts, but that doesn’t change the fact that 54% of Americans over the age of 18 drink coffee every day.
My nails don’t have addictive properties that I know of, but I’m guilty of having been addicted to nail-biting since the age of 10 (which I have since quit doing thanks to a solid support system and more distractions to keep me busy).
While sugar does have addictive properties, it isn’t typically fatal so many of us don’t view ourselves as sugar addicts, and if we do, we don’t generally care until someone with a stethoscope tells us we have diabetes.
The reckless, yet irresistible men and women we lust after may not have nicotine embedded in their saliva and they may not induce dangerously high-levels of dopamine and serotonin in our brains, but many of us tend to repeatedly fall for these types of characters anyways.
At times, it may become difficult for you to sympathize with the alcoholic you see every week at your local gas station or the drug addict that wanders around aimlessly outside the Walmart a couple of counties over. While sympathizing may be hard at times, criticizing is incredibly simple: so simple, in fact, that anyone can do it. Just because something is simple, though, doesn’t mean we should do it. Understanding that our humanity makes all of us prone to addiction can, in turn, make us more compassionate toward one another.
Compassion can be hard to find, but one group that knows compassion better than the majority population is the LGBTQ community. Regardless of your preconceived opinion concerning LGBTQ members, the numbers show that they “were more than twice as likely as heterosexual adults (39.1 percent versus 17.1 percent) to have used any illicit drug” in 2015, according to the NIDA.
In fact, these sexual minorities have had such high percentages of violence that specialized programs have been created to address the substance abuse that results from belonging to the LGBTQ community. From the moment these sexual minorities step out of the closet and face the real world, they’re inherently exposed to a world of depression, psychiatric disorders, suicidality, self-harm, and eating disorders that is only worsened by systemic drug abuse.
Compassion has no room for prejudice.
Prejudicial criticism is more contagious than the common flu virus. While I may not have any statistics to back that statement up, pausing for a moment and thinking about the last time you mentally or verbally criticized some stranger based on appearances should only take a couple seconds. A couple hours of exposure to the modern world will confirm this.
Many of us post heartfelt posts on our Instagram feeds saying how we should all accept each other and be kind, but how many hypocrites lie among us preaching something that they have never actually tried for themselves?
Realizing that your neighborhood addicts are nothing more than brothers and sisters with troubled pasts and years of neglect, either inflicted upon them or by them, is a step toward working to help them recover. This doesn’t mean they’re not at fault for their own addiction; they certainly are. However, there’s more than one malefactor here.
“There is a saying in Tibetan, ‘Tragedy should be utilized as a source of strength.’ No matter what sort of difficulties, how painful experience is, if we lose our hope, that’s our real disaster.” –Dalai Lama XIV
Addiction is a blazing fire that can only be tamed for a few moments before growing to newer, more intense heights each and every time you attempt to extinguish it. A horrendous example of this is crystal meth addiction. Meth works like no other drug in that it lasts much longer than cocaine, it takes longer for it to break down, and causes a much sharper increase in dopamine levels in the brain.
Unfortunately, the way this fire grows involves the infinite accumulation of new, random variables; every time doctors think they have almost contained the outbreak of one drug’s effects, another drug appears seemingly out of nowhere, leading to another epidemic.
Six years ago, the United States began to see a rise in the abuse of a newer drug, one that doesn’t hold its dealers accountable for abuse because it requires a prescription from a doctor: Synthetic Opioids. The U.S. government only has records dating back to 1999 for drugs involved in overdose deaths, but that doesn’t mean that these drugs haven’t existed for more than half a century.
In the case of fentanyl, a name you might instantly recognize due to the tragic deaths of music icons such as Mac Miller, Prince, and even Lil Peep, its discovery in the 1960s led to its use for surgery and other clinical situations.
Similar to other deadly opioids today, fentanyl started out with a rather innocent purpose but eventually became just another way to take the edge off and exit reality. Unfortunately, the word opioid doesn’t sound quite as terrifying as meth (at least not to my ears), but the statistics provided by the U.S. government should do a decent job of scaring you straight.
With an unbelievable death toll of 29,406 in 2017, opioids have made heroin (death toll of 15,958), cocaine (death toll of 14,556), and meth (death toll of 10,721) seem like a few rambunctious barking Chihuahuas within a pack of bloodthirsty wolves.
Even more repulsive is the rate at which opioid deaths have increased over the past six years. In 2013, there had only been around 3,000 deaths reported for use of synthetic opioids other than methadone. Luckily for potential future opioid addicts, the White House started a “Know the truth” anti-opioids campaign only five years, or about 30,000 deaths, after the beginning of this epidemic.
As an American, I have heard plenty of speeches in my lifetime about accepting and loving one’s neighbor and treating one another as brother and sister. However, I haven’t heard enough voices reminding one another that addicts deserve love, too.
Rather than expelling all addicts or cursing their names, maybe it would be more human and more justifiable to try to understand them so that we can grow to love them. Perhaps we shouldn’t accept their ways entirely, since pushing people to become better is always mutually beneficial, but instead we should probably accept that there were, more likely than not, a variety of circumstances that led them to struggle and fall further with each relapse, further into the deep-end.
Numbers to call in case of life-threatening emergencies:
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1–800–273-TALK
Help for Parents with Teen Drug Abuse and Intervention: 1–855–378–4373
Number to call for more information:
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration: 1-800–662-HELP
