Kids are going to do drugs. Let's keep them alive anyway.
We did this to them. It's time to stop fucking around with non-solutions like arresting more people.
Texas teenager Sienna Vaughn thought she was taking a Percocet “to relax.” She died after ingesting a pill laced with fentanyl.
“She meant everything to us and we’ll never fully recover,” the family told the Washington Post. “Our goal in going public with her story is to honor her memory by trying to save the lives of other children.”
In response deaths among high schoolers, lawmakers are putting up morbid billboards, (“The billboard, which features a photo of a smiling Stewart, reads, “Fentanyl kills … just ask my mom!”) and, of course, demanding harsher sentences for people who sell or share drugs.
Let’s ask a few questions. Why does a 17-year-old need a fucking Percocet to relax? Back in my day you suffered through your adolescent angst by reading the Beats and being annoying about it. Once in a while (very rarely for me cause I was a giant nerd) you’d steal a Bud Light from your parents or get a hold of some crappy weed. I didn’t even know of anyone who did anything harder.
My first inkling of the existence of the opioid crisis was sometime in 2011, when my friend and drug reporter Kristen Gwynne joined AlterNet the “progressive” website where I worked. Kristen is 9 years younger than me and a college student. She knew kids from her hometown who were addicted to opioids; who had been in and out of rehab.
I remember it blowing my mind. Even at my college, the craziest thing anyone ever did was cocaine or psychedelics, which you can now get administered by a fancy therapist. Kristen’s experience was the tip of a Titanic-sized iceberg. These were kids stealing their parents’ oxys, with the crazier ones switching the heroin.
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