A man overdosed with his two young children in the car. The unidentified woman in the front seat next to him also overdosed. According to the children, he started falling asleep while driving and managed to pull into a parking lot, where he was found unconscious with his foot still on the brake. The woman was found blue and pulseless. The children, who couldn’t wake them up, let themselves out of the car and were found wandering in the parking lot. First responders revived both man and woman with bag-valve masks and naloxone. The car was filled with trash and the car seats were not properly installed. The man was arrested and charged with multiple counts from risk of injury to a minor to possession of controlled substances The Department of Children and Family Services took the children, and got his mug shot in the paper, courtesy of the state police.
The news article did not take comments. Had it, they no doubt would have been filled with rancor, disgust, and condemnation. The comments would likely have not only assailed this man, but “addicts and junkies” in general.
I have responded to calls like this before. At first I didn’t understand how someone could use drugs with their children in the car. Only after I learned about the science of addiction did I begin to understand how a person’s brain could become hijacked, rewired to believe that drugs were the key to human survival, rather than sex, food, and the protection of children.
Science aside, what I want to know is not about the chemical changes in the brain, but what started this man on this path. How did he come to use his first opioid? Was it the result of a doctor’s prescription or was it through experimentation? Was he injured in a car accident? Did he suffer a work or sports injury? Did he have surgery? How long after his first opioid exposure till his addiction? Did a doctor cut him off? I want to know the story of his life. Had he been to treatment? What was his work history? What was his childhood like? Did he come from a broken home? Did he have a mental health diagnosis? I want to understand. I want to see this through his eyes. I want to know what he was feeling when he used drugs on that day. How sick and hurting was he? Was this the first time he had used drugs with his kids in the car? Did he hesitate about using then? Did he consider the kids? Did he feel bad about it? Was the compulsion, the need to use that strong? I want to understand. I don’t want to just condemn, I want to understand.
If I was the one to transport him to the hospital, as he sat there on my stretcher, probably feeling pretty shitty about himself and where he was in his life that had brought him to that event of being overdosed and nearly dead in his car, while his young children thinking he was just asleep wandered the parking lot, unwatched, I would have asked for his tale.
And I would have listened.