Our Views

Back in the day, when I took drugs, I’d been using daily for about four years before I even met anyone addicted to heroin. I didn’t lead a sheltered life: I look everything around: marijuana, MDA, LSD, and a myriad of others. Was even shooting up meth. But there were simply not many heroin addicts around. It never occurred to me to get off drugs, and I never considered drug detox or rehab. Drugs were a way of life for me, and for just about everyone I knew. But they didn’t take heroin.

One day I walked into the house of a heroin addict who was also a dealer. She offered it to me. There was such a stigma attached to heroin – everything else was ‘recreational’, heroin was hard, heroin was for drug addicts - that even after taking everything else for four years, I hesitated. But I accepted, and began the short route to a new and different kind of hell.

Today, decades later, 124 million prescriptions are written every year for prescription painkillers that are the equivalent of heroin. Enough to get over 40 percent of the U.S. population started. And the heroin addicts that were so taboo are now taking “legal heroin” and living right next door, and two doors down, and five doors down, and across the street, and there are probably two or three in the next block – in my nice, middle-class neighborhood in a sleepy southern town. And there probably aren’t enough drug detox centers in the U.S. to help them.

How did it come to this? Some will say it’s advances in medical science but, in my opinion, greed is the culprit: A greedy industry that cares more about profits than people. An industry that is fuelling prescription drug addiction more than any pusher in the street ever did.

Popularity: 12% [?]