Untreated opiate addiction a killer
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Editor,
“More Americans die of suicide than car crashes,” May 2; “Mortality and Morbidity Reports,” CDC, “This may stem from the economic downturn.” The New York Times adds, “another factor may be widespread availability of opioid drugs like oxycodone.” A 2011 study by SAMHSA showed an increase, between 2005 and 2009, of 210 percent in women trying to kill themselves with oxycodone (Percocet) and 67 percent with hydrocodone (Lortab). Opioid addiction is the most lethal of all addictions, finds the Center for Addiction and Mental Health. Untreated opioid addicts are 5.7 times more likely to die than healthy individuals, worse than second-place meth, then alcohol. From “Exit Strategy” in “The Fix - Alcohol, Addiction and Recovery News,” “There is something closed off and final about opiates. They contract consciousness to the point where all other objects are only facets of themselves. They don’t call them painkillers for nothing. And a lot of troubled women know it.”
If we are underlings who accept suicide, “sequester,” out-of-control “tabs” and “oxys” and lack of addiction treatment, it is not because it is in our stars. Rather, there need be no end ever to our expanded grasp of right action. “Love changes your mind” by improving brain chemistry, through “lovingkindness practice” carrying grace of right thought and right effort. It is individually what each of us needs to want to stay alive, say having the treatment you need to be able to keep your job to support your family, or have back a mind that allows you to focus on your love for your children, not like what pills do to you, as childhood emotional deprivation did to Emily Dickinson, “It would have starved a gnat, to live as small as I, and yet I was a living child with food’s necessity upon me like a claw. I could no more remove than I could coax a leech away or make a dragon move;” and she wishes she, like him, were able to smash into a window pane and “gad my little being out and not begin again.” Yes to Shakespeare’s “Tired with all these, from these I would be gone; save that, to die, I leave my love alone.”
Ken Cairns
Polson
