Just last week here in a desirable suburb of my hometown, 4 children overslept. When they realized their parents hadn’t woken them for school, one of the kids went to check on them. She found her two parents, both professionals in their 30s, dead of a drug overdose. The poem about drugs details what it’s like to be affected by addiction.
The opioid crisis is not just in our inner cities, my friends. It’s in our “nice” suburban neighborhoods, and soon it could be in our homes. In our lives, in our children’s lives. You see, so many nice, responsible parents like you and me are getting addicted to opioids after surgery or a painful accident. Dependency turns to desperation, to a need to feel the “normal” our brains have been altered to expect, to seek out more dangerous means of getting high.