Drug users may be trying to escape other traumas

Re: “Drugs to be decriminalized in B.C.,” June 1

I used to be one of those who, while sympathetic, would look down on those who’d ‘allowed’ themselves to become addicted to alcohol and illicit drugs. However, upon learning that serious life trauma, notably adverse childhood experiences, is very often behind the addict’s debilitating addiction, I began to understand ball-andchain self-medicating: The greater the drug-induced euphoria or escape one attains from its use, the more one wants to repeat the experience; and the more intolerable one finds their sober reality, the more pleasurable that escape should be perceived.

By extension, the greater one’s mental pain or trauma while sober, the greater the need for escape from reality, thus the more addictive the euphoric escape-form will likely be.

The lasting mental pain resulting from trauma is very formidable yet invisibly confined to inside one’s head. It is solitarily suffered, unlike an openly visible physical disability or condition, which tends to elicit sympathy/empathy from others. It can make every day a mental ordeal, unless the turmoil is prescription and/or illicitly medicated.

The preconceived erroneous notion that addicts are simply weak-willed and/or have committed a moral crime is, fortunately, gradually diminishing.

Also, we now know that Western pharmaceutical corporations intentionally pushed their very addictive and profitable opiates — the real moral crime! — for which they got off relatively lightly, considering the resulting immense suffering and overdose death numbers.

Frank Sterle Jr., White Rock