When Brooklyn, NY was being ravaged by Heroin in the 1970’s and black men were dropping dead at home and in Vietnam, not a lot was said. Then when crack was introduced to the urban streets, the subtle genocide against young black males in the US was raging again—and when all that failed to cut the Nubian root down, well, the antidote to urban renewal became mass incarceration.
It feels like sand stuck in my bathing suit to know that white kids dying of this overdose thing is the thang that is finally asking people to pay attention—that, and the suburban morgues are over-filling, but the truth is that once any deadly or toxic thing scourges a population of people with money to spend on “curing disease,” the issue gains the substantial enough revenue to build prevention, connection, eradication.
Until now, the response of affluent or “educated” families whose children who have become hooked on a drug that will quickly or slowly kill them is something of a paradoxical phenomenon—not one truly significant move has been made to cure the affliction, but hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent to rehabilitate an under-researched condition, based on the conviction that there is no cure for addiction. Because we have built a school system, a conspicuous consumerism rooted in environmental degradation, and therefore, an economy that profits on the sickness and incarceration of the truly most gifted, we have raised a whole generation of rehabilitated zombies who believe that leaders show up well lit and backed by a green screen.
I never had to touch the heart-stopping killer drugs to nearly die of love for the uncured addict who thinks he is rehabilitated. Twice I did this for romance, and two dozen times for women, otherwise, whose families can't get this one--there is nothing shameful about Heroin, Cocaine, Meth, Ketamine, Benzodiazepine, or Nicotine abuse or addiction. These are big time medicines--and because your children do not know what they are taking, they took a thing that hooked them. If they are alive and clean even one day, your children are miracles. You are miracles for never giving up on them, but the cure is still very far away. And the cure happens again and again every day. It is free; there is no money that can pay for the kind of revision of life that must follow chronic abuse and addiction.
Here’s the truth—there is a cure for everything. But nothing can be saved—not even your own life. The opposite of life is not death, but we won’t live this way forever. The only opponent to LIFE is human thinking—and mostly the thinking that we can “save” anything, each other, ourselves. We must question everything, and in doing this, we connect with everything, and it’s likely that if you find out what happens to your brain and your body after prolonged use of drugs you never really learned about, you probably won’t die of a drug overdose, or anything other than good health. But here’s also the truth, the nasty shit, the drugs, the addictions, the mental afflictions, aren’t coming off the streets; they hang out in your living room, between the sheets. Unconditional love is the only way towards getting clean. The only bad neighborhood we build is in the brain. And escaping that hood is a one day at a time thang--no rehab can take you out, or keep you out, of a place that wants you dead, by charging 28k for a bed and some yoga therapy. Save your money and measure your own success in taking 12 or 1200 or 12,000 steps towards the cure--but anyone who tells us that we have to pay someone else other than a farmer for our good health?--Well, that's the disease we're all sick with.