Have you been directly affected by the opioid epidemic?

27 comments

1. No. I do have distant family who has.

2. No

3. I’ve lost friends and family to it. If that counts as direct.

4. Yeah, multiple friends of mine have died, and people put fentenyl in coke for some stupid reason so that’s ruined too

5. In a way – 6 months ago.

   My brother was downtown at a Chinese takeout and choked.

   The cops treated him as an OD. They told the paramedics he ODed. They gave him narcan 2 tines before checking his air passage.

   Both of my parents died a couple years ago, thank God, or they would have been destroyed by it.

   It’s been a hard few years. [My brother never took opiods]

6. I know several people who have died, including roommates, family, and close friends.

7. Yes, I find there’s a longer wait to get your stash from the dealer with opioids, so I just smoke crack until he comes through.

8. I’ve lost an aunt who was in her 40s. When I lived in PA I had a neighbor on the left that OD but survived and the one on the right got wrapped up in a check fraud scheme to pay for her pills. Got sent to jail leaving her husband to care for the 6 year old during covid. Then a business about a block away was busted making fentynl. Mind you, this was a decent neighborhood.

   My wife works addiction recovery. Nearly everyone she sees has the same story, started with some injury or surgery and a doctor way over prescribing pain pills.

9. Yes, my wife’s brother died of an overdose before we met.

   So even though I wasn’t around when it happened, it effects my wife and in-laws very much so by extension it effects me.

   Also I went to college deep in Appalachia, so I saw plenty of it first hand.

10. I know people who are using fentanyl and one who went to prison.

11. Not me, but my wife. She was receiving treatments at a local fertility clinic, and one of the nurses was stealing the fentanyl for one of the procedures and substituting it with saline. The clinic had me sit in an alcove directly across the hall from the operating room, and I could hear her muffled screams as they went through with the procedure.

    As overused as this term is, the clinic absolutely gaslit us into believing everything was normal. Fast forward about 2 years, and we found out that indeed this nurse was caught red handed stealing fentanyl and bringing it home.

12. No

13. Yes. Have seen what it does; destroys otherwise good people, families and communities. I’ve directly had friends struggle and die from it.

14. Immediate family? No. But we are a pretty buttoned up group.

    My friend used to visit often until I realized they were taking my dentist prescribed post surgery oxy from my medicine cabinet.

15. I have friends who have become addicted to opioids. It is very hard to see completely average people change almost overnight.

    Addiction is a scary disease.

16. Yes. Had a problem with them many years ago myself, and have had quite a few friends and some family also get wrapped up in it.

17. No one in any of my social circles has been affected and I’ve never even heard a single story from friend of friends or anything.

18. I had to be on oxi for a few days at a hospital and god damn I can see why people get addicted to it

    my sister died from a heroine overdose when I was 20 so yea it kinda effected me. Kinda wish dealers didn’t mix heroine and tranquilizers just to make extra money

19. I’ve narcaned (sp?) 4 people

20. No

    There were people I knew in college who used but I haven’t talked to them in a while so idk how they’re doing. None of the people I regularly talk to use it. My neighbors are still dealing with the crack epidemic of the ‘80s and ‘90s though. Lots of crackheads but no opiate addicts in my building

21. I’ve lost family, one just about a week ago

22. Yep, but in a bit of different way. I have extreme chronic pain (Google CRPS) and take daily morphine and for flareups I have hydrocodone. The hoops I have to jump through monthly to get my medicine are insane. Thankfully, I have the very best medical team in the world and my pharmacy is great too. But I have so much (unfair) anger at times for opioid addicts because of how difficult they’ve made getting medicine that I need to have a decent quality of life out of a hospital.

23. I had to pass a kidney stone with no pain meds. It was brutal. Idk if that counts.

24. Not really directly but two people I went to high school with overdosed on heroine.

25. I lost two of my best friends to addiction. One at 28 and the other at 38 after years of being sober. She relapsed during the pandemic lockdown.

26. Not the most direct here, but I’ve known and spoken to many people (sister’s friend’s mom, my biological grandmother’s husband, neighbors, great aunt, that sort of thing) who were actively addicted to opiods and they were all really okay with just telling people really off things like…to get in car accidents because you’ll get money and pain meds, or sortof odd bragging about how much medication it takes to do anything for them anymore, the vast majority of them actively did nothing because that’s what happens with those kinds of pills..

    Stuff like this is honestly why my mom will literally do any physical therapy/massaging/whatever needed to mitigate her chronic pain instead of taking medications.

27. Indirectly only. Two Facebook acquaintances that I knew loosely from high school. One had his dad get badly addicted and the other had his brother OD. My wife’s best friend’s brother struggles with addiction too.

    Nothing personally though. I don’t really have much drug use in my social circles.