‘How is it that the FDA gives us a national warning about tainted heads of lettuce but cannot do the same with medication that kills thousands of people every year?’ Photograph: Patrick Sison/AP
On a cold December evening in 2010, my only son, Michael David Israel, walked into my bedroom and said: “Dad, can we talk?”
I said: “Of course, Mike.” I was glad he wanted to talk to me because for the past 6 months my boy had been behaving very strangely.
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I will never forget his next sentence. He said: “I have a problem. I’m addicted.” “Addicted to what?” I said. “To my pain pills,” he replied. I answered him: “How the hell did you get addicted? Those are pills that the doctor gave you.” At the time, I could not understand that a pill prescribed from a doctor could change your life forever.
Michael struggled with his addiction, and our family struggled to understand what addiction was. Michael, my wife and I had been asking everyone for help: our doctor, his surgeon, his GI doctor, the local hospital and our insurance provider. Michael was denied treatment every step along the way.
It was only six months from that night in December to the morning of 4 June 2011. Michael walked into my bedroom again, this time for the last time. On that cloudy Saturday morning, Michael had been refused referral to a treatment bed from his counselor, and he had an argument with us, his parents.
Michael walked into the bedroom, locked the door, and shot himself. I kicked the door open and held my son as he took his last breath. I remember kneeling down next to Michael, hearing the rain coming down outside, and thinking that my son didn’t have to die. The system had failed Michael every step of the way. Six years later, it is still happening every day, hundreds of times a day.
Society and every level of our government and medical community do not view addiction as seriously as they should. Everyone still thinks addiction is a choice. The choice was taken away from my son, and from thousands of other people, a few days after they begin taking pain pills as prescribed.
Just like everyone else I viewed Michael’s addiction as something that he could “choose to stop”. I was wrong. I didn’t understand how opioids get hold of your brain. If I knew then what I know now, I could have done something to help my boy.
After Michael’s death, we formed Save the Michaels of the World, Inc, a not-for-profit organization to help educate the public and raise awareness about addiction. We have been successful in passing laws in New York state to curb over-prescribing. We started an awareness campaign called “Painkillers Kill More than Pain.” But the epidemic is growing, not slowing down. Twenty years of over-prescribing and the easy availability of street drugs is taking its toll on our people.
In my daily work at “Save the Michaels” I see people that started on that path called addiction the same way my son did. Eighty percent of people we see were prescribed pills that they later became addicted to. Twenty percent of the people we see become addicted by experimenting with painkillers.
Why is it that the very agency that was created to protect us: the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), is the one that has allowed this crisis to get out of hand? How is it that the FDA gives us a national warning about tainted heads of lettuce but cannot do the same with medication that kills thousands of people every year? How did the FDA allow an industry to get so powerful that it controls the very agency that polices itself and the US Congress?
Addiction not only controls the life of an addict; it destroys the fabric of a family. I have seen families break apart because of addiction. Last year a father called me up asking for help with his son. The son, we’ll call him JR, was in and out of treatment. After a short conversation with the dad I found out that the father and son worked together. But the father didn’t live at home, had no communication with the boy’s mother, and other family relationships were badly affected. Addiction effects more than just the addict – it impacts families and relationships within that family.
In my case my three daughters did not talk to Michael for a year before his death, and now they are left struggling with guilt because he’s gone and they can’t fix it.
We see addiction struggles first-hand. One thing we have not seen is any sustained help from the federal government. The last president was in office for seven years before acknowledging we had a problem with addiction in this country. The current president told us he was going to declare the opiate crisis a national emergency, but even if that happens on Thursday as expected this has taken him ten months.
The general medical community has no idea how to treat addiction, nor do they want to. It’s sad, since they are the ones that started this crisis. Can you imagine the progress that could be made if you could go to your general practitioner and ask him/her to treat your addiction? It would help to erase the stigma and shame that stops so many people from seeking help. Like any other disease, early intervention leads to greater success.
How great would it be if our government treated addiction the same way Ebola was handled? Addiction is not viewed as a deadly disease, even though it killed 64,000 people in 2016, which is a conservative estimate. Addiction has become a new industry and Big Pharma is spending a lot of money to make sure people stay addicted.
Our political leaders would rather spend our tax money to pave the same road five times, than try to save the Michaels of the world.
[“Source-theguardian”]