Opioid Addiction

I’ve been struggling to get through this article I have to read for school. It talks about the difference in media presentation between communities and the effects it has on them. After seeing a photo of a woman shooting up 3 pages in I couldn’t handle it. I had to take a step back, and I am now 2 weeks behind in school from not being able to handle it. I asked a friend if I could read the article to them as a way to hold myself accountable to get through it. He agreed and we got through the first half last night. I woke up at 6am this morning and decided I was going to finish the other half. I’m about 3 pages into the 9 pages I have left, and I’ve already cried. I’m extremely frustrated with this article because it’s clear the author hasn’t lived what she is writing about. She explains that when white people die from overdose the media represents them and their stories, while black and brown communities are only met with arrest reports or no coverage. There are many factors that play into this though. The articles she pulls to show how a community responds to a white persons overdose is making me sick. I cannot count the amount of friends I have lost to overdose on one hand. Behind the scenes of these articles are that people are lying. Every single one she has pulled talks about how they had great parents, and friends. That essentially nothing was wrong with their life’s, but that they just let drugs take over. First thing I have to say about this is that parents are not going to publicly say their marriage was falling apart, and they put their child in the middle of it. People aren’t going to say that girl was raped, and she didn’t know how to handle it. They aren’t going to tell the people their parent or sibling had an addiction, and wanted to understand. They also have no mention of what I’ve experienced.. Which is that the friends that were arrested are the only one’s left alive. That the one’s who died never received any help in their darkest hour. Another thing to mention is people who refuse to grieve the lose of their loved one publicly. It’s just so clear to me this author has no clue what it’s like to actually have this as their life. All they really have is statistics with too many variables to be accurate. We don’t have a drug problem. We have mental health crisis and a broken society.