Heroin is all over the news, ravaging our region and destroying families, leaving sadness, strife and desperation in its wake.
Most mornings I look at my Twitter feed so I can read up on the day’s events. Every day I read numerous articles about heroin and overdoses.
Every day I read about crime prevention and the “next-best” method to “round up” drug users. I read about punishment a lot. I read about being “tough on crime.” Sometimes I even read about rehabilitation for prisoners while they are incarcerated.
Concurrently, heroin is the talking point of many political campaigns in Hamilton County, most notably in the sheriff’s race and the county commissioners’ race.
But I rarely ever read about the real issue. I rarely read about what causes people to turn to heroin. I rarely read about real prevention.
I rarely read about poverty and its alleviation in regard to heroin. I certainly hardly ever hear about this in the context of a political campaign. And I never read about the deep, systemic and cyclical dynamics that keep people poor in Cincinnati.
Duke University engaged in a study not too long ago that sought to uncover if there was any connection between poverty and addiction.
It found that children raised in “economically stressed” environments had a higher likelihood of substance abuse, partly because of poverty’s negative impact on self-control.
As our society attempts to understand addiction, numerous studies are now discovering that addiction is created, not a de facto state.
What researchers are finding is that social exclusion is the highest contributor to the behaviors that lead to addiction. Which means that children who grow up in environments that continually remind them that no one outside their immediate circles cares for them are more prone to engage in risky behavior.
One of these behaviors, as we see in the news every day now, is heroin use. And heroin is extremely addictive.
In my line of work, I see and hear about the destructive nature of heroin every single day.
I also see and hear the ignorance of a society that wishes it could boil down every complex issue into a meme or sound byte.
Heroin use is not the result of faulty morals. Heroin use is the byproduct of a society that devalues human life if it is economically poor.
It is the byproduct of a society that excludes poor people from the table of equity. Addicts and heroin users are byproducts of a society that values money and things more than humans and equality.
Heroin users are people, and they are our responsibility.
These situations have gotten so dire that none of us are very far removed from the struggles of addiction. I know that I hear the sadness of family members who have lost loved ones.
I see people standing outside the needle exchange clinic. I hear of the disoriented man outside my friends’ house and the conversations he had with her before she got him help.
I listen to stories from my friend, a Cincinnati police officer, who calls me to decompress after running out of Narcan after only a few hours into his shift, and I chat with the mother whose daughter overdosed and whose children she now raises as her own.
I also hear people demonize heroin use and claim there is “something wrong” with those doing it.
But I see these issues in a broader context — a cycle of desperation. Poverty breeds desperation and exclusion, which breeds drug use and risky behavior, which often breeds crime, which breeds incarceration, which breeds poverty.
And on and on it goes.
The solutions aren’t going to come easily, but there are steps within this cycle where those engulfed in it could be pulled out.
Alleviating poverty, funding great public schools and increasing our affordable housing stock would all help.
We can rehabilitate all the prisoners we want while they are in the “care” of the penal system, but when they leave jail they are thrown right back into the environment that bred their desperation in the first place.
They are thrown right back into exclusion.
There are minor victories here and there. But, ultimately, when someone is surrounded by an environment that promotes and perpetuates desperation, he/she will fall back into a familiar routine.
In many cases, people who turn to drugs or criminal activity are desperate, living in a world that is very different from the average Cincinnatian’s. When people see that their hopes and dreams never amount to anything, they grow despondent.
When this happens, sometimes people self-medicate, sometimes people find harmful ways to make money and sometimes people do both.
Yes, sometimes people just make bad decisions, but this is an oversimplification of how humans operate. Most people don’t make the conscious decision to use heroin when they have their basic needs met. It just doesn’t happen.
Further, when people get involved with heroin (or overdose and die), children are hurt in the process. Families are hurt in the process. We are all hurt in the process.
Our inability to take significant steps toward poverty alleviation is why heroin is literally killing our region.
Promoting healthy behavior and investing in children will take a long time.
What can we do sooner? End the failed “war on drugs” and invest in treatment. Presently, only those in prison and very wealthy people can even access treatment. That’s a pretty terrible indictment of our priorities as a society.
Let’s combat heroin by addressing the root issue.
Let’s invest in children and in neighborhoods.
And, please, let’s stop demonizing the user and the poor — it doesn’t look good on us as human beings.
EDITOR’S NOTE: CityBeat has invited three local activists to write monthly columns on pressing issues facing Cincinnati. Mike Moroski is the executive director of UpSpring, a nonprofit working to keep children experiencing homelessness connected to their education. He is also a trustee on the Southwestern Ohio Workforce Investment Board (Youth Employment Subcommittee), a member of Cincinnati’s Human Services Advisory Committee (Homelessness Prevention Subcommittee) and a member of Mayor John Cranley’s Hand Up Steering Committee. Additionally, Moroski serves as a trustee on the board of Invest in Neighborhoods and is currently the vice president of the Sedamsville Community Development Corporation. He is also an executive committee member of the Hamilton County Democratic Party. Moroski’s self-described passion is fighting poverty and injustice — namely, the systems that keep people poor and society unjust. His columns will appear in CityBeat the first week of each month.
This article appears in Oct 5-12, 2016.