An actor dies; what about the other 37,999 drug overdoses every year

So one celebrity dies of a heroin overdose and all of a sudden the media discovers lots of people who are addicts and some of them even die. They report the news with concerned looks on their faces so phony you can see why they failed as actors and had to go into broadcasting. Heard one news head say the public is just discovering the heroin problem. Bulldust. It is the media who are recently discovering it. After years of only sporadic reporting, now one movie actor dies and all of a sudden OMG there is heroin in America.

They register surprise that it is in Vermont. a typical attitude toward any place in the country that has trees and isn't New York City.  People, it is everywhere.  It is in Barrow, Alaska, on the Arctic coast, the northernmost city in the United States, for crying out loud.

The death of Philip Seymour Hoffman from a drug overdose brought out waves of sympathy and remembrance, particularly from the entertainment industry. Just like when Cory Monteith died last year the overwhelming attitude was about the loss, the sympathetic recollections of their fights with drugs and wishing they could have done more to stop that seemingly inevitable decline until death ended it.

Overall, even with the rest of us, the overwhelming reaction was sympathy and attempts at understanding, the sense of loss and almost deifying the dead. Law enforcement reacted quickly as well, making four arrests a couple of days after Hoffman's death including one person believed to be the actor's supplier.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, 100 people in the United States die of a drug overdose every single day, 38,000 a year. And it's not going away – again according to the CDC, deaths have tripled just since the 1990s. Do the cases of those other 37,999 deaths this year get that kind of police response?

Are we sympathetic to the rest of the people killed by drugs? Do we speak of them almost with reverence? Or, more likely do we lump them into a group of dirty, lowlife, criminal, weak untouchables who didn't matter? For those of us who matured in the 60s, an awful lot of us know or at least know about someone in our lives who died because of a drug habit.

Personally I know of two, and a third who is in what amounts to an asylum with a vegetable for a brain. Looking back,  you could see the potential for abuse even before the problem started.  We had all pretty much lost touch when they became involved with drugs so I did not see the decline. Understand, coming up in the 50s, drugs in the suburbs weren't even an issue or a temptation. Alcohol was and the people I know who died from drugs were big drinkers when they were adolescents who landed in the 60s with addictive personalities, dependence on a substance (alcohol) and a desire to party.

More recently I came to know someone who depended on methamphetamine to get through a very difficult life. She could not even admit it was a problem yet she went through several attempts to stop and gain some measure of control over her own life. She always returns to it and I think she did very recently after almost a year and a half in a recovery institution. It's difficult for most of us to imagine something can have that kind of control over a person. How strong the addiction is came out in two separate interviews I saw this week. Two hard-core heroin users said when a product hits the street that begins killing people from overdoses, like the one that apparently killed Hoffman, that is the product they try to find. Why? Because they know that is a stronger drug and they always want the strongest one available.  One of those said he never had any fear of overdose or death from one of those high-potency versions of the drug.

Heroin has been around in the U.S. for more than a century and really took off in the drug culture of the 60s, moving out of the cities into the broader general culture. And it has been a problem all that time. But we pay little attention to it until a celebrity dies. This was a man who had money, access to any kind of treatment he wanted and obviously needed.  Yet he had that habit for years, slowly killing himself. This was a member of the privileged. What about all those kids in the cities who don't have that advantage, no positive influence not to do it, and who end up dead or in prison?

As much as I have scoured my mind there doesn't seem to be any logical conclusion to this piece. Supposed experts and news heads are talking about all kinds of solutions, but most of those have been around for years, yet use increases and more people nameless to most of us die. I suspect too, this bulge in publicity will slowly die out as the talking heads turn to another Justin Bieber or Kardashian scandal. 

Honest, intelligent, hard-working people will continue their unheralded efforts try to take care of the victims, punish the criminals and try to solve the problem, but each is that Dutch kid with his finger in the dike perhaps stopping one little part of this while the mass threatens to overwhelm them.

Slowly drug use and danger and deaths will fade from the public eye again, at least until another high profile celebrity overdoses and then the news heads can be surprised again as they interview the same experts about the same problem with the same potential solutions.

I don't have a solution, I wish I did. All I can see is that any help must be on a face-to-face, one-by one-basis – individual treatment, and that is a huge task. And, a whole lot of that needs to be done in education and environment even before drugs become the issue. But I can't even be sure that works. I tried for eight years to divorce my friend from meth and failed; so did some very credible professionals.

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