December 17 2012, one of my closest friends died from a heroin overdose. I’m still learning how to mourn her loss as so many of us are with so many people. Even in the midst of my own substance abuse problem with alcohol, I immediately began hyper-focusing on trying to understand heroin, addiction, and why it seemed like it was stealing people I love on a regular basis wether to use or to death. I learned a lot, one of them being that alcohol is more deadly than heroin.
It is February 22, 2021. The nature of my personality is to question everything and not stop devouring information until I find a “why” behind every single question I have (a blessing and a curse). The event of my friend’s death (and more that followed from other substances/mental health issues) combined with this facet of my being have had a few results. I have made my own choice to abstain from alcohol (in this piece when I say “drugs” alcohol is 100% included in that category), I have learned there are many things we can never find an answer for, and I have learned that some answers are quite obvious but we have been shrouded in fear perpetuated by people in power. Another choice I have made is to go back to college. This decision was made upon recognizing that we do not have a drug problem in this society, we have personal problems including but not limited to: ignorance (myself included). Personal problems that lead us to unsafe substance use because we have not received education or real information about drugs. We do not receive mental health education in this society either and we are constantly told contradicting things about what we “should” be by various people while we grow up. It is confusing and a recipe for continuous problems primarily stemming from our own ignorance.
The worst thing about all of it is that many many people in positions of power are aware of ALL of these things and continue to do nothing that would work towards a real solution. Real change is hard, especially when it is a result of mistakes you made personally. I know that first hand. I have had to come to terms with many mistakes I made, even if a lot of them seemed to be the right thing at the time. We do the best we can with the information we have at the time. I was ignorant about my own self and who I was as a person, which has led me to hurt a lot of people and myself throughout my life. Recovery from personal issues is challenging, but it’s worth it. I’m a better person for it and people around me in society have benefited from my own personal journey. My child will have a better understanding of who I am and in turn – who she is – as a result of my own personal recovery from what I had been conditioned to perform as. Alcohol was a side effect of this issue. Addiction recovery is powerful and the more educated we become on substances the more effectively we can help those struggling with addiction and reduce stigma so that more people are comfortable admitting their struggle.
Our country made a mistake, they’ve made many mistakes when it comes to drugs. We do have a problem and the drug problems we face are a side effect of the bigger problems. Blaming an inanimate object with no agenda for serious socio-economic issues is laughable. The people who have the power to control what information we receive about very powerful and sometimes dangerous inanimate objects are the ones who have the agenda. The people in charge need recovery, I do not advocate for 12-step recovery programs across all experiences, but the people who have the ability to make changes could benefit from following the steps.
Step 1 – admitting you’re powerless over power, control, money, and fear and the state of the society you supposedly care about has become unmanageable.
Step 2 – Come to believe a power greater than yourself can restore you to sanity – education and honest information.
Step 3 – Make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of a higher power – people who are educated on these issues and have real solutions for real problems and know more than you.
Step 4 – Make a searching and fearless moral inventory – this could take awhile, but realize this step is crucial for the public to see all the fallacies we have been led to believe about drugs.
Step 5 – Admit to those who can help make real change, to yourselves and others, the exact nature of that inventory and why you were wrong.
Step 6 – Become ready to have people who have solutions based on science, education, and factual information to school you on how to fix the problems we face.
Step 7 – Humbly ask those who know more than you and are not operating from a place of fear to help you understand how to remove those things you have ignorantly internalized so we can start saving lives.
Step 8 – Make a list of all persons you have harmed and become willing to make amends – here is the part where we get into actually changing things and you have to show your ass.
Step 9 – Make direct amends to these people unless it will harm them – this is the part where you publicly explain that everything we think we know about drugs is wrong and you had a part in contributing directly to the unnecessary deaths of far too many people. This is part where real change can begin. More people are being harmed currently by not doing this.
Step 10 – Continue to check yourself to make sure you are getting factual information and no longer operating from a place of fear. A fear that is literally killing people.
Step 11 – Seek to continue communication with those who know more than you on topics you don’t fully understand, and allow these people to guide you in the betterment of our society and less deaths as a result of ignorance.
Step 12 – Tell your fucking friends to do it too.
My friend who died in 2012 died because the people she was with were afraid of getting in trouble. She could have easily been saved had fear of criminalization not been a factor. Had she been saved perhaps that event would have been an experience on her journey that led her to understand herself more fully and not want to escape from herself so often. We use many things to escape from ourselves and we use many things to get to know ourselves better.
When I discovered the work that Dr. Carl L. Hart was doing a few years ago, I was floored, his work is a majorly huge reason I took the jump to go back to college. His courage to speak about the truths of these things is astounding and valuable. While I was, at times, uncomfortable with his suggestions, I know from my personal recovery that discomfort is where we realize the change is happening. I cannot stop leaning into discomfort and every time I do I grow, shed more fear, and see things more clearly. More people with his knowledge and expertise need to come forward and start talking about real change. His new book Drug Use for Grown-Ups Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear is a MUST READ for anyone who is trying to understand why we have people dying from these issues.
My goal is to help rehabilitate the minds of people in society to help us all become better versions of ourselves or perhaps get to know ourselves for the first time. As was the case for me, personally. The harmful effects of substance use begin to fall away when we begin to understand why we pushed ourselves into them, how they work in our brains, and where our personal limitations are. Make no mistake, I have an addictive personality, but now I understand more clearly why I do and what triggers those behaviors to come on and what substances I make the choice to stay away from because they are harmful to me. I will always choose to do self-awareness work because I want to minimize the stress factor happening inside my body from a physiological perspective. I strive for sound mental health which means understanding and educating myself on my own brain and what tools I can use to help and what things are not helpful.
Here is the bottom line: there are simple, effective, and developed tools to help combat deaths related to drug use. They are unavailable to the American public because of fear-based laws deeply rooted in racism that have now become pervasive and effect every single person in the USA. It is ridiculous that people who have the power to make these changes are walking around, scratching their heads, expressing sympathy, and acting like they’re “working on figuring out solutions” when people have been proposing solutions for YEARS about to save lives and people are regularly continuing to die unnecessarily EVERY DAY.
Drugs are not solely responsible for the deaths of those who have passed while using them. Policy, miseducation/ignorance, fear, and those who perpetuate it all are responsible for those deaths. It’s time to change and get our heads out of our asses acting like we don’t know how. I’m fucking beyond over it.
-roxii
Buy this book and learn more about this work here: https://drcarlhart.com/
roxii 
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