Big Pharma’s Obituary
I’ve always hated headlines about overdose deaths. 100,000! A million this century! A new record! They say. I’ve never seen 100,000 obituaries, but I assume they don’t look like a flashy headline or some government statistics. On the road to my childhood home in Riva, Maryland, I pass by the fire station with the sign of grim figures of overdoses and overdose deaths that year.
As the seasons change, I watch the numbers slowly tick up. On some days, there’s a sudden increase from a bad batch on a bad weekend. On others, the number miraculously stays the same. There are no obituaries in front of the fire station, there aren’t even names or ages or photographs of the dead.
What is an obituary for? Or who? It acknowledges the dead, shares their legacy, asks us to remember, even just in the moment you’re reading it. There are no obituaries for the living, or none that I’ve seen. How can we acknowledge, share and remember the lives of the living people affected by the overdose epidemic? Especially when drug use is surrounded by so much stigma and even hatred.
I used to hate drug use because I thought it was killing the people around me. I realized, after watching young people in my community dying constantly, that it’s easy to jump from hating drug use to hating people who use drugs. Take a common refrain I’ve heard from others: why does someone using drugs deserve another chance at life with Narcan? This is a disturbing thought: that someone deserves to die. But it’s pervasive in a country where a long drug war has pitted us against each other while elites enact class warfare against us.
Now, I don’t hate drug use. I hate the pharmaceutical industry, the prison industrial complex, the Sacklers, the lawmakers at every level who refuse to act but pour money into the war on drugs. I see the bigger picture of how people could drop like flies for decades on end and those who represent us do nothing at all.
Obituaries across the country say, “he died after a long battle with addiction” or beg others to heed the warning: “this shit will kill you.” Some obits say nothing of the cause of death, only that she was a good daughter, sister, mother, friend. Some articles don’t mention names at all, just the numbers dead. No obits, here.
I want to write the obit of Big Pharma, of prisons, of the Democratic and Republican Parties. No sugarcoating the facts: these institutions were built to kill. They died after a long battle with the People, and eventually the People won.
