Unlike Snow White

Yesterday one of Tom's childhood friends died of an oxycotin overdose. We think he took it recreationally, with his girlfriend, and just took one too many and so never woke up. Like Heath Ledger, and so many other people who take these drugs liberally, with no stigma, because doctors dispense them.

We have some experience with less acceptable drug use in my family. One of my siblings is a recovering methamphetamine addict. When she was high she was a raving lunatic with drug-induced paranoid schizophrenia and painful ulcers from head to toe, where she'd scratched the "bugs" away. People see what meth does to a person and they think they're looking at a trailer trash loser whose parents did something wrong. It's shaming to the parents, and the siblings, and eventually--if you're lucky enough that this person stops using--to the drug user, who knows that she's done something illicit and ugly. My mom thinks that the cultural stigma against crystal meth helped bring my sister back from the brink; she wanted to live in this world.

Meth is a bad drug. And while I support the legalization and de-criminalization of drugs, to reduce drug cartel violence and hopefully inspire a more transparent social conversation and response to drug use and treatment, it's really hard to say that people should be able to buy it. Heroin fits into that category, too, because it's so dangerous. Two Reedies (my Alma mater) have died of overdoses in the last year. But I'm not sure that making heroin illegal has stopped anyone who wasn't already disinclined to try drugs from using it. Instead, illegalizing drugs like pot, heroin, cocaine and meth has flooded our prison system with low level offenders and helped a devastatingly violent black market to flourish in South America and Mexico. Perhaps most importantly, making these items illegal has allowed Americans to push drug use off to the side as a marginal thing, a low-life activity; we do not face the fact that it is our country's demand for drugs that keeps the Mexican drug lords' pockets fat, and Mexico's northern states in the flux of brutality.

But we do allow Americans to take vicodin, and valium, and oxycotin, and any number of medical narcotics. The last time I was at the dentist I had a root canal, which if you haven't had one hurts, but really not that badly--not badly enough for the vicodin they offered me. I don't know why a doctor would offer someone an addictive substance when maximum strength Tylenol is sufficient; I don't understand how a drug like oxycotin, which has a physical impact and addiction risk to rival morphine and methadone, has been given to my cousin for the last ten years to help her mask the pain of a knee injury that should have been rehabbed. And yet it's okay for her to spend her days in a minor fog of substance abuse, to drive a car and mother her children. And it was okay for Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich and myriad celebrities who have crashed cars, passed out, and died in their sleep, because they weren't doing drugs. They were doing medicine, and medicine is safe.

Prescription drug abuse ranks second behind pot as the nation's largest drug problem (http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/drugfact/prescr_drg_abuse.html), and yet even after several high-profile accidents and overdoses, most of the people I know love to have a vicodin and a glass of wine before bed, if they can get it. Because it feels good. I know, because I tried it once with Tom many years ago and all I can think about tonight is how goddamn lucky we are that we woke up. How unbelievably overjoyed I am that I didn't wake up like Justin's girlfriend to find the person I love most in this world gone from this world. And for nothing. The waste makes me feel like raging.

Tonight I feel sad because my husband is so deep in grief, and angry because drug use and abuse is just one problem on a long list of things we could change about American policy--and so change about the world--but that we do not because these pills make a few people a lot of money. And so tacit approval for the use of these drugs, legitimately, recreationally, leaks out into our culture and into the bodies of people who someone loves, and for whom they mourn.