Pennsylvania, please put down your drugs. They are not working. They are killing you.
I am not speaking as the proverbial old man complaining about “kids these days”. I did my share of drugs when I was younger. Although, in a lower middle-class neighborhood in the mid-1970s it was mostly pot and cheap whisky because, thankfully, that was all my friends and I could afford. And, like most of us, I grew out of it. But something has changed. People are disappearing at an alarming rate; young people. This past weekend began with the death of young woman that we know; she was 21. The weekend ended with the death of another young woman that we know; she was 30. Both deaths were drug related. My own brother died in a rehab in Florida in 2006; he was 25. His young body just gave out. It is among the worst events of my life.
It took 15 years to kill almost 60,000 Americans in Viet Nam. We are losing more than a Viet Nam war every year to drug overdose. It has taken the terrorists and all their various affiliations more than ten years to kill over 7000 of us. We are losing almost that every month to this latest epidemic. There were 70,200 deaths due to overdose in 2017, it has only gotten worse. I have looked into the haunted eyes of parents who have been blindsided by a monster they did not know existed; their babies devoured by a hunger that is never satisfied. This has to stop.
Between the pharmaceutical companies, and the Mexican and Columbian drug cartels, we are drowning in heroin, fentanyl, oxycodone, hydrocodone, and other street concoctions of various opioids. Pennsylvania, for some reason, is ground zero for this war; along with Ohio and West Virginia. The father in me wants to assassinate the drug lords and imprison the irresponsible drug executives for flooding our streets with death to enrich themselves. But others would simply arise to take their places. Instead, our collective energy should be spent on denying them a market.
Other than aspirin, or the like, do not ever take a pain killer unless it is prescribed directly to you by your own physician. Even then you should be dubious and cautious. I know construction workers that have been injured on the job and ended up addicted to painkillers. Some burn through all of their assets and end up homeless.
Do not ever share your prescriptions with anyone. If you are not going to use it then dispose of it; local authorities have programs for the safe disposal of unused prescriptions.
If you are still in school and have friends that are using ANY of these drugs, confront them. You may think it is harmless, but everything is harmless, until it is not. We all think we are indestructible, until we are dead. If you are using any of these drugs when you are with certain friends, and you want to stop, then you must leave those friends. I am sure that everyone in Phoenixville high school knows where to get various opioids. Sorry, but if they are holding this crap out to you, they are not your friends.
Parents do not shrug this off. Put down the phone and get involved in the lives of your kids. Where are they? What are they doing? Are they experimenting? Do you have any of these items in you house? Are we so consumed with being non-judgmental as a culture that are willing to watch our children die? We went to war over the casualties on September 11th. What we have now is the equivalent of a September 11th every three weeks.
I am a Christian writer and preacher in my spare time; so, I tend to see all the big issues in theological terms. But I am not trying to convert anyone with what I am writing here, I am only shooting up a flare to shed light upon a battlefield that we are losing to sinister forces. However, I cannot help but notice the irony; that the most stable and prosperous society in history is increasingly addicted to what amounts to pain killers. As a pastor, I can only assume that our culture is in pain. It is combatting a creeping anxiety with whatever is available.
I would like to apologize to the young. My generation has let you down. We have driven God from the stage because He was a scene stealer; and He was inconvenient. We did not mean to leave you with nihilism, but that is what we have done. We have left you adrift on the high seas without chart or compass. If I suspected that my life was meaningless, I would probably be tempted to float away on the fentanyl cloud too. If I could drive one fact into the heart of every child, it would be this: you are the image of God. You are not God, but you are God’s image. You should spend the rest of your life trying to find out what that means. At the very least it means that your life has meaning. It also means that you are more significant than the moon or the stars.
I leave you with the ancient words of a far better preacher named Isaiah…
“Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?”
Pennsylvania, please put down your drugs, they are not working.
https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/epidemic/index.html