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Heroin, that most dangerous of dangerous drugs, has made a roaring comeback—breaking out of the inner cities and into working- and middle-class communities, tearing apart families and destroying young peoples’ lives.
As outlined in a harrowing New York Times article last week, Staten Island—the most middle-class bastion of New York’s five boroughs—is in the midst of a heroin epidemic.
In 2012, according to statistics in the Times article, there were 36 deaths from heroin overdoses on Staten Island, a rate higher than any of the other four boroughs have seen in at least 10 years. The amount of heroin seized by police on Staten Island grew more than 300 percent between 2011 and 2013. Treatment programs are overflowing, and support groups for families—like one held at a meeting room in Our Lady Star of the Sea parish—are mushrooming.
Last month, nearly all Staten Island police and emergency medical workers were authorized to carry naloxone, a drug to counteract heroin overdoses.
Said the director of a treatment facility with many Staten Island clients: “You’ve got kids falling apart. You’ve got families falling apart.”
Indeed. There is probably nothing more heartbreaking for a family than to see a promising young person—the classic “good kid” from a stable, church-going family—losing his or her soul to a powerful evil force.
These beautiful young people, in the blink of an eye, become virtually unrecognizable. They lie, they steal, and they snort or inject poison into their very lifeblood in search of a quick thrill. It’s an act of self-destruction that just might kill them on the spot from an overdose, or cause years of suffering later from hepatitis or AIDS or imprisonment. And even if none of that happens, it destroys their God-given free will. They are, without help, helpless to stop.
Staten Island, of course, is far from the only community facing a heroin scourge.
Much of the country was surprised in January, for example, when Gov. Peter Shumlin of bucolic Vermont devoted his entire State of the State address to the “full-blown heroin crisis” besetting his state.
But the sheer enormity of the problem, and the intractable nature of addiction, does not mean we should throw up our hands in defeat.
We must first, as Gov. Shumlin did and as courageous parents on Staten Island are starting to do, acknowledge the problem, and recognize that it’s bigger than one person or one family can handle alone. We have to talk about it, in our homes, in our schools and in our churches. Education should start at the earliest practical level on the dangers of drug use, including abuse of prescription pills (which often pave the way to heroin use); we should support public-service anti-drug ad campaigns and law enforcement efforts to stem the supply.
Treatment programs, including the enormously effective 12-Step programs, need to be expanded and encouraged.
As a Church, it is important for us to recognize that the struggle with heroin addiction is very much a pro-life issue. It demonstrates a tragic disregard for human life, especially on the part of the addicts themselves, whose enslavement leads them to behave as if their lives do not matter, but also on the part of those who encourage them and sell to them.
Finally, we need to see addiction not as a moral failing but as a profoundly spiritual sickness affecting many of our young people—a sickness of the soul, a deep-seated despair with little sense of hope.
We can only say to them that there is hope. That they, and their families, can choose to walk with God, the only force for good that’s strong enough to fight the evil that’s among us.
And we can join them with our prayers and our support.
