Comment by edgyquant

Author, here:

As a severe opioid addict myself for over 10 years, I am absolutely ashamed of having any part in that life. It is a burden that I will have to continue dealing with every day for the rest of my life.

In no way am I trying to say that I did not deserve to go to prison. The focus of this post, was about the facilities made available to those people who do end up in prison, so that they do not return.

As to the references... yes I am a non-violent drug offender. That isn't a label I gave myself, that is a fact: there to let readers know that I am not here for murder or rape or something of that sort. Involvement in opioids and that lifestyle/culture is something that I did not have any contact with UNTIL I was sent to prison. Perhaps we should consider whether 1. Prison is making people worse (that is just an objective fact) 2. We want to be institutionalizing people that clearly are capable of much more, who turn to things like dealing out of their drug habits, or lack of resources/options.

Before anyone wants to go google'ing and coming up with immediate judgements, why don't you look into that there was absolutely zero prosecution of the case being referred to.. They said they found "residue" in my apartment, put out a nationwide manhunt for me, then immediately dropped the case as soon as I was judged by the media and the judge. They couldn't just destroy my apartment and all my stuff and say "we found nothing". Leaving them to prosecute me for 1oz of a synthetic opioid 8x stronger than morphine, that itself, had a potency of roughly 1%. It was almost completely inert. absolutely useless. and this was a completely unrelated case.

To the person who said I sold drugs to kids.. Where exactly do you get off making such horrible claims about me? Do you live in such a bubble that you think that every drug dealer sits around behind dumpsters at high-schools and asks kids if they want to try some 'pot', thats really laced with angel dust? Oh and they all put rainbow fentanyl in your kids halloween candy too right?

The opioid epidemic has killed a good chunk of my friends over the years. It was rampant in the form of "cheese" when I was a teen; one of my closest friends was left to die when he began vomiting from an overdose. When I was in the Marines I saw Marine after Marine prescribed opioids for pain and injuries after deployments, many of them separated out and continued using. As an adult I've lived in the Bay Area and Portland; I've gotten to observe first hand what culture these drugs cultivate on our streets. I've gotten to see opioids make their way, sometimes by mistake, into the rave scene and the constant fear it creates among people who want nothing to do with those drugs. We have Narcan at our house because people consistently use the church parking lot next door to shoot up in their car. I've personally ran down the street and through the fence to go bang on doors because I saw someone passed out for too long - not because I want them gone, but because I don't want to see someone else die.

To put the entire mantle on dealers would be a mistake, imo. Their choice to sell can come from a variety of incentives: sometimes from clout, sometimes their upbringing, sometimes lack of opportunity, sometimes lack of education, many times a mixture of the above. Often enough these people are users themselves; the pain the people they sell to endure they also typically endure.

I don't view this post as victim-seeking and I don't really view him as a victim. Instead, I view this as a critique of prison culture that reinforces its outcomes. I view him as someone that wants to change and has the capacity to change, but there is little if any pipeline or incentive to do so. If there is one, it seems frail. When people want to change we should have a stepped pipeline for reintroducing them to normality and finally society.

Like you, I'd like to see less opioid related deaths in the future but I think there's more than one way to get to that goal. If there's a way that can make productive citizens out of people rather than shutting them away forever then I'm all for it because, frankly, the threat of a felony or life imprisonment didn't stop people before. In fact, that's when the prison population and recidivism bloomed.

The guy is in jail and is serving his sentence. I could understand given recent scandals with opioids that people view perhaps justice in this area as "patchy", though.