I could have been the boy in the overdose photos
through Drug Abuse Resistance Education, a drug program for teens, and wondered why my parents hadn’t “just said no”; but I didn’t yet know society views addiction as a moral failing, despite all the talk of disease and treatment.
Years after my father’s death, an old work friend of his told me, “I hope you have some positive memories of him.” It struck me as so strange, because I have only positive memories of him.
I have a shirt of his that still, 16 years later, smells like him. I know that he was filthy, that by all accounts he smelled as pungent as you imagine a junkie would smell, that people moved away from him on the bus. But sometimes when I’m really missing him, I bury my face in that shirt and take a deep breath. It smells not like a junkie, but like my Papa.
The photo, originally shared by the police department of East Liverpool, Ohio, was republished numerous times. Some news outlets, including the Washington Post, took pains to blur the face of the boy to protect his privacy. When asked about the decision not to initially conceal the child’s face, Police Chief John Lane told NPR: “Within a month, no one’s even going to remember what he looked like, and in 10 years, no one’s even going to know that’s who that was.”
This rationalisation shows the chief’s cluelessness as to how this experience, and its documentation, will affect this child as he grows up: He may not understand what’s going on now, but he will someday. It’s unlikely that, years from now, the boy will be recognised on the street from this photograph, but it is likely that he will come upon the image of his family’s darkest moment and his helplessness at the centre of it. His personal sadness, is recorded on the internet forever. In addition to being tonedeaf, the explanation is suspect. It’s far more believable that they knew that the photo is exponentially more powerful when viewers can see the little boy’s face and project our feelings about addiction onto him.
That boy in the photo was probably confused as to why Grandma and her friend were sleeping. Maybe the boy was scared by the police approaching the car. Maybe he understood that his grandma was sick and felt relief that help had arrived. But all of the anger and disgust the public has mustered over this photo, all of the worry about the opiate epidemic that’s sweeping the US – that’s all coming from us, the viewers. It’s important to recognise that when we look at the face of a woman on the verge of death and judge her choices as if we understand what was in her mind, as if the fact that she uses drugs can’t possibly mean that she cares about her grandson.
There’s no disputing that the boy needed help in that moment, that he was in a dangerous situation and needed to be removed from it. But let’s not make him the poster child for the opiate epidemic or reduce his family to this one low moment. Let’s not make him another casualty of our narrow understanding of addiction.