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Third Place Winner (Tied) – Justice Project Essay Contest

Third Place Tied
Essay by Kristin Sullivan

“It wasn’t always like this,” I think as I drive to a work meeting in the midst of racking my brains for anyone or anything I know about sober living houses in Canaan, Connecticut. Two years ago, I thought “sober living” was not something I would ever have a reason to know about. Sober living was a show on VH1 that I watched, condescendingly pitying the people for how horrible their lives seemed. Why can’t they just stop? They have lost their families, their careers, their friends and their fortunes – for stupid things like drugs and alcohol. “Oh well,” I would think as I went back to a life that I didn’t think crossed paths with any of “those people.”

But here I am texting, googling and emailing frantically for sober living houses.

Injustice is the fact that I know exactly whose fault this is. I have never hated anything as much in my life as I do heroin. Heroin robbed me of my naivety to this world of addiction. Heroin almost robbed me of my little brother and hasn’t released its grip on him yet. Every time I see a needle carelessly dropped in the park or a person nodding off on a bench, the rage almost consumes me. I hate this horrible thing that tore through my family’s life and left measurable holes that we may never fill. Injustice is the fact that this villain can stop your lungs, cause your organs to fail or force your family to stand around you as you are breathing through a tube in an emergency room. Heroin forced us to look at my brother, to really look at him and see him, maybe for the first time ever.

I hate the person who gave my brother the heroin that almost ended his life about a year and a half ago. I hate the person who advised my brother to try this new drug, this drug that took away all your pain. For any pain heroin takes away, it gives back tenfold. I know this is not rational. I know this is wrong for me to hate them, but I do.

Injustice is the fact that my brother is fighting a war he never signed up to fight. Injustice is the fact that my brother, sister and I all had the same upbringing, with the same parents, but only one of us has fallen prey to this disease of addiction. Injustice is the fact that no matter how much we try to fight this enemy for him, we are stuck on the sidelines hoping that he can find the strength to break free from this disease once and for all.

I remember arriving at the hospital to see my brother in the emergency room after his overdose. I saw an oxygen mask, I saw his ghostly skin, and I saw his sad eyes. As the NARCAN wore off, I saw a tube in his throat, a hole in his chest, and a tear roll down his cheek when we came in to see him. These images will never leave me.

After my brother’s overdose, he went into his first inpatient treatment for substance abuse. We went down to visit him for the family weekend, and I was convinced the nightmare was over. I learned how this horrible plague started, this opiate epidemic that reaches far and wide. It started with prescriptions. Prescriptions that are too expensive to buy in the quantities one needs to sustain an addiction. Prescriptions that run out – leaving only heroin to fill the void. Heroin is what I thought only the fringes of society saw, much less used. Heroin wasn’t something I saw at parties or heard people talk about using. That naivety is heroin’s greatest accomplishment. It crept into our lives while we weren’t looking and it ravaged our neighborhoods. Heroin is here, and we can’t make it go away until we accept that it has society in its hold.

Injustice is living in constant fear of “the call.” You know what call I am referring to…the one that is your worst fear, the one where the person on the other line says that your loved one is gone. It’s the one that I hear in my nightmares, the one that I cannot think about without a knot in my stomach, and the one that I fear whenever I see more than one call from my parents in a row.

Injustice is addiction, just as addiction is injustice.

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