The faces of the opioid crisis

In October of last year, President Trump responded to the opioid crisis by declaring a public health emergency.  Considered to be America’s deadliest drug overdose crisis, opioids claimed 64,000 lives in 2016 alone, more than the total number of deaths in the Vietnam War.  Promising to alleviate Americans from the “scourge of addiction,” Trump told the public that he would to direct resources to the crisis, maybe even “build a wall” to cut off the flow of drugs into the United States.

It’s been four months— and no action has been taken.  The Trump administration has not provided new funding for the epidemic.  No notable policy has been passed.  No major initiatives.  

And with time, we begin to forget.  Even the most salient memories are transient, even the strongest feelings decay.   Over the last few months, the  opioid crisis has been nudged out of the limelight by other shocking news—updates on the special counsel's investigation, growing controversy over the Me Too movement, the shooting at Stoneman Douglass. 

Perhaps we thought that the President was handling it, like he told us he would.  I heard some numbers here and there about opioids, and I thought I knew what I needed to know.   But then I saw the pictures.  

Last week, TIME released a series called the ‘'The Opioid Diaries”, where photographer James Nachtwey documents the human toll of the opioid epidemic.  It’s a chiling collection of black-and-white photos that captures the plight of those who have fallen victim.  One picture shows a woman, under a bridge in the freezing cold, her sleeve rolled up to her elbows and her brows furrowed as she struggles to find a vein.  Another shot is of woman lying face up on her porch, her eyes glazed, as officers revived her.  She wanted to recover for her kids, but she died four months later of another overdose.  There’s also a photo of a man who looks like the people I interact with everyday.  He is dressed nicely in a button up and slacks.  The incongruity is the needle sticking out of his arm.   And then there was a mother on opioids, who found out too late that she was pregnant.  Her unborn child was already a heroin addict.  

“The Opioid Diaries” changed the way I understand this growing epidemic.  Nachtwey’s pictures are raw and jarring, each telling a uniquely unfortunate story that numbers and words alone could never do justice.  There is a human element and emotional truth that is seen only through the perspective of a lens.  For those of us who are removed from the crisis, visual documentation is a way to connect us to the person on the other side of the camera.  Nachtwey explains that “the only way to make real sense of [the crisis] was to see what happens to individual human beings, one by one.  Photography can cut through abstractions and rhetoric to help us understand complex issues on a human level. Never is photography more essential than in moments of crisis.”

Nachtwey is right.  It’s why the picture of the small Syrian boy laying facedown on the beach drew international outcry, why photos of death and destruction caused by the U.S. in Vietnam shifted the American public’s opinion on the war, and why I felt compelled to write this piece only after seeing pictures of the havoc wreaked by opioids.  

This bothers me.  Does this mean that if a crisis has no visual documentation to tug at our heartstrings, it will go ignored? If this is the case, then we are destined for moral failure.  Ignoring human suffering is inexcusable.