Tag: New York Times

"Times" Readers Share Stories Of Addiction & Recovery

New York Times readers shared their personal experiences with opioid addiction and recovery.

The opioid epidemic can be covered with statistics and numbers: the 72,000 Americans who died of drug overdoses in 2017 or the five-fold increase in babies born dependent on drugs.

However, that only captures some of the picture. To really grasp the effects of the opioid epidemic, The New York Times asked readers at the end of last year to share their experiences with addiction and recovery.

Charlotte, North Carolina resident Cindy Chandler, 64, reminded readers that the issue of drug addiction has been affecting families since long before it started getting press coverage. Her brother overdosed on heroin in 1997 at age 40.

“He took the entire family on psychological roller coaster rides throughout his life. We never knew when the phone rang from then on if it was the end for him,” Chandler wrote. “Turns out it took 28 more years of family torture.”

Some readers, including Michele Sevik, a 58-year-old from Vermont, described the initial euphoria that kept them coming back to opioids.

“It was like offering an emotional and social paraplegic a drug that would suddenly allow them to hop out of their wheelchairs and walk and run,” Sevik wrote. “Even knowing about addiction, even knowing about HIV, it was irresistible.”

Stephen DePasque, a 35-year-old from Pennsylvania, was more productive than he had ever been when he started using opioids, but the new energy was short lived.

“Before long, the upkeep of my back-pocket superpower took the top spot on my priority list,” he wrote.

St. Louis resident Heather Hudson, 27, found that even facing the heartbreak of addiction head on wasn’t enough to make her stop using.

“At age 26, my little brother and I found our big brother dead on the floor from an accidental fentanyl overdose. I actually took the rest of his dope and did it in a McDonald’s bathroom while the coroner was loading him into a van,” she wrote. “As sick and twisted as that is. But that’s addiction. Sick and twisted. It’s like being in an endless tunnel. You can see the light at the end, but you never feel like you’ll reach it.”

Despite the heavy answers, some readers wrote in to share hope for recovery.

“Recovery is not an exact science, or a recipe that can be applied to different people in different ways. But many of us do recover,” wrote Katharine, a 29-year-old from Philadelphia. “I wish I knew the answer to this current crisis. All I can do is keep my hand open and available to the next person who may need help.”

View the original article at thefix.com

14 January 2019
New York Times Apologizes For "Demonizing" Moms With Crack Addiction

In their apology, the Times’ editorial board acknowledged the negative impact of their stigmatizing coverage of black mothers with crack addiction during the crack epidemic.

When Suzanne Sellers gave birth to her son in 1995, she tested positive for drugs, having become addicted to the crack cocaine that was an epidemic in poor black communities. Despite getting clean, Sellers was coerced into signing away her parental rights, she said.

“I had been sober for over two years at the time I was coerced to sign away my parental rights, despite numerous accomplishments and evidence of a rehabilitated life,” Sellers wrote in an opinion column for The New York Times. “Being black was used against me. Yet there were other factors that compounded the racism and unjust treatment, including my being a woman who was poor, with an unstable living situation, unmarried and, of course, a drug user.”

Sellers was writing about her experience after being featured in an opinion piece in which the Times’ editorial board detailed the ways that the coverage of mothers addicted to cocaine —particularly crack cocaine — contributed to the erosion of a woman’s right to choose and stigmatized a generation of mostly black babies born to mothers who were using drugs.

“Americans were told on the nightly news that crack exposure in the womb destroyed the unique brain functions that distinguish human beings from animals — an observation that no one had ever connected to the chemically identical powdered form of the drug that affluent whites were shoveling up their noses,” the editorial board wrote.

“News organizations shoulder much of the blame for the moral panic that cast mothers with crack addictions as irretrievably depraved and the worst enemies of their children,” the board wrote. “The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and others further demonized black women ‘addicts’ by wrongly reporting that they were giving birth to a generation of neurologically damaged children who were less than fully human and who would bankrupt the schools and social service agencies once they came of age.”

Sellers said that the paper’s recognition of the dangers of this type of coverage was appreciated.

“I want to thank The New York Times for its apology for how it demonized mothers like me,” Sellers wrote. “The apology is welcomed, and it gives me hope.”

Sellers called on society to do better today, especially in regards to dealing with mothers and children affected by opioid addiction.

“In 2019, no longer should weak science, poorly informed crusaders and racist attitudes continue to shape public policy,” she wrote.

“American citizens, including drug users, have rights. My rights were violated numerous times during my child welfare case, and my family was wrongfully torn apart. When families are wrongfully torn apart, the results are devastating. When the fundamental relationship of every human being — the relationship of a child with his or her mother — is severed, the effects can be irreversible.”

Today, Sellers has resumed contact with both her children, who are now adults. She leads her own consulting firm and a nonprofit, Families Organizing for Child Welfare Justice, and is a homeowner with three master’s degrees.

“I list my accomplishments not to ‘toot my own horn’ but to show that people can and do recover from drug addiction,” she wrote.

View the original article at thefix.com

10 January 2019
New York Times Op-Ed Slams "Incompetent" DEA Over Opioid Crisis

The writers of a scathing op-ed believe the federal agency “deserves much of the blame” for opioid-related deaths.

A recent op-ed in the New York Times does not mince words in its critique of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). “Because of its incompetence, the opioid crisis has gone from bad to worse. The solution: overhauling the agency, or even getting rid of it entirely,” write Leo Beletsky and Jeremiah Goulka in the Sept. 17 opinion piece.

Rather than pointing to pharmaceutical drug makers or drug cartels, Beletsky and Goulka—of Northeastern University’s Health in Justice Action Lab—say the DEA “deserves much of the blame” for rising opioid-related deaths. This summer, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated that more than 72,000 Americans died of a drug overdose in 2017—with opioids accounting for more than 49,000 of the deaths.

The federal agency’s response to rising opioid abuse in the United States did little to mitigate the growing epidemic, the authors write. While the DEA has the authority to establish “non-enforcement programs aimed at reducing the availability” of illicit drugs—e.g. expanding evidence-based treatment from a public health perspective—instead, in its decades-long existence, the agency has opted to ramp up the enforcement side of its mandate.

“Instead the agency pushed for surveillance of prescription records and electronic communication, doubled down on prosecuting prescribers and helped to tighten the screws on patients seeking pain relief,” reads the op-ed.

The agency’s enforcement-heavy response to painkiller abuse only pushed people to seek illicit substitutes like heroin and counterfeit pills, and to encourage drug traffickers to “create more compact, potent drugs” like fentanyl.

This resulted in more deaths as well as the spread of HIV and hepatitis (from sharing needles), while access to evidence-based treatment for drug use disorder, like methadone, saw little improvement.

Not only is the DEA accused of employing tactics that have “fueled the opioid crisis,” in the 40-plus years since it was established under the administration of former President Richard Nixon (the man who declared drugs “Public Enemy Number 1”) the agency’s approach has had a harmful effect on community policing, and it has earned a reputation for botched operations at home and abroad in its tireless campaign to hunt down illicit drug suppliers. (The agency has the largest foreign presence of any U.S. federal law enforcement agency, according to its 2018 Budget Request.)

“It has eroded civil liberties through the expansion of warrantless surveillance, and overseen arbitrary seizures of billions of dollars of private property without any clear connection to drug-related crimes,” write Beletsky and Goulka.

And in the DEA’s long history, “these actions have disproportionately targeted people of color, contributing to disparities in mass incarceration, confiscated property, and collective trauma.”

By taking Nixon’s “War on Drugs” a bit too literally, the DEA’s focus on the law enforcement side of its mandate has done nothing to reduce the amount of drugs consumed by Americans. “The agency was supposed to curb problematic drug use, but failed to do so because its tactics were never informed by public health or addiction science,” write Beletsky and Goulka.

The authors of the op-ed offer a solution: reinvent the DEA “from the bottom up.” One way to do this is to transfer regulatory authority over the pharmaceutical supply to the Food and Drug Administration.

Currently the DEA is in charge of how controlled substances are classified, produced and distributed. (For example, under the DEA, marijuana is classified as a Schedule I drug, which are considered the most dangerous, alongside heroin and LSD.)

Some of its law enforcement efforts can be transferred to the FBI or local authorities, or eliminated altogether, the authors suggest.

And a “significant portion” of the DEA’s budget should go to life-saving measures like access to high-quality treatment. The agency requested a budget of $2.16 billion for fiscal year 2018, a $77 million increase from the year prior.

According to the authors, the agency is an emblem of the failure of Nixon’s “War on Drugs” and the failure of the federal government to make significant progress in reducing drug abuse in the United States.

Forty-seven years after Nixon declared a “War on Drugs,” the authors say it’s time to “urgently rethink how our nation regulates drugs.”

View the original article at thefix.com

21 September 2018