Addiction is a moral weakness. I used to believe that. I used to ask myself why I couldn’t stop using drugs and drinking. I was convinced that I didn’t love my family enough to stop. I figured that God made a mistake by sending me to Earth because I was too weak to survive. Eventually, after years of being miserable and hurting everyone I ever cared about, I chose to kill myself on May 23, 2001. I woke up on May 24. After spending 18 months in a free residential rehab learning to love myself, I decided that I was not a piece of garbage, I was ill. Ever since then, I have focused on educating others about the disease of addiction.
Here are some phrases that I have overheard in several different communities in Hawaii: Drug addicts and “crazy” people are making our communities unsafe. Arrest them, move them out of my community. Send them back to where they came from. They choose to live this way. They don’t even want to get better. They are lazy and loafers. If only they loved their families enough, they would stop. They are so selfish.
Let’s look at some numbers shall we? There are fewer than 10 residential treatment facilities for addicts and alcoholics in our entire state that accept Med-Quest.
Several islands don’t even have one facility that accepts it. Psychiatric wards across the state have been closing down and repurposing the psychiatric beds because addicts, who are high, aren’t entitled to psychiatric beds. Last year over 50 percent of people arrested in Hawaii were drunk or high on drugs. Throughout the entire United States, 66 percent of addicts and alcoholics reported having childhood trauma and 53 percent of addicts have underlying mental health diagnoses. Many use drugs as a form of self-medication.
So, let us reframe the addiction issue. Our war on drugs is really a war on traumatized individuals who have no ability or resources to get the help that they need to heal from childhood trauma. The system failed these people as children and we continue to fail them again.
What are your elected officials doing about it? Are they making it easier to open up treatment facilities? Leasing cheap land to these facilities? Giving incentives to psychiatrists and addictionologists to move to Hawaii? Are they prioritizing this issue the way the rail is prioritized? If not, write them a letter, bombard their Facebook accounts, talk at town halls and forums, hold them accountable!
After all, they don’t just represent the people in their districts who are registered to vote, they represent everyone in their districts. Many of these people require someone to help them find their voices, or even be their voices. Will you be the voice for a voiceless member of your community? If your answer is no, think about if your answer would be yes if they had cancer, or if they smelled better, or if they didn’t lower the property value of your house. Addiction is an illness, let’s stop treating it as a crime.
Zahava Zaidoff is certified substance abuse counselor and a certified prevention specialist who lives in Captain Cook.