I am so excited. While browsing through facebook groups I’d joined a while back (which generally get lost in the tangle of links and memories too large for me to organize) I checked into a closed group called TAP United, (the addicts parent–united) and there was a comment by Ryan Hampton, author of American Fix. This book is an excellent treatise from a lived-experience point of view on the hugeness of the opioid crisis, (not to mention the fabulously rich perpetrators who created then falsely advertised OxyContin). This drug was pushed into the medical practices of American doctors on the false premise that it was non-addictive due to its time-release coating. All hog wash. The drug is the instigator of 90% of people who are caught in the nightmare of opioid dependency today. Of course there are fine tuning issues about who gets the disorder and who doesn’t. But the fact is, the numbers of disordered usage are multiplying like out of control cancer cells. The epidemic is a terminal cancer that has killed 140,000 Americans, the majority being young Americans, in the last few years. Another generation is being wiped out. Our kids, our neighbors’ kids, our friend’s spouses, our parents and friends. It has to stop. Votes, believe it or not, can make a change. Let’s vote in 2020 for those with real plans to help end the slaughter.
Mr. Hampton, as one slogan and plan on WHAT TO DO, is mustering up an army of registrars with the goal to register 1,000,000 recovery votes by 2020. It’s a brilliant and direct action. I was an adult in the 80s and 90s when the country was facing AIDS. The first phase was to ignore it and blame gay men for their own demise. The cruelty was monumental; the interest in finding a cure or a good treatment plan from the top down, was minimal. It took noise and very brave voices. My beloved brother died peacefully at home, surrounded by family and friends with his kind and compassionate doctor nearby and on-call. He was 48. He had won a lottery pass to get the new protease inhibitor treatment, but it was too late. He was too far gone by the time the medicine that worked was available. If the nation had been more eager to do the research, my brother could have lived. WE need to get busy on what treatments work and how. Mr. Hampton has good ideas, based on his own determination to do something.
In the early days of HIV AIDS, ignorant people treated gay men with disgust and all kinds of hateful judgements, all over their faces and spewing from their thoughtless mouths. Much the same is happening right now, today, with the substance use disordered persons who are dying at a rate of one every four minutes in the United States. This has to stop and can be stopped and it will take a nation to slow down and cure and stop a national epidemic. At the rate we’re going, we will have lost 500,000 American lives to opioid overdoses. The number is roughly 50,000 per year, and every four minutes of my lousy typing, another American has died. From a lie. For corporate profit. Read Ryan Hampton’s book American Fix. Form some informed and intelligent opinions. Hampton documents all his assertions with fact-based research. It’s not too hard to count dead bodies. But it is hard to stop it from happening. Everyone needs to do something. Vote out non-providing representatives. We need much much more of the agreed upon care that is surfacing in various overwhelmed communities and proving itself effective.