My home state, specifically my home town of Huntington, WV, is known globally as a leader in heroin overdoses. Addiction has become a literal plague in that city. The state has run out of money to bury their dead. This time last year, every week a friend of mine from high school was laid to rest due to overdose.
Here in Broward County, heroin is not so much of a menace, Baruch Hashem, but addiction issues are a pandemic throughout the entire country. Much like the HIV pandemic of the early 1980s, an especially hard hit community for this disease is the LGBTQ community, and much like the medical community and the congressional community of the day, the medical, congressional, and law enforcement communities of today choose to ignore the seriousness and scope of the disease.
Despite great strides toward equality, the LGBTQ community is still a protected class because it is required. Social acceptance and “normalcy” are always harder fought battles than legal ones. Too many in our community are refugees of the wars in their homes, the battles fought with family members, friends, mentors and teachers, clergy, and political representation over simply being who they are. This lack of freedom of being, when combined with the ever-present issues of survival, drives many to escape and to try to recover the meaningful interpersonal relationships that were lost, all too often, finding both in the welcoming arms of substance abuse.
Just as the medical community has, with painful slowness, overcome the social paradigm restraints of seeing homosexuality as a mental defect, as a disease, they are now recognizing that substance abuse, specifically drug abuse, is as much a disease of the mind, deeply rooted in depression, as it is a physiological need. Sadly, just like in the early 1980s, few mental health professionals are willing to work with those affected. Here in Florida the number of addicted persons continues to rise as the number of psychiatrists and psychologists drops. Of those remaining, very few will see a patient with a drug abuse issue.
The law enforcement community, and the goals, procedures, and laws to which they conform, is even less sensitive and understanding. Greenwich Village police of the late 1960s, knowing that people with the supposed disease of homosexuality would be found in the bars breaking laws with unfair and unjust consequences, executed raids and locked up as many “criminals” as they could, driven largely by social and personal prejudices. The procedures of law enforcement today appear to target minorities and protected classes, groups established to have greater issues with the known disease of substance abuse, often for similar reasons of prejudice. It is not difficult to see that, since the Reagan administration’s war on drugs began, the goals of the laws and law enforcement was the removal of addicts from society and not treatment of individuals.
When a person has a heart attack or a stroke, emergency services are called. They respond and give the patient the medical attention needed in order to save their life and quality of their life as much as possible. Emergency response services do not seek out people with history or high risk of heart problems, hide in the shadows, and jump out to startle them in order to set up an emergency situation. Firemen who set fires to respond to are punished severely. How is it any more just for a law enforcement officer to target a vulnerable group of people and set up a crime?
Here in Florida we have a law on the books known as the Baker Act, the Florida Mental Health Act of 1971. This law allows for the involuntary institutionalization of persons that have a “possibility of mental illness” and “is a harm to self, harm to others, or self neglectful.” This law is almost exclusively used for the emergency mental treatment of those considering suicide. The specific wording of the law states that “substance abuse impairment” is not to be considered as a “mental illness.” This is an antiquated sentiment. Substance addiction is characterized by both physiological and psychological inability to abstain, a physical and mental disease. As something said to “take everything you are and everything you hope to be,” there is little dispute that users are self-neglectful and a harm to themselves.
The Baker Act is limited in its ability to help addicts primarily due to the restrictions of two things; Oppressive State and Federal drug laws that concentrate on elimination of addicts rather than the health and wellness of people, and a lack of mental health facilities and professionals trained to deal with a problem that is barely understood and recognized. Both of these obstacles can be overcome both locally and nationally by one thing, a shift in the social realization regarding people with the mental disease of drug addiction as persons rather than criminals.
The procedures under current laws, persons with drug abuse issues, caught merely using or possessing drugs, are incarcerated, and are housed with and treated the same as those arrested for theft and assault. This estranges the person even farther from family, friends, and society as a whole, often only serving to deepen the feelings of depression and a lack of self worth. No love, no caring, no compassion is given. No hope that things will be ok is given. If the intent is to instill a sense of guilt, it is poorly executed. If it is for punishment, punishment for what, being caught having a mental illness? Upon release, these persons are faced with mountains of legal debt, often with no means of paying it, as jobs are often lost and the ability to get any new job is greatly reduced.
A woman cannot be denied employment because she is, or could possibly become pregnant. A person cannot be denied employment because he/she has cancer, diabetes, a heart condition, HIV or even depression. A person cannot even be denied employment because he/she is an alcoholic. Why? Because medical conditions are a private and protected, personal thing under HIPPA. Arrest records are public, very public, as are proceedings and sentences. A drug abuse issue is rarely treated without intervention of the Strong Hand of the Law because the first thing that drugs do is convince a person that he/she does not have a problem. Even when a person sobers up enough to realize that he/she has a problem, the social stigma against being a drug addict is so strong that seeking help becomes as daunting as the addiction itself. Even the businesses that will hire a person with a felony drug conviction are less likely to do so if alternatives are given.
Persons with drug abuse arrests are frequently re-arrested, charged with further possession charges, and often with trafficking charges. All too often selling drugs is the best job a convicted felon can find, perpetuating the cycle.
There are trickle down crimes that have their origins in drug abuse, it’s true. Often communities that have a high drug abuse issue have more theft, more violence, but when your mental illness won’t let up its grip on you, when your legal bills pile up, when no one will hire you, when you are forced to live in underground social circles, what other options do you have than to steal, often violently, what you can for your survival, and your disease?
I, in no way shape or form, condone such behavior in anyone, regardless of their station. I merely pose the hypothetical to show that these crimes would also decrease if the root causes of drug addiction were addressed and those that suffer with it had their suffering recognized and treated with compassion and hope. צדק צדק תרדף “Justice, Justice shall you pursue.” Justice is not just crime and punishment but the treatment of everyone fairly and with compassion. There should be justice for those who have things stolen from them. There should be justice for those that are assaulted, and the families for those killed. There should also be justice for those that are compelled by depression and disease. The Law and the punishment should reflect the crime and the justice of the offended party.
