Being a Wisconsin native, the nation’s opioid epidemic seems to hit closer and closer to home as more people and areas of the state become drug-ridden. People I used to know are now strangers to me but friends with dope, and places I used to go are now run down, swallowed up by abusers and poverty.
Recently, I read an article in The Capital Times called, “The Heroin Blues: a story about love, addiction and loss,” by Nathan J Comp. I understood the heroin epidemic on the surface, in the ways that it affected me, but never had I looked inside the individual struggle of a casual, day-to-day abuser. The article didn’t paint dope or dope abusers in a bad light. The people in the article were not homeless or poor and covered in sores, they were normal, just like you and me. They were people with jobs, careers, a hope for the future. They didn’t use heroin every second of every day, but once a day, or a couple times a week. The people in the article were the kind of people whose abuse isn’t severe or interesting enough to make the nightly news. However, they intrigued me and showed me the darkest side of the opioid epidemic no one gets to see.
The article began with Comp and his then-girlfriend, Sarah, living in New Mexico and witnessing their first “fall out,” (a term often used amongst abusers for someone who’s overdosed and needs to be revived.) Comp recalls the experience in a chillingly calm way and as the article progresses, experiencing a “fall out” begins to feel like a normal experience. In fact, Comp’s relaxed recollection of his experiences while abusing made me almost forget he was using a hard, illegal drug. There were plenty of nights in college I saw my friends passed out from drinking, or so high they couldn’t get off the couch and I never thought twice about it. When Comp would describe the people who had overdosed, it eerily reminded me of my friends’ drug usage, and made me wonder, were they really that different? After all, Comp and Sarah had degrees and careers. They felt as though they had their addiction under control, just as my friends do. I’m sure Comp and Sarah never expected to be the ones falling out, just as my friends don’t expect to end up alcoholics.
The article chilled me, but not in the way I had expected. I expected to hear about the gross people, worn to the bone, dying to get a fix. I expected to read that Comp and Sarah went off the deep end and lost everything. What I never expected, and what chilled me the most, was how familiar he made heroin feel. You grow up believing drugs are this horrible thing only done by horrible people until one day its your friends, your family, who are the ones using.
Comp never tried to stop Sarah from using in the same way that I never stop my friends from drinking or smoking. However, Sarah died. Sarah dies in the end of the article after her and Comp agree to quit together. None of my friends have died but night after night we swear to stop juuling and cut down on the drinking. Yet, we never do. Who will it be next and what substance will it be next? That question is what makes this article timeless. It doesn’t matter if it’s heroin, meth, marijuana, cocaine, alcohol or pills. What matters is that when you take any drug, no matter what it is, it takes a part of you until it’s taken all of you. I witness it everyday in my hometown of northern Wisconsin, in the run-down towns, the failing school systems, and the broken families.
Addiction is not as foreign as we think it is when we learn about it in school or see it on the news. It’s all around us, everyday, in the form of our friends, our families, and our weekends at the bar. Most addicts don’t stick out, that’s why it’s an epidemic that’s impossible to stop, and after reading this article, I walk through the world around me with a different perspective I didn’t know I needed.
The Greenhorn 