by The Snakehunter & Tina in Traffic
All we hear today is “opiates, opiates, opiates.” What a great time it must be to work in “recovery support services.” Republicans and Democrats alike will invite you to talk at their functions. These politicians, snakes in the grass, really don’t care what the speakers say as long as they drop enough fluffy buzzwords like “recovery.”
As long as you’re white enough, nobody even cares if what you say is evidence-based or trauma-informed. They just care about their image, being the savior of their white constituents’ children, those who are “strong enough” to make it out of addiction.
Where was the compassion for my dead daughter? Where was the compassion for people of color, or for people who freebased cocaine when I was young? Racists and unapologetic self-promoters, the whole lot of them Legislative, Executive and Judicial branches.
Where was all this talk of safe injection houses for freebasers? Why are there so many black people in Maine prisons? What the hell is wrong with these Maine politicians, AGs, DAs, and judges who watch “13th” and read “The New Jim Crow”?
I love these young people in recovery now- but I disagree with politicians exploiting them to reach their own selfish goals. (a buzz term the suits love to toss around to claim a margin- al amount of competence).
Politicians and organizations trot these kids out, if they’re white enough, and trick them out and say “look at this success story, we’re doing a great job.” Or “I have friends who are in recovery,” just like “I have friends who are black.” Why wouldn’t they ever
say “I have friends who use drugs?” Why weren’t they friends with my dead daughter? Well… Addicts don’t deserve their friend- ship. No, they don’t even deserve to live. They deserve the chair until they’ve found God’s golden light and been reformed by it.
I found that out when I started advocating for “evidence-based practices” (EBPs) such as Heroin-Assisted Treatment, an approach shown to successfully minimize the harms of active drug use. At first the bureaucrats entertained this. They could, vicariously through me, take a brief foray into the “wild side” of public health.
They found it exotic and interesting but ultimately too “radical” for their puritan values. When I didn’t stop talking about true health justice, I was disinvited from these weasels’ establishmentarian meetings. At first I was sad, but I soon realized those meetings are just where bureaucrats go to stroke their egos- it’s a veritable orgy in those perverted meeting rooms- and showing off their latest grant- I could practically see them foaming at the mouth.
I don’t need my ego stroked by a bunch of sick people; I need my daughter to be alive. I need to see these politicians get off their ass and prevent the needless death of more of my daughter’s generation. These politicians should be ashamed of themselves. They are grimy disgusting snakes who deserve prison.
By advocating for the health of active addicts, rather than the perverted platonic ideal of the person who quit drugs, I had become a thorn in the side of the establishment. My soul had been entirely obliterated by the overt obstreperousness of the State-nonprofit-industrial-complex. I had been depressed, demoralized, and destroyed by its disgusting dereliction of the most disadvantaged.
I suppose I was too naive and optimistic to understand why all the “public servants” were acting with such reckless disregard for the impoverished people they claimed to serve. The State of Maine issued decrees that served as the final nails in the coffins of addicts.
Down south, in the state’s largest city, Portland, there was some sad joke of a municipal task force- the “Overdose Prevention” Task Force- that embraced policies that caused more overdoses (you can look it up), and then, when put under the micro- scope, it shamefully disbanded. They should pay taxpayers back the money they wasted, and they should bring my daughter back from her early grave. Is this a game to them?
Some of us had erroneously assumed that when a critical mass of discussion had been generated, bureaucrats and activists alike would be aligned in the pursuit of justice. Instead, the bureaucrats continued to resist righteousness, and the activists acquiesced. The suits had overwhelmingly signaled that those who “wanted recovery enough” deserve to live, but the most oppressed ought to die.
Politicians ride into office on a ticket of “combating stigma,” but they are dis- ingenuous from the start. They uphold stigma by only implementing those laws and policies that mostly preserve the status quo. The inevitable conclusion is that the status quo is preferable to one in which people live and get better.
The heat on Maine’s snake politicians has been turned up as of late, now that suburban white kids are dying… These kids’ parents are the snakes’ donors, brokers, and attorneys. Their parents invite these snakes to their garden parties and feed their serpentine souls sustenance. But as high as the heat is turned up, Maine’s sick serpentine slaughterers devise more monstrous methods of masquerading their murderousness.
It is repulsive how they have taught us to loathe our sick and suffering children; how they have convinced us that the stigma-reinforcing law is just and proper; how they have convinced us parents that some of our children deserve to die- that there is no solution for them. I am embarrassed to say that I live in Maine, whose state motto is “the way life should be.”
Peeling back the illusory veneer of civility exposes the more evil, but equally-as-probable, explanation for why Maine politicians remain complicit in the genocide of *some of* their children’s generation. Fentanyl eases gentrification. Maine’s trying to create a master race of infallible Mainers who won’t succumb to “heroin addiction” or “crystalline meth.” That’s only for poor people. “They’re more trouble than they’re worth.”
A real Mainah does something whole- some like pick fiddleheads or uphold the white supremacist patriarchy. Those are the ones we want to keep around as we wage this campaign of cavalier callousness against already oppressed people… This… This is “the way life should be.”
Sincerely,
The Snakehunter & Tina in Traffic
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