Opinion: Notes From An Overdose Epidemic, In Memoriam of Danny L. and Elijah F.

As noted by Dan McGowan of WPRI 12 News Providence and other reporters, death due to opiate overdose is becoming a tragic problem in the Ocean State.  According to this collection of data from the Department of Health, 2014 saw 239 total deaths from such overdoses.

However, pure numbers fail to do justice to what has been defined as an epidemic by the DOH.  Already we have seen 91 deaths in 2015, according to this piece by the Boston Globe.  Behind each of these digits stands a family destroyed, a friend loss, a parent made absent.  The addition of a synthetic opiate called fentanyl has increased the potency and fatality of heroin here in Southern New England.
Today I went to the second memorial for someone I knew due to opiate overdose.  Last August, someone I knew at Rhode Island College was also made a statistic in this disaster.  Two memorials in less than one year is far too uncomfortable for any person, but especially when the two individuals were under the age of thirty.  To quote HAMLET:

Now cracks a noble heart. Good night sweet prince:
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

Rhode Island's substance abuse problems are not new fare, having previously been ranked for one of the highest concentrations for marijuana, cocaine, and binge drinking per capita population.  The state does not have a substance abuse problem as much as a recovery problem.  Detoxification centers are one of the major businesses in the state.  What is truly wrong is the dynamic and method we as a society not just encourage but sanctify as praxis.
Journalist Johann Hari has written in this story on Huffington Post and in his new book CHASING THE SCREAM: THE FIRST AND LAST DAYS OF THE WAR ON DRUGS that addiction has almost nothing to do with chemical hooks and everything to do with social standing.  He writes:

Professor Peter Cohen argues that human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. It's how we get our satisfaction. If we can't connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find -- the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe. He says we should stop talking about 'addiction' altogether, and instead call it 'bonding.' A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn't bond as fully with anything else…  [T]he opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection…  When I returned from my long journey, I looked at my ex-boyfriend, in withdrawal, trembling on my spare bed, and I thought about him differently. For a century now, we have been singing war songs about addicts. It occurred to me as I wiped his brow, we should have been singing love songs to them all along.

Here is Hari this past February on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman:

When I talked with people who were also familiar with these two drug deaths I knew of, what struck me was that both ended their short lives in extreme loneliness.  That is a painful life.  The need for an outlet, be it drugs, drink, or other vices, is powerful and obviously deadly.

So what do we need to do as a state?  There are some obvious steps to take:

• Encourage the abolition of our social stigma about addiction and replace it with a dynamic of empathy.
• Re-design our drug abuse prevention curriculums to create a better understanding of the user as an individual.
• End the Drug War and our Prohibition culture while re-directing the funds spent putting people in jail for being lonely towards programs based around this new socialization dynamic about addiction.

In the meantime, we must mourn those we lost and pray we might not loose others.  This is a long-winded, tedious, seemingly endless process.  But until we implement the aforementioned steps at the minimum, we will continue to loose people we love.