drug overdose
A 2017 memorial in Huntington, W. Va. / Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty Images
“WITHIN 72 HOURS after an overdose, the Quick Response Team—me, a faith leader, a counselor or peer coach, and a police officer—will go out to that individual, either where they overdosed or where they reside. We introduce ourselves and tell them they are not in trouble—we are not here for that. Then we ask if they’ve thought about recovery. If they have, we’ll lay out all the options and let them decide for themselves what they want to do.
We have been to homes that are a quarter of a million dollars all the way to abandoned homes that have no floors because they’re rotted out. Our oldest client was 78. All races, all tax brackets, it doesn’t matter.
Witnesses who lost children to opiod addicition or are former addicts speak to the House subcommittee on health April 19, 2018. Photo by Shelby Fleig
Brian Mendell committed suicide at age 25 because he was ashamed of his opioid addiction, despite not having used drugs in more than a year, his father told a House subcommittee Thursday as he demanded that Congress pass laws to fight the epidemic. Mendell is one of the hundreds of Americans who die every day as result of substance abuse.
Philip Seymour Hoffman at a football game in 2011, Debby Wong / Shutterstock.com
Tom Junod of Esquire wrote an insightful piece about the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman titled “ Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Final Secret: The cost of holding up a mirror to those who could barely stand to look at themselves .” The whole article is worth reading, but these words are especially important:
"There was no actor, in our time, who more ably suggested that each of us is the sum of our secrets … no actor who better let us know what he knew, which is that when each of us returns alone to our room, all bets are off. He used his approachability to play people who are unacceptable, especially to themselves; indeed, his whole career might be construed as a pre-emptive plea for forgiveness to those with the unfortunate job of cleaning up what he — and we — might leave behind."
In his roles, Hoffman played unacceptable, despicable, and broken characters. In other words, he played our cultural scapegoats. But the beauty of Hoffman’s work is that he humanized our scapegoats. Of course, his characters were unacceptable because they were guilty of being repellent jerks, underserving of love or sympathy, which is exactly why they made good scapegoats. The function of a scapegoat is to unite us in hatred against them, so the scapegoat who seems to us to be completely guilty, like a cartoon villain, the better sense of unity we can form against them. The best scapegoat is one who even agrees with us about just how terrible he is. As Junod writes, Hoffman “used his approachability to play people who are unacceptable, especially to themselves.”