When I first learned that my friend Dan, a student in the Watson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, had passed away a few months ago, I was devastated. Even more alarming than the news of his unfortunate death were the circumstances surrounding it: he overdosed.
I felt an immediate sense of incredulity, since the last time I saw Dan, he told me how going to a rehabilitation facility had transmuted his perspectives on using substances. But only a week after this exchange, I received word about his untimely death.
Both prior to and after his passing I had heard both close friends and mere acquaintances refer to him as an “addict.” They spoke with such confidence, as if their diagnosis was the essence of all of Dan’s problems. It felt as if they were totally writing him off in a dehumanizing manner. Although he clearly died from the misuse of a substance, something about the negative connotation of the word “addict” haunted me. It seemed so dismissive to just call someone an “addict.”
Sadly, this word completely encapsulated who my friend was to some people. They didn’t see Dan as a kindhearted, honest and brilliant son, brother, friend and student. They just saw an addict.
Dan’s ordeal is very analogous to the internal conflict numerous people face. Using substances provided Dan a platform to escape — from his own demons and from the society which rendered him nothing more than an outcast. In retrospect, I can see that the way people perceived him as a stereotypical substance abuser only exacerbated his dependency on drugs, and the more he fell into that trap the more people saw him as a social pariah, synthesizing a vicious cycle. This kind of thoughtless discourse on addiction, which only serves to degrade people as opposed to help them, is what we all need to reconsider altering.
Perhaps one of the most detrimental facets of modernity stems from our increasing lack of genuine human interactions. As a society, we have sacrificed real connections for the convenient world of social media. Yet, it is this same cheap simulation of social interactions that has contributed toward an atmosphere where people would rather use labels to pigeonhole others to avoid determining what social difficulties they’re going through.
The prevalent discourse today on addiction inculcates us to only highlight how someone is addicted but fails to give us a medium for compassion. Thus, people battling addiction are not perceived of as ill but are scolded to stop. One simply wouldn’t tell a loved one to stop having a cold, yet the contemporary beliefs on fighting addiction would have us echo this absurdity.
In the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s annual report, it was revealed that the number of people who use drugs and those with drug use problems have increased from 208 million and 26 million in 2006 to 247 million and 29.5 million in 2014 globally. Additionally, in the same report it was found that the use of opiates have been increasing, and unsurprisingly the number of heroin related deaths in the past 10 years have similarly been increasing.
These disconcerting metrics coupled along with the fact that the world has become significantly more dependent on social technologies to take place of genuine human contact shows critical insinuations about our society. Our lack of human interaction is a catalyst of addiction, and we cannot solve our problems by continuing to push away those who need our attention the most.
It’s no secret that the city of Binghamton, like the rest of the country, is facing a major drug epidemic, which was only intensified by our country’s faulty war on drugs. The city has recently been flooded with heroin, and the lack of a response from former Broome County Executive Debbie Preston has been pitiful. Instead of offering solutions and investing in rehabilitation, Preston’s camp only offered excuses and claiming it was not financially viable to open long-term treatment centers.
Most Binghamton University students could never fathom a student overdosing, but it has happened. As students, we tend to gravitate toward the ill-conceived notion that BU and the city of Binghamton are two separate spheres, and that the local community’s problems are peripheral, therefore they cannot affect us. Dan’s death proves otherwise.
If we, as students, take the time to realize that we can enhance our own environment, it won’t just be people walled off in academia who benefit. Subsequently, as a society we need to re-evaluate how we maintain our social relationships with one another. The absence of human interaction has in turn made us more self-centered and has presented us with the falsehood of control and the illusion that we have time. The mistake I made the last time I saw my friend was believing that I would see him again, and that we would have the time then to talk about what he had been through and how he was doing.
I didn’t make time when I should have. In life, our time is finite and control is limited, but if someone battling addiction engages with you, don’t take their presence for granted. Connect with them.
Hooman Ibrahim is a senior majoring in business administration.