The Daily Sheeple – by Dawn Luger
The forlorn scene (below) in West Brandywine, Pennsylvania, where two drug addiction counselors lost their lives is a stark reminder of the realities of opiate addiction. While laws continue to increase with attempts to combat this often deadly affliction, it really isn’t that easy, and sadly, two men have lost their lives and the fight to the ongoing battle of opiate addiction.
It isn’t that drug addicts are bad people, but they do bad things in order get the high they need to survive, which is something non-addicts don’t understand. The constant strain placed on the brain by drugs often proves too much for addicts, and unfortunately, many pay with their lives, as is the case in West Brandywine. Halfway house residents in Pennsylvania were met with a horrifying scene of two of their drug counselors dead from heroin overdoses. It’s now become obvious that the drug laws aren’t working, nor are they saving lives.
“If anybody is wondering how bad the opioid epidemic has become, this case is a frightening example,” Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan said in a news release. “The staff members in charge of supervising recovering addicts succumbed to their own addiction and died of opioid overdoses. Opioids are a monster that is slowly consuming our population.” One man was found in an adjacent room and half-full syringe of heroin was left on the nightstand – the last hit these men will ever inject.
Authorities didn’t release the names of the counselors. Many addiction counselors are former addicts, but it was unclear if that was the case with the men who died. The counselors lived and worked at the Freedom Ridge Recovery Lodge, which bills itself as “a special recovery home for men that provides a safe place to live.” No one returned a message from The Washington Post left with an answering service at the lodge’s listed number. At the time this was written, The Daily Sheeple also went to the Freedom Ridge Recovery Lodge’s website for more information and got an error message declaring that the website is down due to “technical reasons.”
A screenshot taken by The Daily Sheeple showing the Freedom Ridge Recovery’s website is offline.
Although the home’s website was offline, a cached version of the site identified one of its key missions as “Freedom Ridge will give you a solid foundation to help free you from the bondage of addictions.” The site also says the home strives to “incorporate family in this very early stage of recovery” and mandates that residents attend addiction meetings daily for 90 days.
Residents of the halfway house found the counselors dead and/or dying (it wasn’t immediately clear if the men had already succumbed to the overdose or not) Sunday afternoon. They tried to resuscitate one of the men with the drug naloxone, which counters heroin’s deadly effects, but it was too late. Two of the plastic bags which had contained the heroin had a “Superman” symbol on them. Another was stamped with the symbol for “danger.” Police think the drugs had been laced with fentanyl, another opiate that can make a hit of heroin more potent and more deadly.
In September, Governor Tom Wolf (D) told lawmakers that the opioid epidemic facing Pennsylvania is “a public health crisis, the likes of which we have not before seen. Every day, we lose 10 Pennsylvanians to the disease of addiction. This disease does not have compassion or show regard for status, gender, race or borders. It affects each and every Pennsylvanian and threatens entire communities throughout our Commonwealth. The disease of addiction has taken thousands of our friends and family members. In the past year alone we lost over 3,500 Pennsylvanians — a thousand more lives taken than the year before.”
More laws against drugs only force incidents like this one underground. Harm reduction techniques in places like Europe have proven effective in the treatment of addiction. It’s easy to judge a drug addict and make laws that condemn them. But most addicts simply need help and thanks to the stigma of being a drug addict, many will never get it, and those who do will get it too late.
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Contributed by Dawn Luger of The Daily Sheeple.
Dawn Luger is a staff writer and reporter for The Daily Sheeple. Wake the flock up – follow Dawn’s work at our Facebook or Twitter.
Wonder how much of the taxpayers money were they getting paid to od?