We say ‘Opioid Crisis’ like the crisis is over 

The overdoses started the summer I graduated high school, 2007, in an Ohio college town. At first glance, homelessness didn’t seem to exist there. It had collections of neighborhoods near various placements of sprawl, no sidewalks until campus, and a downtown area that had a used bookstore, a taco place, and a hippie store. And no public transit either, so isolation was easy. Sometimes the middle of nowhere is psychological that way. 

Before the overdoses, opiates had felt far away, somehow. Mostly it was drunk driving, domestic violence, and medical debt that killed people. It wasn’t called the “Opioid Crisis” yet. It was considered to be an issue for poor junkies, and what happened to them didn’t seem to count. At most they would be noted as some cousin or uncle or other far off relative with “problems” that no one talked about in detail. But as the housing bubble burst, the landscape was pockmarked with empty, half-built subdivisions, and the threat of people losing their houses, suddenly it needed a name. 

The trend of opioid spikes and the loss of housing is not only solidly proven in correlation in medical research studies, but also the timing of the crimes of Purdue Pharmaceuticals and the media conjoinment of the dueling crises made the Opioid and Housing Crises the identifiable shorthand for the world falling apart, and people ending up dead. 

Heroin and downers had only ever been discussed like a relic of the past. That was a ‘90s thing. It was all meth labs now. And these tended to blow up with the people inside, so the problem and the people seemed to neutralize themselves. No one respected an addict anyway. No one wanted to live near them. No one wanted them to live at all. Sometimes friends’ parents would suggest they be enlisted to fight in foreign wars because that’ll straighten them out. 

But opioid addiction was everywhere. At my college job, working in one of the offices filing papers and checking boxes on a computer program, my supervisor told me how her husband had gone into the local urgent care with back pain and came out with a pill addiction. He’d worked in construction and was forced to retire early because of it. Social security was complicated, no word of a pension, and union work was a thing of the past as well. She was worried about losing the house, and her kids were moving back in because they couldn’t afford their apartment either. 

The local urgent care was awful, but it gave out medication. We called it the Morgue because people went in for routine stuff that killed them. But healthcare was hard to get and I understood the need for relief. For my supervisor and her husband, the Opioid Crisis and the Housing Crisis were one. She was piecing together her life all the time as we sat in a brick building of higher education, both of us hoping it would somehow save us from poverty. 

The argument to keep people alive in the wake of harm reduction always starts with housing. Countless studies—from Havard health reports, social service organizations, and even the news—conclude that in order for people to not overdose, they need homes. Yet little actually gets done with that information other than to try to court developers and taxpayers with the promise of building “affordable housing.” But that’s a plea to the middle class more than anything. It doesn’t keep people alive; it just keeps the economy alive. 

I began a list of the people I was losing in death. To drugs, to poverty, to jail, to homelessness, to suicide, all of the broad threads of “crisis” that weave together into insurmountable tragedy. My neighbors were converted into statistics, names and circumstances became data points and lines on spreadsheets, lines of numbers on the spreadsheet of mortality. 

Death certificates for unhoused people often list the cause as “natural causes.” Like death by exposure is a default and not an organized assault. All of their deaths were framed as crimes of neglect, rather than aggression by the system. The denial of safety, housing, and healthcare were somehow happenstance, slipping through cracks in a working system, rather than something embedded in the design. 

I have now lived in the Bay Area for 10 years, and the first thing I noticed was the gulf created by money. Maybe this is what happens when you come from places without any, but the divide was enormous and people just walked past it like they didn’t see it. They refused to make eye contact with the injustice. The invisibility of rural poverty was highly visible in a city center. People camped out on street corners and still left unattended, the gutters became public cemeteries. When I moved to Oakland, I got used to my heart sinking when I approached the bike lane on Telegraph, wondering if I’d see someone laying there for the last time. 

But I have never lived farther than a block from an encampment. It’s just the aesthetics were different by location. I didn’t always know how to recognize it. In Ohio, the houses with the ramshackle RV in the back with rust-eaten trucks coming and going were families trying to get by: sons on parole, daughters needing child care, and the collection of runaways that just needed a place to crash. But in Oakland, the compounds were tents, tiny houses, people sitting in reclaimed chairs under overpasses. We’d wave to each other, say hi, have a bit of a chat, and then the next day they’d be cleaned out and the strip of street would be empty like they were never there. Whenever Mosswood Park was blank, the fires reduced to ashes strewn about, the trash cans overflowing from where people’s homes had been tossed, my body felt hollowed out. 

Each time, my list of losses got longer. 

And this year, the Supreme Court overturned the Sackler bankruptcy ruling, protecting Purdue Pharma, the maker of oxycontin, from the responsibility of paying families they destroyed by lying to doctors. The corporation legally doesn’t have to even acknowledge the people at all. And we’ll continue to frame the Opioid Crisis as something that happened in 2007 like it’s not happening now, and I’ll have a longer and longer scroll of dead friends who I counted that no one will otherwise remember. 

Everyday, I see the erasure. Our neighborhood is being attacked until each home and person is gone. One after another, my neighbors get cleared out, and my friends disappear. And I’m always just one paycheck away from homelessness myself. But I’m not ready to go.

The frame on this painting changes, but the subject never does. 

It is lonely to keep holding this torch for my friends. 

The list doesn’t have my name on it yet. I never assume that it won’t.