While I was in the hospital my sponsor and I talked about painkillers. I told him I didn't want to take the Dialauded they were giving me. And the reason was because it was the closest to my drug of choice: heroin.
So he sat by my bedside and explained to me that there are other uses for painkillers besides getting high. That a lot of people use them to do what they were designed to, which was to kill pain. He said most addicts use drugs to cover up emotional pain, without realizing that there is a legitimate use for painkilling drugs. As a teenager I seemed to be living through a lot of emotional pain – whether it was self-created or not. Drugs always helped.
So anyway I had a talk with the staff of the hospital. They told me they would get something that wasn't quite so potent since I was afraid of becoming addicted again. They moved me down to something called oxycodone. And as the pain subsided I tapered off of those within a week or two,
And this comes up for me today because I read in this morning's edition of USA Today that the Surgeon General of the United States says that more than one in seven Americans will suffer from addiction to opioids or heroin.
The article went on to say that an American dies every 19 minutes from opioid or heroin overdose. And the economic impact of this abuse costs more than $442 billion each year – topping diabetes at $245 billion.
The article quoted him as saying "we have to recognize addiction is not evidence of a character flaw or moral failing. It's a chronic disease of the brain that deserves the same compassion that any other chronic illness does, like diabetes or heart disease."
"Our whole approach to substance abuse disorders is you go to jail," he said. It's the only illness for which you send people to jail, for long, long periods of time." According to this report, nearly 21 million Americans have trouble with substance addictions. That's more than the number of people who have all cancers combined.
There was a lot of truth in this article. Because I've met thousands of people in prison who were sent there simply because they were drug addicts – maybe for committing a small property crime so they could obtain the drugs they needed to feed their addiction.
Maybe a positive new trend is developing where our society views addiction as a disease rather than a crime.
