Losing a Family Member to Opioids

When we think about the opioid crisis do we see people who have lost their will? Do we see street addicts? Perhaps we see a man or woman trapped in chronic pain alone in their bed or slumped over their kitchen sink?

Whatever you may think of the opioid crisis as it has been called, it’s not captured in these images of lost will, addiction, individuals in back alleys or those who’ve overdosed in their home. It’s best captured when we turn to a wider network of questions.

I lost my older brother to oxycodone on July 2nd.

The police broke the news to me. My brother’s close friend tried to explain he did not know anything was wrong trying to get off the phone. His physician explained he recently cut back his dosage while tripping over this words. Everyone stuttered and tried to back away from responsibility. People had condolences but no one could explain why. 

We sometimes forget or I sometimes forgot that my brother and our separate lives were really one life by birth, one life by addiction, one life by loss. That is, the opioid crisis is not a problem of lone persons who couldn’t control themselves but failed institutional approaches to addiction, opioid treatment and failed compassion for those in chronic pain. It’s a wider societal problem. 

As a society we often punish people if they buy criminalized drugs while gladly enter a course of oxycodone. We shame those who use one kind of drug and then turn around and clinically encourage them to turn their lives into a life time of drug use, what’s commonly referred to as “treatment.” We miss the signals when such treatment has gone awry because we can find ourselves pharmaceutically saturated even when healthy.

To die of oxy to my mind is to kill a little piece of the social fabric that ties all of us together in which pharmaceutical marketing departments have attempted to take the place of a soothing hand, a kind word, a family bond, a grandchild or spouse rubbing our shoulders and caring for us in time of need. 

For millions of people it’s hard not to take oxy or another narcotic as the opioid receptors in our brain immediately light up like a light show and signal to us how immensely pleasant this sensation is, transmitting a feeling of well-being warming our bodies. It also mitigates debilitating and chronic pain from an unsuccessful spinal surgery as my brother was suffering from.

To claim we have an opioid crisis sounds hollow to me.

It sounds like another war on drugs that will hurt more people than it will help. Physicians will be increasingly sued, certain types of patients will be demonized or criminalized, and legitimate uses of such drugs will be made bureaucratically difficult and even shameful to acquire for those patients who legitimately benefit from their pain-reducing effects. 

An opioid crisis is not a war but a warning, it should signal a new level of care for our own lives that may frequently get away from us, lead us into disconnected, isolated, fixed-in-pill-form and highly routinized selves, lives most of us have experienced but often keep secret. 

On another level when someone dies of opioids they have confirmed just how pharmaceutically market-driven our choices as patients have become between ourselves in times of clinical need and ourselves in times of reliance upon the trusted advice of medical professionals, and times such professionals have been betrayed by their own unsound clinical judgment and betrayed by the companies who promised them magic efficacy.

If I was one of the manufacturers of oxy I would not be sleeping so well. As with the tobacco industry, such manufacturer’s and marketing firms have a problem and it’s my brother’s passing and all the other brothers and sisters mothers and fathers who have passed and may soon pass.