PERRY: Mything the point. Science, not wishing, saves the lives of drug addicts

Nothing hurts like the truth. Here it comes.

First off, bats aren’t blind. They can actually see really well.

Go ahead, sugar up your neighbor’s kids when they come to visit. The old adage about sugar making kids hyper? Not true. No evidence at all. Lots of stories, though.

Fortune cookies? Yeah, not Chinese. Invented in California.

More?

Coffee does not stunt growth. Really. Lightning does strike twice, sometimes it strikes the same place a lot. And no one ever got warts from a toad or frog, because they have none.

Now for the hard part.

Providing drug addicts with a safe, public place to shoot up heroin or some other illegal drug does not encourage users to keep on using, nor does it keep people from kicking their addiction.

I know, it’s hard to believe because it’s so antithetical to what most of us were indoctrinated with since we were young. For the most part, and for most people, we’re raised to believe that, as humans, we do the “right thing” because we fear the consequences for being bad.

“Do you want a spanking?” is training for “Do you want to get a ticket?” which leads to “Do you want to go to jail?”

Human history is filled with the idea that the fear of bad is what keeps the vast majority of us being good, or relatively good.

Having been subjected at an early age to conditioning known as “Catholic Guilt” and “Jewish Guilt” and “Stress Eating Guilt,” I totally get it. Most of us live our lives by some version of the Ten Commandments and not the Torah, Bible and Quran books and gospels that show us all, by example, how we should act to be better people.

So I wasn’t surprised last week during an Aurora City Council meeting when some city lawmakers began objecting to a plan to spend some Opioid Addiction Settlement money on installing a couple of vending machines in Aurora that would dispense Narcon, or naloxone. Those are the almost miracle drugs that can actually stop someone from dying from an opioid overdose.

The drugs are so effective that they’re credited with saving the lives of thousands of people in Aurora, Denver and across the country who were overdosing on fentanyl or some other opioid concoction. Basically, an opioid overdose prevents your body from telling itself to keep breathing. The opioid molecules stick to special cell receptors in the brain and in your body, causing a euphoric high, and slowing respiration, even to the point of death. Naloxone hogs those receptors, with no side effects, and can restore breathing, all in a matter of minutes.

The trick to naloxone’s success is making sure someone has a bottle of the nasal spray when someone near them is overdosing. Remarkable success has come from huge campaigns to mail it to just about anyone who asks, let them get it from a pharmacy, or hand it out to government types likely to interact with people who do drugs. So people like cops, medics, social workers and folks like that, who can recognize someone overdosing and knows how to administer the drug can, and do, save a lot of lives.

So can just folks you work with, maybe your brother-in-law or a teacher.

Since almost all of us really frown on people shooting up heroin, snorting cocaine, or outright popping fentanyl pills, there’s a lot of guilt, shame and stress for people who not only occasionally, and unwisely, do these drugs, but especially those actually addicted to them.

Opioid addiction is among the most insidious things humans have ever inflicted on themselves. I’ve known people addicted to these drugs. I’ve seen them jones for it. It’s horrible and relentless. I’ve seen people lose limbs to diseases caused by using dirty needles or simply destroying their circulatory systems. I’ve known people who traded their addiction to Percocets or Vicodin for a workable addiction to Methadone.

Drug addiction is filled with myths and misconceptions. For the most part, people with serious opioid addictions aren’t partying when they’re using. They’re often nearly comatose or non-functioning, but the idea that they’re having a great time is so far from the truth. They’re ill.

Another myth is that drug addicts are mostly homeless people, or that most homeless people are drug addicts. There’s no doubt that there are lots of people living on the streets who suffer all kinds of addiction and other health problems, but an opioid user or addict is more likely to be your neighbor, your niece, or someone who doesn’t look anything like what most of us are taught to think of as drug addicts.

So that’s why the objections of the city council are what’s so antithetical to good science, reality and saving lives.

“I just want to make sure we’re not promoting any sort of, you know, safe injection sites, and for me, that kind of teeters on that,” Councilmember Danielle Jurinsky said during a recent city council meeting as city staff talked about a plan to put a couple of naloxone vending machines in the community.

No doubt we all grimace thinking about a safe injection site, where people show up, get a clean needle, inject their heroin or speedball while a nurse looks on, and then heads out. The reality of those places is that they’re primarily used by people who otherwise would shoot up in the dark part of a park or alongside the Dumpster behind a fast-food restaurant. They might overdose or die there. They might contract HIV or get a blood infection and end up in the emergency room, costing all of us tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, all for a $10 high gone wrong. Several Canadian studies have even shown that many of those who use these safe-shoot sites quit their addictions, rather than die from them.

The science is solid. They don’t attract crime. They don’t bother anyone. They work.

The science is just as solid about getting as much naloxone out into the public as possible. There’s no street party around the vending machines, usually set up in hospitals or controlled public areas. Nobody does heroin or “blues” any more or any less because they think naloxone is a “checkmark” for “all good to go.”

These machines simply give people unable or unwilling to ask a pharmacist or explain to someone at home why they’re having naloxone mailed to the house. It’s just a place where they can get this life-saving drug, just in case they know someone who would need it.

I know it’s hard for most of us to get past the idea that this just enables people’s dangerously destructive behavior, but the reality is, addicts are going to drink, shoot up or snort their folly despite what we think or believe. Thousands of years of addiction across humanity doesn’t lie.

Safe injection sites and making naloxone easily available do not promote drug use or crime around the machines or clinics. They prevent death, and living people can and do kick their addictions.

 Dead ones don’t. No lie.

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