My experience of losing a friend to heroin (2020)
Good write up. The US is really grappling with diseases of despair, and heroin/fentanyl addition is on of the biggest ones impacting the wellbeing of our society. A massive slice of talent and raw human resource is just dying every year, but the solutions that have worked in other countries are just impossible to implement here due because the the methods that are known to work are politically dead on arrival.I'm a strong proponent of the US taking the approach the Swiss took to combat their opiate epidemic in the late 80s and early 90s. Anyone that is addicted to drugs can get the drugs they want, they just have to already be addicted first, and accept the drugs in a safe environment. It would be extraordinarily expensive, but cases like Jacks are already costing us much more than just giving him drugs, keeping him alive, then having healthcare professionals be there at exactly the moment he decides he's had enough. The effect on new users would be profound as well: as all the current users naturally age out of wanting to use hard drugs, the majority of drug dealers (other users themselves), won't have the capability to introduce new people to hard drugs.However, we seem to have this huge moral hang up in the US about giving addicts drugs, even though we know that will save lives and money by reducing crime and lowering overall healthcare costs. For all the money Jack's parents spent on rehab, and hours spent watching him, none of it could prevent them burying their son the day he got a bad bag of heroin. For a case like Jacks, only safe drugs and injection sites would keep him and the millions of people stable before they are ready to move on.The US is just not prepared to do what it takes to solve the opiate epidemic, and it's so frustrating to what tens of thousands of people die while we aren't anywhere near getting our act together. It's a Vietnam war in OD deaths, every year, and the Sacklers just walked with no criminal liability. Unless we do something drastic to reach these people, the opiate crisis is never going to go away.