Overdose Awareness Day Should Be EVERY Day
This past week marked the 16th annual Overdose Awareness Day. Rallies were held all over the country as friends and families remembered loved ones lost to addiction. Communities came together for candlelight vigils, drug education, and support to raise awareness of the current opiate crisis.
It’s no secret the drug epidemic is not only here, but it’s growing. More and more families are affected by drug abuse than ever before and it’s unfortunate we must dedicate one day a year to pay tribute to those who have died to bring awareness to the fact that heroin, fentanyl and other drugs have infiltrated nearly every community throughout the U.S. and are killing addicts every day. Too many families bury their children; children in reversed roles and wind up taking care of addicted parents…the scene today is grim.
A staggering figure is between 1999 and 2002, drug overdose deaths rose above the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War, nearly 47,000. Currently, we’re losing that many people every year to overdoses. As of 2013, more Americans died from drug overdoses than from World War I and World War II combined. If this trend continues, by 2021, there will be more Americans who will have died from overdoses than from every major U.S. war put together.
That’s insanity!
If this is the current rate, why is there only one day each year to bring awareness about overdoses? Every day should be overdose awareness day. Because every day addicts are dying. Because every day a family finds out what it’s like to bury their child. Because every day a child must bury their parent.
Because addiction happens every day.
Addiction doesn’t take a break and addiction doesn’t just magically go away. We, as a society, created this problem. We are the ones to blame for this. Sure, the pharmaceutical companies didn’t make matters any easier by marketing their highly-addictive drugs to doctors, who in turn, over-prescribed them to the masses. But we really need to look at our responsibility in creating this epidemic. It’s easy to sit back and put the blame on the drug manufacturers, the doctors, the “pill mills,” and the synthetic drugs imported into the country, but the fact of the matter is we are the ones taking the drugs. We are the ones making a conscious decision to put a chemical in our bodies that we may very well know will destroy us.
Why do we do this?
Society has evolved to the point where it has become a social norm to not confront our problems and numb everything out so we don’t have to feel. We have put chemical blinders on ourselves to shelter us from the true reality of what we’ve become. We are in a prison of our own creation. We like the easy way out of our issues and if we maintain the viewpoint we don’t really have to deal with anything because the drugs will deal with it for us, albeit temporarily, one-day mankind might cease to exist.
It might not be weapons of mass destruction that take out humanity for good. It might be the benign-looking pills in our medicine cabinets.
Sources Used:
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/04/19/drug-overdose-deaths-surpass-war/22045058/
