Mayberry: Time to get real when it comes to heroin ODs
Donald Trump is not wrong when he says we should have a really great advertising campaign to combat opioid addiction.
He disappointed us all yugely when he gave his Rose Garden speech and declared the opioid crisis as a “public health emergency,” which would free up $57,000, instead of a “national emergency,” which would free up billions of dollars, for effective treatment centers, certified counselors and many other needed tools to fight the opioid crisis
But if we’re to have a “really great” advertising campaign as one tool in our opioid epidemic toolbox, it must be two things: brutal, and brutally honest.
You cannot just put a famous face behind a podium or tell outlandish lies or use cutesy metaphors.
Frying an egg in a pan or posing, as Nancy Reagan did, with happy, healthy second-graders as they shout “Just say no!” will not do the trick.
We’ll need something more along the lines of “Scared Straight,” which was designed to show teens the frightening reality of prison, the MADD programs that took teens caught driving drunk to morgues to see the bodies of auto accident victims, or the anti-smoking commercials, like the one of the woman without a jaw talking through a tracheotomy.
One early attempt at an anti-drug advertising campaign was a 1936 film called by various titles, “Tell Your Children,” “The Burning Question,” “Dope Addict,” “Doped Youth,” and eventually “Reefer Madness,” that depicts high school students who are lured by pushers to try marijuana.
The movie shows the drug driving innocent teens to cause a hit-and-run accident, commit manslaughter, become “sex fiends,” have hallucinations, and end up permanently locked up in a mental hospital or committing suicide.
Somebody (the government, churches, schools?) revived that ridiculous film in the 1960s and young people quickly learned that it was all a laughable lie. In fact, it was hilarious to watch the movie stoned.
Lots of other movies or TV shows over the years have more effectively warned of the perils of drugs.
“The Man with the Golden Arm” (1955) or “Panic in Needle Park” (1971), HBO’s “The Wire” (2002-2008) and “The Corner” (2002), and “Winter’s Bone” (2010) about methamphetamine.
But they’ve always been about worlds far away from our white suburban lives, about poor blacks in big bad city like Baltimore or Los Angeles or poor whites in the Ozarks.
Now we know that 140 people a day, possibly as many as 50,000 to 60,000 by the end of the year, are dying from prescription drug or heroin/fentanyl overdoses, and some of them are our neighbors and our own sons and daughters.
So, yes, now we have to do a lot of different things to combat the epidemic and an advertising campaign can be one of those things.
Luckily, an inadvertent advertising campaign of sorts is already saturating social media, where young people are likely to see it.
For example, go on Google or YouTube and search for “overdose in dollar store.”
This cellphone video shows a young woman passed out in the toy aisle of a dollar store while her pajama-clad 2-year-old daughter freaks out.
The child pulls her mother’s hands trying to rouse her, circles her completely unconscious body and pulls her head up by her hair, all the while crying hysterically.
Someone filmed that scene for nearly two minutes – it seems much longer – and the voices of others can be heard in the background.
Yet, that whole time, no one ever thinks to go to, or speak to, or comfort the toddler, who eventually wanders out of the scene, still crying inconsolably.
Finally the EMTs arrive at the scene and save the mother’s life.
Now that’s the advertising campaign.
Show that video over and over, on every social media and on network and cable television.
Or show the photo of a grandmother in East Liverpool, Ohio, unconscious in the front seat of a car with a friend behind the wheel, also passed out, while her 4-year-old grandson sits in the backseat.
Or show the surveillance tape Upper Darby Police Superintendent Michael Chitwood posted of a young man clearly seen shooting up and then overdosing on a SEPTA bus, falling out of his seat and ending up with his face firmly planted on the shoes of the passenger across the aisle.
This is what I mean by brutal.
All of these people were saved by Narcan and first responders and I am sure they are all deeply mortified at having unwittingly starred in such horror shows. But so what? They gave up any right to privacy when they nearly killed themselves in such public places as stores, buses and parking lots, and clearly put so many other lives – children, motorists, police – in danger.
Maybe their humiliation is motivating them to get help and maybe the sheer revulsion of such graphic depictions will influence others not to start using drugs or to get help as well. I hope so. All of the people in these videos and photos are white and look very middle class.
So this is no longer some other social, or ethnic or racial group’s problem that we can tsk, tsk over and then surf off to another Internet site.
It’s our problem. That might be the biggest lesson a “really great” advertising campaign can bring home to us.
Note: Open enrollment for the Affordable Care Act started Wednesday and ends Dec. 15, so if you need individual insurance coverage, go to healthcare.gov without delay. It may still be possible here in Pennsylvania to find a reasonable plan.
The Trump Administration has eliminated the open enrollment advertising budget and cut the enrollment period in half, but the ACA is still alive and you can get coverage until the end of 2018.
And write your congressman to reinstate the CHIPs program that provides health coverage for 9 million poor children.