larkandkatydid:

venomanti:

venomanti:

weird how I became a much more compassionate and accepting person when I realised that drug addiction is the symptom of a problem and not the problem in itself

you also start to realise just how much the War On Drugs was actually a war against the poor, against survivors, against trans people, against sex workers, against the mentally ill and the disabled, against PoC, against queers, against the homeless. how much of it was a government manufactured ploy to sell violence against the marginalized as violence against addiction, as if addiction was not a symptom of systemic abuse.

I realize this a huge improvement over the broader cultural narrative
around addiction which is just that addicts make bad choices.  And I also realize that it’s a huge
improvement over the specific political and legal approach to addiction/harm
reduction now being set by Mike Pence. 

But I’m still bristling and pushing back against this
because it still is predicated on a “good addict”/ “bad addict” divide  where one’s compassion towards a person with
addiction is based on whether or not you think they have a “good enough excuse”
for their addiction.   My sister was born
in a stable, two-married-parents, upper middle class family, as were the group
of friends she started using heroin with.
Their primary “risk factors” for developing addiction were genetic.  My sister’s close friend died in 2006, and while
he was comatose on life support in the hospital his father, a successful
suburban lawyer, admitted to his family that he’d himself struggled with a long
time addiction to prescription medication.
Both father and son died the same week; the son after life support was
removed and the father from an unexpected stroke during withdrawal. My sister
died of an overdose in 2008; she had tuna sashimi in her stomach when the morgue
attendant opened her up.

And does this compassion hold up when you actually have an
addict in your own life? [the general ‘you’. i don’t know the life details of the person who wrote this post]  What if a
person fails to overcome their disease even after their political awakening?
What about when this person steals all your money or breaks into your house and
steals your shit or ‘borrows’ your car and has it ‘stolen’ by the drug dealer
they owed money to? What if the way that the addiction is working in their
brain messes with their ability to have steady human relationships because the
addiction demands that the person prioritize its needs above all others?  I ask this seriously because I think for a
lot of people, including me, in ways that it’s taking me a long time to
process,  have their theoretical ideas get
just pummeled by the way that addiction rips through families and communities.

People who experience addiction deserve compassion simply
because they are human beings afflicted with a terrible disease that causes
suffering and death on a mass scale and where we still have literally no
consistently effective treatments.   It doesn’t have to be a “symptom” of something
more real or important.