Whether you want to deal with it or not, drug addiction is endemic in America and large portions of the world.
If you ignore it, you will pay for it through crime, collapsed healthcare, and end of life services. The public pays for potter’s fields and the costs of internment there.
If you lock up all the addicts and dealers you will pay for it by supporting them. The public pays the cost of housing and feeding prisoners.
If you go after drug companies that have contributed to it you endanger all the people who depend on their manufacture of other therapeutics for their health and/or lives. You will pay for it by lost family and friends, maybe your own life. There are other costs involved here that fall on society.
If you go after the cartels we pay the cost with American military personnel and expenditures, the cost of devastating neighbor nations, and drug violence will spill onto our streets anyway.
So let’s not kid ourselves. We’re already paying for it. We’re paying out the nose for it. Be mad about it all you want, your hysterics and rage won’t change things.
It angers me too. I’d rather have a quieter life, quite frankly, than having to deal with the fallout of other people’s addictions. I’d rather have one less worry in regards to my child and keeping her safe. We are all touched by drugs in this country. I watched my own cousin be put in the ground at 19 years old, his future erased and his family shattered, because he got hit by someone driving high. You don’t have to have ever touched the stuff for it to have impacted your life. Forever. So don’t talk to me like I’m stupid to want to pay for needles and other programs. Not when I put dirt on my cousin’s grave and held his mother while she sobbed. Not when my family has already paid the price of doing nothing with blood, our blood.
There’s not going to be a quick an easy fix. Providing needles may be a bandaid on a bigger problem, but I’d gladly buy someone that bandaid if it would bring my cousin back. I can’t bring my cousin back, but maybe I can help someone from losing their family member.
Providing needles is a stop gap to prevent addicts from causing other health problems that will also cost the public money. Huge sums of money. You’re also nuts if you think devastating needle born diseases stay in the drug addict community, just like it’s a mistaken impression to think that DUI drivers only kill themselves or other DUI drivers. They don’t.
If you’ve got better solutions that are equitable, effective, and economical, I’m all ears. Lord knows, we need them. Until then, take your 5¢ rage and shove it up your rear. Because you don’t “understand” this problem anywhere near as much as you think you do. Until you’ve tossed handfuls of dirt from the fallout of it, show some damned respect.
