This is an excerpt from Chapter 17: Harm Reduction Methods in my book Deviate From Denial: Erasing the Stigma of Addiction and Recovery Through Inspirational Stories.
When I spoke Jess from Never Use Alone recently, she proposed a new way of looking at overdoses. Since overdoses are increasing due to the surge in fentanyl recently, many of them we’re seeing nowadays are accidental. In Jess’s case, this is certainly true. People call her line as a safety precaution, not as a final goodbye.
“I overdose when I know I’ve got fifteen milligrams of morphine and am supposed to take one every three hours and decide to take five at one time. I over took my dose,” she mused. “Now, if because I can’t get my morphine for whatever reason and I go to the street and somebody tells me they’ve got oxy thirty, I buy this pill thinking it’s oxy thirty. It looks like an oxy thirty, and I take it, and it’s got fentanyl in it… I was poisoned!”
This completely shifted my perspective. The word “overdosed” carries a stigma with it. The word “poisoned” does not. I don’t think the stigma should be there for any reason, but I do think it can help to reframe how we think about things to better understand them. “Overdosed” puts the blame completely on the user, while “poisoned” removes some of that weight. In both cases the user chose to use drugs and entered into respiratory distress, yet switching the phrasing helps to alleviate some of the judgment that is automatically assigned to people who overdose. While I don’t necessarily think we need to go so far as to change the terminology to erase the stigma, challenging how we think about it is a step in the right direction.
“You hear, ‘Junkies keep overdosing,’ but I think we need to look at that with a different perspective. The fact is, they’re not overdosing. They’re being poisoned…” Jess started. “These people are using because they’re hurting physically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, and they’re just looking for pain relief. Instead, they’re being poisoned.”
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