|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
By Aleksandra Hurka
Run. Not a word, but a feeling that instinctively floods my mind every time I smell the smoke, see the white powder, taste the irrational fear. To run doesn’t have to be fast or slow, just somewhere far away from the “criminality” of drugs. The question is, how many lives have been lost for every time I ran with that fearful mindset?
According to SF.gov, 192 people in the Bay Area died from unintentional opioid overdose in the first three months of this year.
One hundred and ninety two. A number. That’s the way I would’ve seen this data three years ago. Simply a statistic.
But what happens when we see a death toll as only a statistic, diminishing lives to numbers?
I’ve been told by many people in my life to “stay away” from the drugs, the substances, and most importantly to choose friends who are clean. I’ve stayed so far away from the drug environment that suddenly every person I’ve known who may have been abusing substances has been pushed out of my life.
Every breath I sucked in right before walking into the girls bathroom at school, preparing for the smell of a vape to enter my nostrils was a silent bias that I never exhaled.
For years, I haven’t been able to confront the inner stigma that fueled the fear and anger in my chest morphing into a lump of anxiety that I tried to shove down each time I saw a bottle of alcohol, a syringe, a cigarette.
Don’t be an addict. Don’t be an addict…
Over the past three years, the existence of deaths by overdose hasn’t changed, but my perspective has. Every person that I pushed out of my life for abusing substances was a struggle against addiction that didn’t get resolved.
Stigma was a parasite that embedded bias not only in my mind, but also in the minds of many others in our society.
How many people struggling with addiction didn’t seek help because they lacked support?
According to the Center of Disease Control and Prevention’s Stigma Reduction, in 2022, 54.6 million people needed substance use treatment, but only 13.1 million received treatment.
The side eye, the hard swallow and the set lips reflect an unspoken opinion toward someone going through a battle, producing feelings of guilt, which is not a solution.
The irrational fear some feel toward these fellow human beings needs to transform into rational thought, so people who haven’t experienced addiction can still contribute to helping those who have.
To all the parents and friends of people struggling with addiction, vulnerability can be powerful when it comes to expressing the underlying anxieties. Cultivating a supportive environment without judgment is a step toward closing the distance between us and our loved ones who are struggling.
Letting go of stigma and biases is a process. It’s a process that required me to stop running away from the problem and my fear of addiction when I realized that it’s what contributes to the issue of substance abuse.
To stop running is to start realizing that there never was a place to run away from this issue, only to confront it by providing support for people who need it.
This article was written as part of a program to educate youth and others about Alameda County’s opioid crisis, prevention and treatment options. The program is funded by the Alameda County Behavioral Health Department and the grant is administered by Three Valleys Community Foundation.
