Drugs and health.

People close to me have suffered because of their drug use, often because society chose to punish them for it. My friend Christopher had spent his life loving those who used drugs: he had started a few nonprofits and spent his days supplying people with resources to avoid complications like overdoses and infections. He had personally delivered overdose-reversal medication many times and connected hundreds if not thousands of people over the years who needed help with resources like substance use treatment, housing, food, cash, and more. That's where I met him in 2023: outside in the freezing Rochester winter making sure people had sterile supplies and education on techniques to decrease risk of overdose, death, and infections. More important than anything else he did, and he made sure to highlight this to me as a medical student at the time, was to treat every person we talked to with love: "You never know if you'll be the last person they have a conversation with. Be good to people." Of course that's always true, but ever the more true when working at a syringe exchange. He wasn't wrong: in my time there we lost people to both overdose and violence. Sometimes, people just stopped showing up and we never found out what happened. I met some in the hospital as patients first, and later at the syringe exchange. Others I met at the exchange first and took care of them at the hospital later.

Christopher talked openly about having had contracted hepatitis C virus (HCV) from sharing needles with others years before, since it was, at that time, illegal to even own syringes for the alleged purposes of drug use (and remains illegal in large parts of the country). This made it impossible to procure them legally, and difficult to find some illegally. He talked about how, once HCV was curable, doctors and hospitals refused to treat people who were still using drugs (or had ever used drugs), attempting to punish them. Living for years with HCV and being treated not as a person to be held close, but instead as someone to disrespect and refuse to offer the most basic of medicine, left a lifelong impression on him.

We seek an eradication of infectious diseases and other sequelae of drug use, not because those with infections or other pathologies are a scourge on society, but because we cherish them so much that every death and episode of preventable morbidity is an unmitigated tragedy.

This section of Humanity deserves more, titled "Drugs and health," is a collection of interventions and essays that are guided by values and driven by data aimed to humanize and treat those who use drugs with the love we demand for everyone.

Mike

April 7, 2025