Jordan McClements is a writer, composition/literature instructor and recovering heroin survivor, as well as a graduate of Delaware State University and the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and a Master of Fine Arts student at Columbia College Chicago. He resides in Felton.
I can feel the dead souls of the Delaware overdose crisis.
That weight is something everyone seemed to feel at the Prescription Opioid Distribution Commission’s forum in July at Delaware Technical Community College’s Terry Campus.
We are all trying our best to come up with ideas on how to distribute the multimillion-dollar settlement from Delaware’s Prescription Opioid Settlement Fund.
Everyone in the room was there to make sure no one dies from overdose or drug use ruining someone’s life.
From the state level to the user on the street, the lieutenant governor and attorney general have created what we all needed with the meeting: a conversation in our community on how to eradicate the overdose crisis.
The more we have conversations with our community, neighbors and ourselves, the likelier we can recognize, hear, understand and help one another. Without community, we are nothing.
Without conversation and exchange of ideas, we would not have input from the diverse backgrounds and perspectives needed to eradicate the overdose crisis in conversation and action, together.
A woman who survived domestic violence indicated that addressing domestic violence should be added to the funding because many domestic violence victims sometimes end up self-medicating and can lose everything to get treatment as a result of red tape.
At the same time, another woman who specified her son is not getting treatment in James T. Vaughn Correctional Center suggested that the center picks who they will treat for substance use and abuse. She designated drug addiction as not a moral failure but a chronic brain disease with periods of relapse and abstinence. As a result, she advocated for Delaware to be more transparent and let people know how they can find help. She said, “People are dying because of tough love.”
A college professor advised for education and prevention through means of alternative intervention, along with early education and school-based prevention.
One police officer recommended funding should go to immediate referrals from the police to mental health professionals, to reduce stigma for police and users, as users get help and referred into treatment more quickly.
One counselor suggested that there needs to be more workforce development, meaning we should create levels of certification that make sure those working with users can serve better and are better equipped to serve people with drug use and misuse.
A mother, who lost her son to overdose, called in via Zoom and expressed we should support harm reduction. She illustrated that a safe environment with clean needles and drugs shows that, if we show we care enough about drug users, they will come around to treatment.
When it was my turn to speak at the forum, I argued the following solutions:
We are addressing everything around the overdose crisis but not the essential question to solve it: Why do drug users use drugs in the age of the overdose crisis?
As someone who survived overdose and who lost my cousin to overdose, the answer is that people are using drugs to alleviate a sorrow, a sorrow some of us haven’t reached yet.
A needle will be shared, whether users die or not, yet there isn’t clean-needle exchange throughout Delaware. Does Delaware believe in harm reduction?
Users need somewhere safe to shoot up, so if they overdose, their children, friends, family and people that care about them won’t lose them. Delaware needs overdose-prevention centers.
Delaware needs to cut all red tape from buprenorphine and methadone. Better yet, we should set buprenorphine as the standard for treatment, instead of methadone. This is because methadone is harder to kick than heroin, while buprenorphine is easier.
Users tell you what they need, and you drive past them because it’s easier to look away than face the reality of what is happening in our state.
You drive past them in Delaware legislation, your worldview, when you have to admit they are real on the radio and when you see them begging and living under bridges.
How many people have to die for you to wake up?
There is no war on drugs.
It is a war on American people.
