Jordan McClements is an educational training specialist at Delaware Technical Community College’s Terry Campus in Dover.
More than 200 people overdosed this year, while 290 people overdosed last year, and 290 overdosed in 2019. We are consistently losing hundreds of people to overdoses, Delaware.
Metrics don’t change two things: the numbers and our approach.
We don’t innovate. We pay nonprofits first. We hold meetings and read PowerPoints in a roundtable and count Zoom as making a meeting. That’s frontline work in our state.
You can’t treat overdoses, Delaware. You don’t want to. You know the supply’s poisoned. You know there aren’t jobs or food or shelter or water or showers or clothes or the money you sit on with the Opioid Settlement Fund as of right now.
We understand the overdose crisis as a business of death. We being everyone reading and breathing in Delaware. Our indifference is that we believe, once you play with death, you are damned — in spirit, death and definition of a citizen. We reduce people who overdosed to numbers. We reduce family members like Muh Mum McClements, who had to bury her first-born grandson, cousin Lee, who overdosed in 2019.
I overdosed. Uncle Billy is paralyzed from an overdose. The overdose crisis is already in our homes. Lee’s gone. Forever. Robby lost his father. Tegan lost his father. Uncle Bobby lost his heir. The McClementses lost Lee forever because no one in the state could help him, and he chose death.
Disregard your semantics for a moment. I’m serious. Contemplate the numbers you crave and seek to make this mirror logical. Four out of 10 people overdose in their homes. Seven out of 10 of us here in Delaware are going to discover people in our lives who overdose, not just the “John Elways” you pass on U.S. 13 on your commute to Dover, the capital of Delaware. The Attorney General’s Office released numbers in 2024. But the numbers don’t change. Overdoses have been haunting Delaware for a long time.
Who is responsible?
We all are, Delaware.
You think telling someone to be safe when you say goodbye means you’ll see them again. Dope and coke are death sentences because we don’t reach out to those loved ones on these cold fall days. We think of a winter wonderland, as we make sure we look away from “John Elway” and hope that no one remembers that Craig Richards froze to death at the Duncan Center before he could get treatment. And someone stole Craig Richards’ shoes after he froze to death.
Why do I care about these men? Because the line is razor-thin between freezing and death, the asphalt plank and you, Delaware. You look away from these individuals and make panhandling laws and try to get rid of the People’s Community Center in Dover because they make you remember your own humanity in the life-and-death stakes of Dover. It’s all the “Delaware way,” until you have an anxiety attack, as “John Elway” slowly walks toward you near The Green; John Elway in his black hat, Denver Broncos jersey and white T-shirt, tucked in deep, blue jeans, deep blue, almost fading from sunlight, as well as sports sunglasses, a tan from staying on the asphalt plank and a forward-facing black baseball hat tipped back, as if the wind is grasping it. He’s walking toward you, and you’re reeling at his cardboard sign, reading “THANK YOU GOD BLESS.” And like me, you floor it. But you wonder about John Elway. When you don’t see John Elway, you wonder if he survived, and if John Elway can’t make it, you have to change, not tomorrow but today. You’ve got to help yourself enough to get in a position to help your neighbor, to plant seeds of trees you will never see grow. We parade overdose numbers that don’t change because we play with magicians when it comes to the state and press releases and progress. Don’t let the meetings or PowerPoints fool you. The state is the same magician with the same tricks. The only difference is the order it plays them. And the Hope Centers in Kent and Sussex counties still do not stand.
Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at civiltalk@iniusa.org.
