Addiction the Authoritarian

“Hate the disease not the addict”. -heard in a Nar-Anon meeting.

Anyone who has lived with or loved an addict knows the all-consuming and unforgiving grip that addiction holds like hands around your neck, suffocating, deathly, and devastating. Anyone who is an addict (or recovering addict) also knows this. Addiction is a state of total control. It is a state of tyranny. 

Addiction the authoritarian. Without regard for the rules. Without regard for the law. Criminal, robbing us of dignity, soul thieving, murderous.

Addiction the authoritarian. Scapegoating the marginalized, placing blame on others, without responsibility. 

Addiction the authoritarian. Fear mongering, divisive, spitting hateful opioid-filled words, inciter of self-loathing and shame. 

Addiction the authoritarian. Master of our universe, strong man, ruling by opiate executive order and heroin iron fist.

Addiction the authoritarian. Incessant deceiver, pathological liar, and master manipulator.  Spinning silken lies as we nod-out in a web of obliteration.

Addiction the authoritarian. Moral relativist, rationalizing violence, and justifying brutality.

Addiction the authoritarian. Slogan-slinging drug dealer. Feeding us the same fentanyl-laced line over and over again until we are numb, the words echoing in the empty chamber that is our mind. Ultimately the lies bleeding into truth, nothing left but junk filled brains and weary hearts.

Addiction the authoritarian.  Building steel walls,  dividing families, orphaning children. Us mere detainees in a beige powder-filled cell. Deportation our overdose ending.

Addiction the authoritarian. With blatant disdain for our institutions; without respect for the society that is our mind, lacking kindness for the establishment that is our body, without love for the organization that is our heart, no deference for the center that is our soul.

Addiction the authoritarian. Narcissist, lacking empathy, with a deep need for the opiate’s admiration, self-serving and wasted ego maniac.

Addiction the authoritarian. Rejecting truth and forming alternative facts to fit the junkie narrative. Censoring dissent,  our protests transformed into silent internal screams.

Addiction the authoritarian. Nepotist, keeping only drug-family members and cronies close, forming the opiate inner circle: oxy, roxy, heroin, fentanyl, percocet, speedball. All profiting from our misery. 

As I said addiction is a state of total control. The f$@#ed up thing is, it didn’t start that way. Though my husband’s rock bottom ended in a tyrannical scream, it started as an elected whisper, barely perceivable, practically inaudible.

Next Friday my husband will be six months clean. There was a time that I felt so helpless and out of control that I stopped being able to imagine this. I could no longer see my husband behind addiction’s authoritarian mask.  If addiction is total control then sobriety is freedom. And as I have said before, freedom is an endless struggle. 

Fighting addiction’s tyranny requires education, vigilance, openness, work, empathy, and love. Fight addiction. Resist stigma. Love others. End the opioid epidemic.

Resist. 

Shout out to pixabay for the photo. 
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tatx5-Eskc4