There can be a solution to the massive drug epidemic; treat their disease rather judging their 'choices'.
https://www.cbc.ca/news2/interactives/portugal-heroin-decriminalization/
Taipas is one of 40 publicly funded facilities across Portugal treating more than 4,000 addicts free of charge.
Elsewhere in the building, several patients taking an art therapy class are making ceramics, sculptures and paintings.
The clinic's walls are lined with their creations. Some depict damaged, angry souls struggling to escape their bodies.
Some depict damaged, angry souls struggling to escape their bodies. Here, they say"They treat us like sick people,
not criminals.
"Criminal people are not accepted in society. Here, we are accepted."
Portugal was once Europe's worst country for drug misery and deaths.
Now, it’s a public-health success story with a system that's been copied by its European neighbours.
In 1999, use of heroin, cocaine and other hard drugs was rampant. Approximately 100,000 Portuguese,
or one per cent of the population, reported an addiction to hard drugs.
A decade later, the number of addicts was halved and overdose deaths had dropped to just 30 a year
for the entire country. The number has remained steady ever since.
One thing I have been acutely aware of in watching the programs about addiction, is that what they
are typically trying to recover from are significant tragedies and abuses in the past. When are we as
a society going to own that? All due respect to those who claim they have been been damaged from
their past and still manage to ‘move beyond it’. I for one, don’t believe it.
I am reminded of a popular TV show of a few years back where the main doctor was himself an addict
[House]. Shame on them for trying to make us believe that all addicts don’t have to be ruined.
In that regard, I also have another recent experience to share. Recently my husband of 30 years
succumbed to cancer and that was a 5 year battle. What I don’t understand is the difference in such
cases, compared to the addicts. He was eventually put on fentanyl, in the form of patches during the
past 4 months.
The difference is that he didn’t become 'addicted' to the drug, but was merely dependent on it.
Typically it just caused him to sleep a lot and finally fall into a coma. I would offer that what I
saw was that in the long term it did affect his mental cognition, leading to both delirium and
confusion. In the same way that the brains of drug addicts are eventually affected in such terms.
For my husband, it was to provide relief from physical pain. For addicts, we tend to blame it on
‘emotional pain’ which seems much less damaging, in our judgmental estimations.