Cries for Help

Our one chance

Photo by Kelsey Chance on Unsplash

The crisis on our planet isn’t climate change it’s the people who inhabit her.

Roughly 8 billion souls struggle every day in various degrees of difficulty to navigate what we call life. Every individual human being has to deal with their version of survival in their own head.

Daily life covers an enormously wide range of complex and not so complex set of problems; from a group of children in an impoverished nation wondering when they’re going to eat next, to a soldier in Ukraine or Russia unsure if they’re going survive the day to see their family again or a teenager whose phone just died and is panicking because they can’t get on Tik Tok.

There’s evidence man had been using drugs long before any written records were ever kept. Relics and fossils have shown poppy seeds stuck in teeth, residue of alcohol in bowls, remnants of burnt cannabis seeds. Even signs of cocaine in mummies in the South American Andes and peyote buttons from the New Stone Age, going back some 10,000 BC at sites in Texas. https://evolvetreatment.com/blog/history-drug-use/

Doing drugs and alcohol has been part of man’s evolution, if you can call it that. Some were used for religious ceremonies or others to simply tune out and/or hide from struggles they can’t deal with.

According to WHO, in June of 2024, about 2.6 million deaths a year were attributable to alcohol consumption. Another 0.6 million deaths caused by the use of psychoactive drugs. https://www.who.int/news/item/25-06-2024-over-3-million-annual-deaths-due-to-alcohol-and-drug-use-majority-among-men/

Between 2002 and 2022 alcohol, drugs and suicides had increased 142 percent. https://www.tfah.org/report-details/pain-in-the-nation-2024/. Thanks to reckless political decisions.

On the day we allowed politicians to become medical doctors their actions created more addicts a thousand times over. The lack of any wisdom, or simply put, stupidity, to decide the best way to control our lives and a virus no one understood, was to lock everyone up.

Mankind is killing itself from the inside out.

Way too many of us have a family member or friend or friend of friend we know who is addicted to alcohol. The enormous negative impact on the circle of influence that an addict reaches is tremendous.

Addiction doesn’t happen overnight as we’re all aware. Sometimes a person can be an addict for a long time before anyone even knows. Or you see behavioral changes and become concerned. Once the revelation is made the next big hurdle is for the addict to admit they’re an addict. Without that first step, any further attempts toward sobriety won’t happen.

In the beginning most family and friends try and do all they can to help the addict but any hope of achieving sobriety still falls on the addict. You can push, soft peddle, tough love, but if the addict isn’t willing to step up then you have to step back. That’s the really hard part; to let it go.

When the addiction becomes worse and you note the physical damage occurring and mental stability become erratic; anger, frustration, even a degree of hatred forms. Not necessarily for the addict but the frustration over how helpless we are fighting such a powerful demon.

This is from the mouth of an addict very close to me: It’s perceived we have a choice, but in so many ways we don’t. It’s embedded in us. After a certain amount of time we always regress to (drinking) because we don’t think we have another solution. And I’m no better. I’ve been through so many treatments, counselors, podcasts and meetings and yet ultimately it lies in our hands. We have to come to the conclusion we are truly powerless. There is no such thing as one drink, because it equals 1,000. We are hormonally different, and we react to alcohol the way other people don’t. You have to accept there’s going to be a lot of pain before there’s peace.

Hundreds of our friends and family are dying each day. We all know the impact of fentanyl and hopefully with the border closed some lives will be saved because of it, but a bottle of vodka is nearby at the corner market.

I would like to say it has something to do with our society but as we can see, it’s been going on for thousands of years.

When I started writing this, I asked myself why, and where was I planning to go with it? The answer, for cathartic reasons.

There have been no less than a dozen people in my circle who have suffered through and/or are dealing with it now. Some are already dead. I feel the pain. I’m part of the pain. And I’m helpless in dealing with the pain.

I look at my home, my stuff, a beautiful day and sometimes it doesn’t feel the same. Almost icky. I have so much to be thankful and that I get to enjoy the fruits of my labor and the beauty of life, it almost seems wrong. It really tears me up when I think about the one shot we all have at life and how fleeting a mess it has become for way too many.

DOGE is uncovering billions in wasted dollars and massive corruption. Dollars we could use to educate and invest in quality treatment centers. There are thousands of “rehab” centers which for the most part are “club rehabs” for a week or two; costing a fortune and no solutions. After the short stay, the addict is binging again twenty-four hours later.

We need to focus on real long-term programs toward a societal sobriety and back to saying no to drugs. We need to revise the stigma and create campaigns that America is here for you. We care and we’re willing to step up and fight to get you better. Instead we squander so much money on garbage, subsidize wars we’re not a part of and watch some in our country spiral out of control with misguided hatred.