I've seen the needle and the damage done.

A short treatise on why I despise substance abuse and anyone who enables it. Despite the libertarian in me, I understand that the drug crisis won't go away on its own. Warning—R-rated. I'm in a mood.

Photo by Lance Reis on Unsplash

“My papa was real big. He did like he pleased. That’s why everybody worked on him. The last time I seen my father he was blind in the cities from drinking, and every time he put the bottle to his mouth, he don’t suck out of it, it sucks out of him.” - One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

This morning, I arranged a Zoom call for one of my foster kids (a sweet little five-year-old girl) with her incarcerated biological father. I stepped out of the room after ensuring that the camera and microphone were working so they could have some privacy. Before I could walk away, I heard the father, whom the little girl has never really known, ask if she knew who he was. That was a little tough to hear. He then explained to her who he was, engaging in the kind of light yet probing talk that’s necessary to reconnect when one hasn’t held their kindergartner in their arms since she was in diapers.

The father knows what the future holds, and to his credit, he spoke well of me, her “other dad.” That was the last that I heard before I left the two of them alone for the court-mandated half hour. But I can’t leave the situation alone, because it sucks and I’m getting tired of it all in my old age. I’m looking to wear some people out.

Life can be wonderful, but it can also be very difficult. This morning came from what’s behind door number two. The last thing I needed this a.m. was a sad and desultory effort to patch—as best I could—a fractured relationship between a father and his little girl who happens to be in my care. I’m a poor substitute for what this kid needs—a healthy relationship with their biological family. But the world has only provided her with the option of what’s behind door number two as well. That happens to be me. It ain’t Ozzie and Harriet, but it’ll have to do.

What fractured the families of both of my foster kids was drug abuse: fentanyl, methamphetamine, THC, and God knows what else. Their situation is well known in local law enforcement and child welfare circles as a terrible multigenerational tragedy. Many mornings, I meet for coffee with a friend in the local police department, a cheerfully voluble man, who becomes subdued and pensive whenever the local drug abuse epidemic comes up. A few years ago, the local PD responded to a call where a 1-year-old child had drowned in a bathtub while his father passed out from an OD in the next room. That explains a 1000-yard stare. It’s straight up PTSD. The cops know.

Every clueless progressive airhead chanting about defunding the police as a solution to crime, every arrogant libertarian who doesn’t understand that at some point you don’t take the drugs anymore, they take you, and every advocate disguised as an academic researcher ought to have to go along on one of these calls. Some things you can’t unsee, and that sight burned into their memories just might serve up some penance. They might even get their minds right (or at least STFU).

I loathe and despise drug abuse. I always have, and I always will. I didn’t generally mind the commonplace and minor social drug use when I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, but I wasn’t much into it myself. It just never did anything for me, and most of the people I knew who were into it were just not my type. Part of this is my good fortune in genetics. As a slow metabolizer, I don’t experience much of a high from drugs. Opiates, in fact, only make me sick to my stomach (I once spent weeks passing a kidney stone the size of Rhode Island on ibuprofen). I don’t have either the physiology or personality to easily succumb to addiction. Given what I see in the world today, I count that as a blessing.

As this is a serious topic, I shall take the liberty of speaking plainly. If I cause offense, I apologize. Straight up, I’ve always thought that recreational drugs were a crutch for the dipshits, the hangers-on, the indolent, the helpless, or the people who wouldn’t face the challenging parts of reality without assistance. If you couldn’t do anything else that gave you satisfaction or joy, or if you just couldn’t face the real world, you did drugs. I never cared how popular you were, what crowd you ran with, how great of a musician you were, or any other status-related bullshit. If you overindulged in drugs, all that I could see was the big “E” for eschew on your forehead.

No amount of cool, beauty or moolah outshone that. I thank my lucky stars every day that recreational pharma was just never my thing. Climbing, cycling, physics, and music were my vices. Music was kind of a strange fit since I was generally the only sober person in almost every band I was ever in. That never bothered me a bit. I’d much rather be relegated to playing music in a coffee shop with my kids than jamming with Chet Baker anyway. How’d the large life work out for him?

As I mentioned in last week’s column. I recognized every character in Hillbilly Elegy from firsthand experience—especially the addicts. The one constant in my life is being surrounded by the flotsam of drug abuse. It destroyed my family when I was a kid, and it has, one way or another, shadowed the entire trajectory of my life. Now, in my final act before the big sleep, I’m using every finger I have to plug holes in the same fucking dike that’s cast a shadow over my whole life to make things better for the kids in my care. I can’t fix everything, but I can fix some things. In the time I have left, that’s just going to have to be enough.

Drug abuse and its causes don’t fall into place neatly along most of our cultural divides. If the left and the right have anything in common, it’s the same blood on their hands for largely ignoring the problem, imposing idiotic political solutions when pressed, and after that paying little more than lip service to it for half a century. Actually, “ignoring” isn’t quite right. Politicians across the board have enriched themselves on the gravy train from pharmaceutical companies peddling “safe” opiates (with FDA approval) to legal cannabis operations rolling out products that may contain levels of THC as high as 90%, a huge leap from the 3% THC concentrations typical of the weed available in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

None of this occurs because of people volunteering to make the world a better place. The United Way does not conduct fund drives for better living through recreational pharmaceuticals. It’s exactly the opposite. The drug crisis has spun out of control because so many people have an unfettered ability to look the other way as long as their coffers are full. Do you really think that the Sackler family alone got richer than Croesus from OxyContin? John Boehner Was Once 'Unalterably Opposed' to Cannabis. You think that he changed his mind because he discovered alpaca wool hats and bell-bottom jeans?

And nobody ever goes to jail, except the addicts and low-level dealers.

I at least understand greed. I understand the ideologues a lot less. The libertarians who won’t admit that any level of drug crisis requires at least some restrictions on personal liberties. The progressives who cheered and virtue-signalled for decades as drugs flowed into the country because they were accompanied by people they thought would end up voting for them. The progressive academics and their bullshit studies that nearly always justify decriminalization of drug abuse and attack those who are on the front lines of dealing with the chaos that their laissez-faire advocacy has wrought.

This is another thing that I think explains Donald Trump. People are fed up with “There’s no way to stop illegal immigration” and concomitantly “There’s not much that we can do to stem the tide of drugs into our country.” So as much as I dislike the guy, he’s willing to try to do what others say can’t be done. I’ll give him that chance. Besides, he’s not wrong when he talks about the southern border. Sure, his approach to fixing the problem involves more theatrics than substance, but that’s the point. Wave a big enough stick with conviction, and the work gets done for you. And every time he talks about parking a cruise missile up the ass of some Mexican drug cartel lord, I cheer (as long as no one is looking).

So yeah, I’m pissed. If you are a drug dealer and you see me coming, you’d better run. All of which leads me to this morning.

Kids don’t get any say so as to the circumstances into which they are born (if they did, a lot of them might choose differently as soon as they were able). Kids have to just deal with whatever shitstorm the world places them in. The current drug crisis has made this shitstorm a bonafide nightmare. There are people like me, social workers, medical personnel, police and others who try to set things right, but we’re pissing up a rope. All we can do is the best we can. Unfortunately, that isn’t enough.

The little girl in my home who doesn’t know her biological father because of the drug crisis is more than a data point in an academic study—she’s a human being who has to live the rest of her life dealing with the consequences of something she had no hand in creating. She’s not going to get tenure for bullshit scholarship; she’s not going to get filthy rich turning a blind eye to avarice; she’s not going to get a job at a think tank where the most untethered people in the world dream up policy; and she’s not going to get elected to high office by pandering to sycophants. She just has to learn to cope with everyone else’s fuck-ups. For the life of me, I can’t see the fairness in that. I fucking just can’t. All I can do is try to make things right.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on X at @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com