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The bowling ball on my chest is always heaviest at 3 a.m. Its steady pressure pushes me out of sleep most mornings before the sun rises on either coast. I could set my alarm by it, but I don’t need to. Wherever I wake up—in hotel rooms, at friends’ houses, or in the home I share with my husband—the bowling ball is there, in the pocket right between my ribs and a little bit north of my stomach.
When the weight wakes me up in the morning, it’s never for a good reason. Every day, I talk to friends, parents, loved ones, and peer workers as they face yet another unspeakable tragedy. One in ten Americans has lost someone to an overdose, and that number is only rising.
An entire generation is dying off, as though killed by a plague that nobody is brave enough to name.
There are no words for these losses—these deaths. What I felt in the beginning—the hot anger and outrage that fueled my advocacy, pushing for bipartisan legislative solutions and distributing lifesaving naloxone—has faded to a dull ache that sits in my body and never goes away.
It feels like grief. Or maybe, heartbreak.
There is no bad time to stop using heroin, but I am positive that I quit at exactly the right moment. In 2014, I was at the tail end of my chaotic drug use. After years of living on and off the streets, I was in bad shape.
I know that, had I continued to use heroin, I would be dead today. Years after entering recovery, I need more than my fingers and toes to count the number of people I know who lost their lives to fentanyl. Within the past few years, that number has increased exponentially; it seems like fentanyl is in everything, from cocaine to fake prescription pills to bags of heroin. Fentanyl has no discernible taste, smell, or color. The only way to tell if your substances are tainted with it is to test them—how many people living on the streets like I did, or planning to party with their friends, actually do that?
There are a lot of misconceptions swirling around…
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