Today, for the first time in the three years that I have been visiting
the people on the streets of Kensington, a new and disturbing thought hit me…
While acknowledging and being thankful for pockets of success…
Sadly, the inept[1],
unprofessional, cruel, incompetent, non-respectful, etc. etc, etc. responses by
people who have pledged themselves to integrity in government or their medical
careers to Hippocrates have largely been an utter failure in making better to
any real degree this national tragedy within homeless addicted people diagnosed
with Substance Use Disorder.
The men and women of SUD themselves, in their attempts to maintain self
developed safety guidelines had been doing an amazing job. For example,
To the untrained eye, a bunch of people living in tents under a bridge
are labeled “addicts” “whores” “moral incompetents” and other uneducated,
painful, derogatory references.
Looking more closely, however, you would have discovered a gathering of
people bound together by an officially recognized disease of SUD and who are in
the addicted phase thereof. In the
absence of respectful, timely medical treatment at the Medicaid level of care,
they have no real choice other than to continue to take their "medicine".
In the absence of being able to find w-2 type employment they must
resort to various forms of less dignified ‘service jobs’. For the men:
this might include hauling loose metal to junkyards to redeem for cash or for
the ladies: renting their bodies for, well, you know…
They gather in these communities for one overriding reason. Their
needed medicine can kill them. They know
this. So as to avoid this possibility as
much as can be, they gather together to inject. If one person starts to
overdose, someone else will see this happening and provide Narcan. In so doing they save each other’s
lives.
The number of saves of homeless SUD patients by other homeless SUD
patients will shock you. 153… 76… 43… 25…
These are real numbers presented to me by four street residents. That’s a lot of non-dead relatives and
funerals that didn’t happen.
By being in community, they maintain their own grassroots level
overdose prevention sites. Well, we need to put that in past tense. These coherent communities were deleted by
the City of Brotherly Love in their efforts to “clean up” the problem of
“addicts” injecting in the open.
The end result has been an increase in the number of orphans as their
Moms/Dads or both have overdosed in the solitude of an abandoned house, back
alley or other such settings
and
Moms and Dads of these men and women who suffered from SUD who have had
to bury their daughters and sons.
There are many other examples of how these medical patients have been
failed by those who were pledged through oaths of office and Hippocrates to
serve, protect and do no harm.
Judicial practices plant these medical patients in cells designed for
criminals for months on end and with no rehabilitation during this time of
“mental rot.”
Subsidized housing offers protection from the street but increases the
likelihood of solitary injecting in rentals that are not abandoned but largely
slumlord managed.
When any of these Medicaid reliant SUD patients decide they have had
enough, they must climb what I’m calling “Medicaid Mountain” so as to get to
their personal path of healing. Most don’t make it as they navigate narrow ledge
trails on the sides of this mountain through bureaucratic procedural obstacles
and attitudes of supposed professionals who they encounter along the
way.
So, you may be asking… What was that disturbing thought that I
had earlier today?
Given that the homeless men and women of SUD had already established
their own Overdose Prevention Sites and were saving each other at astounding
rates and given the low quality of care that these children of God receive on
the narrow cliffs of Medicaid Mountain from the larger community, it’s sadly
safe to concur that the current ‘cure’ for the problems associated with SUD in
its addicted and homeless phase is much worse than the "problems" themselves.
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