Drug Poisoning Crisis
Overdose Drug Poisoning Crisis
They’re trying to kill me.
Chemists curating crippling addiction,
creating cheap highs,
creating lethal highs.
Overdosed.
Insinuating I took too much,
insinuating I chose this life,
that I craved death more than the drug.
Overdosed but I took the right dose.
The piece of me I wanted to kill is
not the same piece that stole the air from my lungs,
not the part of me that ripped the flesh from these bones.
A hound resides within, one who’s name I do not know,
a hound that tears love into debris, turning minds to wreckage.
The hound is not what killed me.
You did.
Prohibition does not make it hard to find drugs,
it makes it hard for me to stay alive.
Overdosed.
insinuating I took too much,
I took the right dose of a counterfeit, cut from a tainted supply.
They call me addict, user, while simultaneously urging me to quit.
That which keeps me in this chasm is the stigma I am bound by.
Ropes rubbing the skin on my wrists raw,
the society pinning me in a corner.
Prohibition does not make it hard to find drugs,
it makes it hard for me to stay alive.
A silent murderer, stigma will come for you in the night,
with a dagger in hand only to choke you with its calloused hands.
Stigma is the word addict.
Curt. Poisonous.
Marrying people to their pain.
Stigma is a murderer,
but we are all the dagger.
We are all the gun.
We are all the calloused hands,
choking out the ones we love with
state-curated views of morality and deviance.
What kind of life do you lead if your words
stifle the light of other human beings?
Harm reductionists say people who use drugs
because as stigma tip toes its way through our streets,
thousands of bodies are piling up and the corpses
look just the same as any of us. People.
Their crosses are built with wood just the same as any of ours.
Painted chalk white, like the faces of the grieving –
it could be any of us.
The word addict is hundreds of small cuts to human flesh
before finally choking the humanity out of a living being.
When you say addict or junkie,
I see stigma coiling its venomous
body around the living
I see the light fading from their eyes.
If you held my throbbing heart in your hand
would you crush its arteries, suffocating valves beneath fingertips?
Bursting veins, scattering ashes in the rubble of the streets that held me,
so, they can hold me once more, while I lay lifeless, rigid, frozen.
If you held my throbbing heart in your hand,
heard the vibrancy of life echo through your ear drums,
felt the pulse of a body cradling its spirit,
would you preserve it?
Overdosed
but I took the right dose.
Overdosed
but I was poisoned.
If you had the power to keep me alive, would you?
